Wikipedia

Can We Trust Wikipedia? Should We? No and No, Of Course…But What’s The Alternative?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ethics Alarms hasn’t pointed out what a biased, often incompetent, purveyor of progressive and Democratic propaganda Wikipedia is for a while, and I regret that. I am reminded of Wiki’s key role in hammering woke propaganda into the brains of unsuspecting users (like students) virtually every day, however, when I choose to use the crowd-written web encyclopedia for basic facts (when did Jerry Lewis die was the latest) and am irritated both by what the badly curated articles leave out, and the dunning for contributions. The promise of AI Grokipedia as a more ethical alternative has been dimmed by my dawning realization that I can’t trust bots either, and that Grokipedia uses Wicki among its sources.

“Reason” has posted an exposé of sorts on the Axis ally, here. Nothing in it unseats what I had already included, but the brief against Wikipedia is damning. As we would assume, the site reallt went over to the dark side, and violated its alleged mission, when Donald Trump shattered the Left’s dream of forever power in 2016. Reason notes, describing the page on the current President,

“He’s described as an “American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States.” Biographical details include his time as a real estate developer, reality show host, and his 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton. So far, no disagreements.

But the first policy mentioned is a travel ban against seven Muslim-majority countries, expanding the border wall, family separations, rolling back environmental and business regulations, downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to concede the 2020 election, and getting impeached. Then comes a recounting of his legal battles, his second term involving “mass layoffs of federal workers,” “targeting of political opponents,” the “revers[al] of pro-diversity policies,” and “persecution of transgender people.” 

The final paragraph concludes that “many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racist or misogynistic” and that “he has made many false or misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics.” It also states that his  actions “have been described as authoritarian” and “historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history.”

Even more revealing is the reaction of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose response to Reason’s query about that biased alignment, replied, “If you get a negative view of Donald Trump from reading it, that’s not our fault.” Wow. No bias there!

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I’m Feeling Hopeless Regarding Whether The Unethical Use of Higher Education As Leftist Indoctrination Can Be Eradicated In Time…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This story is the latest reason for my despair.

The unethical and diabolical woman on the left, physically and politically,

… is UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies and performance studies Juana María Rodríguez. Not content to rot the brains and values of her students, she has weaponized her charges to inject Leftist propaganda into the general population through Wikipedia, itself a propagator of biased and left-slanted disinformation.

Beginning in 2016, Rodríguez has assigned her students to create and edit Wikipedia articles about LGBTQ+ people. Her special focus is on gay and transgender “people of color,” of course, because that’s how people like her roll. The manipulating of the online encyclopedia gets credit in three of her classes: “Documenting Marginal Lives,” “Queer of Color Cultural Production” and “Queer of Color Critique.”

I would not hire any job applicant who had taken any of those courses, nor would I send my child to any school that treated those subjects as worthy of academic study.

“I want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge but as being able to produce knowledge as well,” Rodríguez explained in a smoking gun email. This is new: a college professor who doesn’t know what “knowledge” means. One doesn’t produce knowledge, (“facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject”) one seeks, acquires, conveys, and distributes knowledge. Producing knowledge is called “making stuff up.”

The professor allows students to skip finals in exchange for doing her propaganda work.

Rodríguez integrates Wikipedia into her curricula in collaboration with Wiki Education, a nonprofit organization that encourages faculty in the United States and Canada to assign their students to create content for Wikipedia articles, aiming to fill in “knowledge gaps” on Wikipedia regarding gender, racial and ethnic diversity. Rodríguez’s students alone have added more than 300,000 edits and 3,000 citations to Wikipedia. the professor says she’s “really proud” that her students’ propaganda has been viewed an estimated 96 million times. Isn’t that wonderful?

How many societal termites like this are being paid by institutions of higher learning to distort reality, then education, and finally the culture? I’m beginning to fear that Americans were asleep at the metaphorical switch so long that the progressive body- and mind-snatchers spread their sinister pods so deeply in our comunities’ collective consciousness that the battle was already lost before it was even discovered.

Ethics Hero For The Ages: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have long planned on writing a thorough post about how much the United States, its culture, its future as a viable democracy and its avoidance (so far) of a close call with progressive neo-totalitarianism owes to Elon Musk. This isn’t it. However, once again he has used his boundless wealth and creativity to strike down an engine of cultural indoctrination and Orwellian twisting of knowledge and history. Buying Twitter and ending its flagrant partisan bias was a landmark in American freedom of speech, one that may well have made the election of Donald Trump possible. His latest adventure may be even more important.

