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Home Type Curated

Wikipedia Is an Information Warfare Tool

by Dr. Joseph Mercola
September 2, 2023
in Curated, Opinions
Christian and Conservative news hand-curated the way it’s supposed to be. Stay full-MAGA despite the so-called “civil war” waged by the Islam-loving “woke right”.
  • Wikipedia is the most biased encyclopedia in history, having been hijacked by U.S. intelligence, industry and the political establishment years ago
  • According to Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger, U.S. intelligence has been manipulating the online encyclopedia since at least 2008, if not longer
  • Sanger noticed a bias creeping in around 2006, particularly in areas of science and medicine. Around 2010, he noticed that articles about Eastern Medicine were being changed to reflect blatantly biased positions, using “dismissive epithets” to paint this ancient tradition as quackery
  • Over-the-top kind of establishment bias includes Wikipedia’s assertion that the Ukraine-Biden scandal is a conspiracy theory designed to undermine Biden, even though evidence of Biden’s corruption has been made public
  • One explanation for why ideological bias has taken over Wikipedia is that it’s intentionally being used as a propaganda tool by intelligence agencies and the globalist establishment that is seeking to establish a One World Government. To succeed, they can’t allow a multitude of dissenting viewpoints to proliferate, and intelligence agencies are working together to disseminate and uphold the Deep State’s narratives worldwide

Intelligence agencies have a long history of using propaganda as a tool of war, and the effectiveness of information warfare radically improved with the emergence of the internet, to say nothing of artificial intelligence and social media.

If you’re over 50, you can probably remember a time when your family had a row of encyclopedias on the bookshelf — usually obtained at considerable cost — which were perused whenever you needed to learn more about a particular topic.

Antidote

Today, you can’t even give a complete set of encyclopedias away because, well, we have Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia has also become a favored propaganda tool, so to call it unreliable would be an understatement.

According to Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger — who left Wikipedia in 2002, the year after its inception — U.S. intelligence has been manipulating the online encyclopedia since at least 2008, if not longer. Sanger recently sat down to speak with independent journalist Glenn Greenwald (video above) about the subversion of the site he helped create.1

The Blatant Bias of Wikipedia

Sanger says he noticed a bias creeping in around 2006, particularly in areas of science and medicine. Around 2010, he started noticing that articles about Eastern Medicine were being changed to reflect blatantly biased positions, using “dismissive epithets” to paint this ancient tradition as quackery.

In 2012, evidence also emerged revealing a Wikipedia trustee and “Wikipedian in Residence” were being paid to edit pages on behalf of their clients and secure their placement on Wikipedia’s front page in the “Did You Know” section,2 which publicizes new or expanded articles3 — a clear violation of Wikipedia rules.

“It really got over the top … between 2013 and 2018,” Sanger says, “and by by at the time Trump became president, it was almost as bad as it is now. It’s amazing, you know, no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has ever been as biased as Wikipedia has been …

I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and The World Book not mentioning my favorite topics, [and] presenting only certain points of view in a way that establishment sources generally do. But this is something else. This is entirely different. It’s over the top.”

Greenwald agrees, highlighting some recent examples of the “over the top” kind of establishment bias, such as Wikipedia simply declaring that the Ukraine-Biden scandal is a conspiracy theory designed to undermine Biden:

“The very first sentence reads: ‘The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was Vice President of the United States, engaged in corrupt activities relating to his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.’

‘As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump’s first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden’s reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign,’ the Wikipedia entry still reads.

So, notice: The Biden-Ukraine scandal is — according to Wikipedia — the ‘Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory’ but the Trump controversy involving Ukraine is ‘the Trump–Ukraine scandal’. Everything is written to comport with the liberal world view and the Democratic Party talking points.”

Wikipedia’s treatment of all things COVID-related is equally skewed. It presents only the establishment’s “truth” across the board, no matter how much evidence there is to refute it.

‘Truth’ Has Been Married to Ideology

“Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia devoted to truth,” Greenwald says. The problem is that “The premise seems to be that you don’t have truth anymore independent of ideological outlook.”

We know that a great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, and where, if not on websites like Wikipedia? ~ Larry Sanger

Indeed, Sanger points out that Wikipedia’s official policy even declares that 80% of Right-wing media is unreliable, and “that really, really colors the articles and what the editors allow the articles to say,” he says. Just how did we get to a point where “truth” is tied to a particular ideology? Common sense tells you it simply cannot be so.

Intel Agencies Control Wikipedia

One explanation for why this ideological bias has taken over Wikipedia is that it’s intentionally being used as a propaganda tool by intelligence agencies and the globalist establishment that is seeking to implement a new global governance, a New World Order/One World Government.

