Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales denied that the online encyclopedia has banned right-leaning sources, only to reference an example of that practice in the same discussion.
In a Wednesday interview with The Verge, Wales responded to growing accusations of bias and Wikipedia’s ban on sources such as Breitbart. His answer? An admission disguised as a denial: “We don’t completely ban sources. We may deprecate them and say, ‘Well, it’s not preferred as a source. We’d rather have something better.’”
Wales then went on to further minimize the impact of Wikipedia’s effective blacklist by suggesting that the list merely elevates sources like The New England Journal of Medicine over sources like Breitbart.
In reality, Wikipedia’s own “Reliable sources/Perennial sources” list proves that the platform does blacklist media organizations, including Breitbart, The Heritage Foundation and Project Veritas. Other right-leaning outlets are effectively sidelined through deprecations and usage restrictions, most of which are not imposed on left-leaning sources.
The Media Research Center has repeatedly exposed the severity and real-world impact of this blacklist, which goes far beyond prioritizing peer-reviewed journals over right-of-center news organizations.
MRC found that 100% of right-of-center media outlets listed on the AllSides Media Bias Chart were effectively blacklisted at the time of the study, while the overwhelming majority of left-wing outlets were approved. Wikipedia has since added one token right-leaning news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon, to its reliable sources list.
The outlets Wikipedia editors deem “generally reliable” are not confined to academic publications such as the aggressively pro-transgenderism New England Journal of Medicine. The list also includes leftist activist outlets such as Mother Jones, MSNBC and The Nation. It elevates a who’s who of elitist media, including the Bloomberg media empire controlled by left-wing billionaire Michael Bloomberg, which has a documented record of coordinated climate pressure campaigns. Overall, MRC researchers found that Wikipedia greenlit 84% of left-wing media outlets.
A separate MRC study revealed that the result is a staggering citation imbalance across Wikipedia: 18.2 left-wing citations for every right-of-center citation. MRC researchers identified 5,320,017 citations from left-wing outlets listed on the AllSides Media Bias Chart, compared with just 292,250 citations from right-of-center sources on searches that took place Nov. 18-Nov. 19. Left-wing citations also dwarfed the 1,595,747 citations attributed to outlets categorized as “center.”
Wikipedia lavished tens of thousands of citations on left-wing outlets, including Jacobin (2,706), Mother Jones (8,326), MSNBC (6,893), The Daily Beast (28,038), The Nation (11,575) and Vox (24,756). By contrast, editors largely sidelined right-of-center outlets such as Breitbart (1,133), Just the News (128), Newsmax (1,123), The Blaze (434), The Daily Caller (665) and The Federalist (389). Project Veritas has 14 citations as of Dec. 18.
Despite its size and influence, The Daily Wire had just 445 citations and is branded by Wikipedia as “generally unreliable.” That designation places it on the same level as satirical outlet The Onion and “Deviant Art,” one of the “furry” art websites allegedly used by Thomas Crooks, the attempted assassin of President Donald Trump.
But be assured that Wikipedia editors would never dream of treating The Daily Wire the same as two websites like that. No, The Onion has 720 citations, and DeviantArt has 2,599 as of Dec. 18, both far exceeding The Daily Wire’s total on Nov. 18.
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