He has launched Grokipedia, the desperately needed alternative to Wikipedia. It is still a work in progress, as Musk admits, but by being AI-driven (the bot in charge is Elon’s Grok), the online living encyclopedia avoids the progressive bias and vulnerability to partisan manipulation that had caused me to only resort to Wikipedia when the topic was immune from political bias.

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Elon Musk’s “Wokepedia” Complaint Is Valid

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Above is pie chart reflecting the Wikipedia Foundation’s own report on how it spent its money over the past year. This arrives while every Wikipedia search is afflicted with drop-down pleas for contributions. In the categories listed above, the only ones that should be active concerns of the online search service are infrastructure and effectiveness. Equity and Inclusion are irrelevant to what people are seeking when they use Wikipedia; I’m not even sure what “safety” refers to. 29% of the budget was devoted to these dubious, discriminatory—but woke!—objectives.

Elon Musk has been issuing critical tweets about these priorities, with good reason. Wikipedia is both essential and inherently flawed and unreliable because of its vulnerability to bias and manipulation. To be a trustworthy source of information for online research, it must be closely monitored to identify agenda-driven entries and misleading statements motivated by partisan and ideological objectives. Quite simply, an organization that devoted to DEI cant cannot be trusted in this regard.

No one interested in improving Wikipedia’s accuracy and competence should give a single dollar in response to its constant pleas for money as long as almost a third of that dollar will be spend on dubious programs that, if anything, are likely to impair the service’s effectiveness rather than enhance it.

Wikipedia Ethics, But First A Riddle: “How Is Wikipedia Like American Journalism?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The answer is: Because its information seems accurate in inverse proportion to how much you know about the subject matter already.

A recent example from China: Yifan, a Chinese fantasy novelist, started browsing Chinese Wikipedia for inspiration for a new book. happening upon Russian medieval history, the writer learned about the great Kashin silver mine, originally owned by the Tver, an independent state from the 13th to 15th centuries, and then by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, until it closed down in the 18th century after the silver was all mined out. The Kashin silver mine, the articles revealed, were operated some 30,000 slaves and 10,000 freedmen at its peak. Wars and human drama surrounded its history, and Yifan felt this might be a fertile topic for a novel. After the Kashin information was as exhausted on Chinese Wikipedia as the silver was in the mine’s dying days, he turned to the Russian version of Wikipedia, but he was surprised to see that the Russian Wikipedia. Strangely, most of what he had read about the famous silver mine wasn’t there at all, and this was Russian history.

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Shackle-Tightening Update: Wikipedia Joins The Left’s Hunter Biden Cover-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The ongoing and frightening effort by progressives and Democrats to hide information that might let Americans know what’s going on in their government and nation (or what might be going on) killed another canary in the democracy mine last week.

Coincidentally<cough!>timed with the recent disclosure that Eric Schwerin, Hunter Biden’s business partner, made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015 including meetings with then-Vice President Joe Biden, Wikipedia editors eliminated its page for Rosemont Seneca Partners, the investment company connected to Hunter’s alleged multimillion dollar influence peddling schemes. The risible explanation for the removal was that the company was “not notable”—you know, like Anne Applebaum’s shrugging off Hunter’s laptop as “uninteresting.” Schwerin was president of the company, and President Biden has repeatedly claimed that he had no involvement with his son’s business dealings.

The Left’s efforts at propaganda and information air-brushing appear to be getting increasingly brazen as the mid-term elections approach, and with them the threat that the Democratic plan to transform America is facing imminent collapse. While their mouthpeices attempt to promote ideological censorship by bemoaning “misinformation” and “disinformation,” the would-be architects of a benign woke dictatorship are also trafficking in de-information, with the sleazy Hunter Biden a primary beneficiary, and, as a consequence, his father as well.

