Many of Hollywood’s biggest stars use stage names and while never mentioned in the traditional media, their real names are always included on their Wikipedia page, except for ‘Laverne’s.’ Tom Cruise (real name: Tom Mapother), Nicholas Cage (real name: Nicolas Coppola), Katy Perry (real name: Katy Hudson), Demi Moore (real name: Demetria Guynes), Tina Fey (real name Elizabeth Fey), and every other ‘cis gender’ celebrity have their real names included on Wikipedia, but the site gives special treatment to ‘Laverne Cox’ (and probably other transgender people).
Liberal political figures also appear to get special treatment on Wikipedia by editors who carefully guard their pages, trying to keep them portrayed in a positive light. One investigation revealed that a single Wikipedia editor made 2,269 changes to Hillary Clinton’s page over a ten year period from 2006 up until the time she announced she was running for president in 2016 in order to keep as much criticism off it as possible.695 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales actually contacted Hillary Clinton’s office to ask how she prefers to be named on the page, either “Hillary Rodham Clinton” or just “Hillary Clinton.”696
Jimmy Wales’ own page is heavily protected by the “edit protection mafia” as some people call them, who guard it against criticism. Wales himself has even edited his own page, which is highly frowned upon according to Wikipedia policy, since all edits are supposed to be made only by “disinterested” 3rd parties to avoid conflicts of interest.697
He also used his administrative authority to scrub references to his connection to online porn.698 In the 1990s he cofounded a website called Bomis, which started as a general interest informational site, but then became mostly about porn.699 Several times he removed any references to pornography, and changed them to call the porn site the “Bomis Babes Blog” instead.700
He also made edits to remove any mention of Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, after the two had a falling out.701 After other editors reverted the changes, Wales again tried to remove the credit to his co-founder. When a technology writer caught the edits and contacted Sanger, he responded, “I must say I am amused. Having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will [come] out.”702
Allegations made by the site’s co-founder Larry Sanger are so disturbing, I don’t even want to discuss them. Just to give you an idea, he contacted the FBI in 2010 after he left the company to report certain kinds of images being published in the media section of the website he said Wikipedia was knowingly distributing.703 After leaving Wikipedia, Sanger started a similar site called Citizendium, where writers have to reveal their real names to avoid many of the problems found on Wikipedia due to anonymous editors and anyone being able to write whatever they want.
For example, the Wikipedia page for USA Today’s founding editor John Siegenthaler Sr. had once claimed he was directly involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby.704 The edit was made as joke by someone, but it stayed up, and when Siegenthaler learned of it he contacted Jimmy Wales, but at first the only thing Wikipedia did is correct the misspelling of a word in the entry. The false claim stayed on the website for four months before it was finally removed, but not before the claims had been repeated on other sites.705
A Turkish academic who traveled to Canada was reportedly detained for several hours by immigration officials because of a false claim someone added to his Wikipedia page.706 Pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, who once won the U.S. Open and the Masters Tournament, sued Wikipedia after someone edited his page to say that he beat his wife and abused drugs, allegations which were then picked up by other websites.707
Just a few days before a Congressional mid-term election, someone changed the page of House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay to say that he was a “Grand Dragon” of the Republican Party, a reference to the title of the leader of the KKK. The IP address of the person who changed it was traced back to someone who reportedly worked for The New York Times.708
Because of the wild west nature of Wikipedia, people often change pages as a joke especially after a politician or a celebrity says something controversial. For example, after senator Ted Cruz got into an exchange on Twitter with the sports website Deadspin and hilariously ‘owned’ them with his response, someone changed the Wikipedia page for Deadspin, which usually reads that it’s owned by parent company Gawker Media, to say it was owned by Ted Cruz.709 While sometimes these kinds of edits are just harmless and funny pranks, they show the vulnerability of Wikipedia and the dangers of allowing anyone to make changes to articles without proper oversight.
People have changed the pages of celebrities to indicate that they have died, which has sometimes caused the fake news to spread far and wide across the Internet. A sociology student actually added a fake quote to the Wikipedia page of French composer Maurice Jarre immediately after his death as an experiment to see if media outlets would pick it up in their obituaries and many did, including The Guardian.710
One study that measured how many people viewed pages that were “vandalized” with false information found that 42% of the “damage” was repaired almost immediately, but the majority of the edits which were not quickly corrected were viewed hundreds of millions of times before the articles had been fixed.”711
Sometimes Wikipedia editors will even create an entire article about a topic or an issue hoping to shine a spotlight on it to further promote their political leanings. For example, there was a lengthy article titled “Criticism of George W. Bush,” but the “Criticism of Barack Obama” page had been deleted four different times by Wikipedia editors who kept claiming the article “has no meaningful, substantive content,” and called it an, “Attack page” that was “unsourced.”712
After the edit wars continued, the site finally allowed the “Criticism of Barack Obama” page to stay, but renamed it to “The Public Image of…” and of course Obama’s main page is mostly praise. The edit summary for the decision to rename and redirect the ‘Criticism’ section of Obama’s page reads, “so the conservatards [conservative retards] won’t get their knickers in a twist.”713
The article about the United States Presidential Election of 2016 highlights liberals’ conspiracy theories about Russian interference, and on Donald Trump’s page in the section about his campaign for president it points out, “The alt-right movement coalesced around Trump’s candidacy,” and claims, “During the campaign, Trump was accused of pandering to white nationalists,” and “Fact-checking organizations have denounced Trump for making a record number of false statements compared to other candidates.”714
Editors have also been known to delete pages of conservatives who they don’t feel warrant being mentioned on the site because when someone has a Wikipedia page, even if it is in a completely negative light, it gives the impression that the person is noteworthy or famous, and sometimes editors don’t want to validate the person’s success by dedicating a page to them. For example shortly after radio talk show host Wayne Dupree was named one of the Top 50 Influential Black Republicans for 2017, someone decided to create a Wikipedia page for him, but editors soon deleted it.715 The gatekeepers don’t want to let people know about black conservatives because liberals are trying to control the narrative by continuing to perpetuate the myth that all black people are Democrats.