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Comment Of The Day: “Mid-Day Ethics Mop-Up, 7/15/2021: …Wikipedia…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Wikipedia-Logo-2003

John Paul, aka JP, adds his experiences to the discussion of Wikipedia bias and ethics, broached yesterday in his Comment of the Day to Item #2 of the post, “Mid-Day Ethics Mop-Up, 7/15/2021: Trump Derangement, Wikipedia, And Fact-Checking”:

“While I know I am not the best writer, I like to consider myself a studious person. But this was done through some rather painstaking classes I had to take in undergraduate and graduate classes. One of those classes was Scripture Interpretation. It is by far the hardest class I took in undergrad. My professor spent the first two weeks, making sure we knew how to do proper research. It was there I first learned (2005 I think) about Wikipedia. He said, it was not a site to be trusted and would not be considered useful for the course. This peeked my curiosity. So I went in during his office hours to asked him why. He told me: Go down to the men’s bathroom down the hall, use the last stall on the right, then come back and tell him what I saw.

“This was a rather strange request to tell me why I shouldn’t trust a website, but I figured he must have had a point, so down I went to the empty bathroom, found the stall, looked in it and saw what was a rather normal looking stall. Confused, I looked around the toilet, checked the toilet paper holder, looked up at the ceiling, found nothing. I was about to admit defeat when It occur to me to check the back of the door. It was there I found numerous jokes about a particular student (just one). There must have been quite a few. Mostly, they were told in the Chuck Norris style of jokes like “God said, let there be light” and X says, “Say please.” There were attempts to fix this problem with obvious layers of paint, but it was a band aid to a persistent problem.

“So I went back and old him what I found. He then pulled up the Wikipedia for our school and there with information about our school were the same jokes about the same student found in the stall. The site used his first and last name. The professor told me that no matter how many times and has changed it himself, he keeps encountering the same problem. The site and the bathroom keep popping up with the same lewd comments and jokes.

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Third Of July Ethics Concert, 2020, Part 2: The Less Grand And Not Historic, One Hopes

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

For historical and quirky reasons, “The Egg” is my favorite song from “1776.” The number takes place on July 3, as the Continental Congress debates Jefferson’s handiwork, and Tom, Ben Franklin and John Adams sit outside, hesitant to witness  the rhetorical carnage they know is coming. I played the role of Adams in several musical reviews, a part I would have loved to have tackled on-stage in a full production, but I am about 7 inches too tall.

Some productions cut this number, which is both bad history and bad theater. (The number to cut is “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” a cheap shot at conservatives, and a lousy song.)

1. And I will say, “None of your business, officer!” A new Virginia law, the Community Policing Act that took effect this week, requires police officers to ask individuals pulled over during traffic stops for their race, ethnicity, and gender. I very much doubt that the law will withstand a legal challenge. The change is part of the Governor Ralph “Call me Michael Jackson” Northam regime of enacting every oppressive progressive agenda item he can get away with. This one is aimed at eliminating “bias-based profiling,” and requires officers to record the driver’s race, ethnicity, age, and sex while conducting traffic stops.

Like so many other misguided approaches to fixing “systemic racism,” this one attempts to protect the rights of African-Americans by infringing on the rights of everyone else. If I am pressed to answer the question by an officer, I will answer that I identify as Asian and female. I urge my fellow Virginians to do likewise.

2. Wuhan virus ethics train wreck update: Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Round-Up, 2/12/2019: It’s Kamala Harris Day, Among Other Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Howdy…

1. Without the decency to say, “Well, we didn’t find anything.”  From CNN: “After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.”

The honorable, fair and honest thing for Senate Democrats (and Democrats generally) would be to state clearly and unequivocally that they found no evidence of “collusion,” and therefore were going to stop insinuating that collusion took place. But these are not honorable, fair and honest people, but people who are determined to undermine public trust in the President, elections, the government and democracy, because they would rather have power in a ruined, crippled government than not have power at all. Thus Committee co-chair, Sen. Mark Warner, D.-Va.,  told reporters, “I’m not going to get into any conclusions I have, [but] “there’s never been a campaign in American history … that people affiliated with the campaign had as many ties with Russia as the Trump campaign did.”  This ranks among the most weaselly statements in recent memory. “Ties” is a deceitful term wielded by the news media—by its definition I have ties to Russia. People “affiliated with the campaign” having business dealings with Russia or Russians, or communications with Russia, are not the same as the campaign having “ties” to Russia. Warner’s statement is, at its most trivial, sour grapes, and at its worst, a deliberate smear.

One Democratic Senate investigator told CNN (anonymously of course),”Donald Trump Jr. made clear in his messages that he was willing to accept help from the Russians. Trump publicly urged the Russians to find Clinton’s missing emails.” After all this, that’s the smoking gun? An obvious, off the cuff joke Trump made on the stump? “We were never going to find a contract signed in blood saying, ‘Hey Vlad, we’re going to collude,'” another Democratic aide sniffed. This is, of course, a dishonest version of Hillary’s “It wasn’t the best decision” (referring to her illegal decision to hijack official emails into a private server) rationalization. No, Hillary, not only wasn’t it the best decision, it was a terrible, suspicious, indefensible decision, and no, anonymous partisan hack, you were not only not going to find a contract signed in blood, you weren’t going to find any evidence of illicit, illegal, impeachable contacts at all.

The Democratic Party has allowed its defeat in 2016 to rot the party and its supporters to the core.

2. Baseball and lawyers! As I discussed here, Baseball’s Today’s Game Committee (formerly known as the Veterans Committee) elected OF/DH Harold Baines to the Hall of Fame in a decision that was not only logically indefensible, but obviously tainted by conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, since associates and friends of Baines dominated the voting process. Now one of the pro-Baines voters, Hall of Fame manager Tony LaRussa (full disclosure: he works for the Red Sox now) has written an article  defending the decision. What is interesting about the article is that LaRussa, though few remember this, is trained as a lawyer, and his defense of picking Baines uses one legal advocacy device after another. Bill Baer, at NBC Sports, isn’t a lawyer, but he does an excellent job with his reply brief to LaRussa’s tortured and statistically deceitful arguments.

3. Let’s start a pool! Which of the gazillion Democrats running for President will commit the most verbal gaffes and require the rationalized defense, “Well he/she still doesn’t lie as much as Trump does!”? Obviously Joe Biden will be a popular choice for the title, as his foot is more or less positioned in his mouth up to the knee, but I think it will be a very competitive contest. For example (from Reason): Continue reading →

Oh, Fine: I Knew Wikipedia Was Untrustworthy, And Now I Find Out It’s Partisan Too….

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

If the mainstream media, social media, and the most accessed encyclopedia won’t tell the truth without trying to manipulate it, what chance do we have?

Yesterday I again tip-toed into the realm of government lawyer ethics for a CLE seminar. As I did last week, I attempted to mention the most important government lawyer issues raised by the events of the past year without triggering partisan zealots and the anti-Trump deranged. I also noted that being a partisan zealot or anti-Trump deranged qualifies as a potential conflict of interest for a government lawyer, interfering with his or her ability to be objective, independent, competent, loyal and zealous. I did not say, but could have, as proven by Sally Yates. I know from past experience that this particular—100% accurate—observation is inviting a fight.

However, I did feel it necessary to discuss Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official who is at the center of several Mueller investigation controversies. I am not yet prepared to weigh in on Orr, except to note this, as I did yesterday: The fact that Ohr served as the Justice Department contact for Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent commissioned to author the dubious Trump–Russia dossier that was used as the primary justification for the FISA warrants permitting surveillance of the Trump campaign, while Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that prepared the dossier under a contract with the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign (but I repeat myself), was a blatant conflict of interest, and arguably (and I’ll argue it) an unwaivable one. It also violates the ethics requirement that all government employees must follow to avoid the appearance of impropriety. (Pretty much the entire Mueller investigation has breached that. )

In the course of trying to confirm the basic facts of Ohr’s conduct, I consulted Wikipedia. Where else do you go these days for a dispassionate up-to-date recitation of facts without spin? Not  the New York Times. Not Fox News. As Frankie Pentangeli says to Michael Corleone, “Your father did business with Hyman Roth; your father respected Hyman Roth; but your father never trusted Hyman Roth.” That pretty much describes my relationship to Wikipedia. I don’t trust it. I frequently find errors in entries; I know people who have Wikipedia pages who are about as deserving of them, or less, than my Jack Russell Terrier; and I have never forgotten how my father spend hours correcting a wildly inaccurate Wikipedia article about a World War II battle that he was deeply involved in and wrote about in his book only to have his work rejected because Wikipedia does not accept, it said, “first hand accounts.” Wikipedia is a classic example of an imperfect resource that is both essential and hopelessly flawed by its very nature. Continue reading →