To succeed in that Herculean effort, they can’t allow a multitude of dissenting viewpoints to proliferate, and intelligence agencies are working together to disseminate and uphold the Deep State’s narratives worldwide. Sanger puts it this way:

“I think that the Left … very, very deliberately seeks out to take control. Except it isn’t just the Left. We’re learning that now, aren’t we? No, it’s the establishment, and they have their own agenda.

I’m not going to try to offer any opinions — because it’s not something that I study — as to how they bring that about. But it’s clear that between 2005 and 2015 … Wikipedia moved onto the establishment’s radar, and we … have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia. Think they stopped doing that? No.

And not just them. We know that a great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, and where, if not on websites like Wikipedia?

They pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community. [They] learn the Wikipedia game and then push what they want to say with their own people. So, that’s my take on that.”

Google and Social Media Are Controlled Too

As noted by Greenwald, Google has played a significant role in Wikipedia’s growth and success by algorithmically placing Wikipedia answers at the top of most searches, and, of course — while they don’t discuss this in the interview — Google also has deep and longstanding ties to the military-intelligence-industrial complex and the globalist Deep State.

The same can be said for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. As reported by Jimmy Dore in the video above, in early 2023, Elon Musk released documents showing Twitter’s former executives censored content at the request of the FBI and assisted the U.S. military’s online propaganda campaigns.

Advisor Bullion Numismatics

Twitter also censored anti-Ukraine narratives on behalf of several U.S. intelligence agencies. Similarly, Facebook censored accurate information that was damaging to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign at the direct request of the FBI. There’s simply no doubt that intelligence agencies are directly involved in controlling and directing public information flow, and Wikipedia is invaluable in that respect.

Anonymous Writers Have No Credibility

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress a key feature of Wikipedia that makes it unreliable, no matter what, and that is the fact that contributing authors and editors are all anonymous.

Clearly, the credibility of an author, regardless of the media format, is of importance when trying to determine the veracity of a given topic, keeping in mind that even experts in the same field will often reach different (and perhaps opposing) conclusions.

Not every expert will have read and evaluated the exact same evidence, for example, leading to differences in interpretation of data. This is normal and unlikely to change, as it is human nature to draw conclusions based on our own breadth of experience and knowledge.

It’s then up to the reader to make up their mind about which of the two or more experts they believe is most correct — a choice that in turn is dependent on the reader’s own prejudices and knowledge base. That said, it should be obvious that no one individual, or even group of individuals, can be the final arbiter of which expert opinion is “the truth.”

However, that’s exactly the position that Wikipedia has inserted itself into. They now decide who they think is right and which position is the correct one, and they simply censor opposing views.

Heaven's Harvest

Google Must Have Known They Were Promoting Unreliable Info

Considering that one of the primary factors that come into play when determining the credibility of an author is his or her credentials, affiliations and previous writings,4 how is it that Google promotes Wikipedia as an authority for every possible type of information by listing them at the top of its search results?

And how can Google use Wikipedia as a primary tool for its quality raters to establish credibility of other online material?5,6 It doesn’t make sense, unless you realize that neither Google nor Wikipedia are about giving people accurate and unbiased information. Their function is to facilitate the programming of people with a certain set of narratives and viewpoints.

As early as 2011, the fact that Wikipedia editors were being paid by corporations to remove and suppress unwanted information was well known and had been declared scandalous.7 Yet nothing changed. At least not for the better.

A 2014 paper8 titled, “Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia” by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, compared 4,000 articles that appear in both encyclopedias and found 73% of Wikipedia’s articles contained political buzz words, compared to 34% in Britannica, and in nearly all cases, Wikipedia was more left-leaning than the Britannica.

Wikipedia Used to Smear and Defame Truthtellers

A key take-home from all this is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. It’s a propaganda tool, and relying on it will frequently leave you wearing the dunce hat. Articles on science and medicine are definitely corrupted and biased in favor of establishment views and should never be used to make medical decisions.

According to a 2014 study,9,10 which assessed the veracity of medical claims made on Wikipedia by cross-checking them with the latest peer-reviewed research, reported finding “many errors” in articles concerning the 10 costliest medical conditions. In fact, 9 out of 10 entries — 90%! — contained assertions that were contradicted by published research.

“Health care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care,” the authors warned.

That said, articles about historical events, current geopolitical issues and the biographies of public figures are not much better. Greenwald himself has seen his personal page transform from a neutral listing of his work history and accomplishments to an “ideological war” description that paints him in a bad light.

Many excellent scientists and doctors who veered from the establishment narrative on COVID have also been shamefully smeared and defamed by Wikipedia, and anyone who tries to clarify or clear up inaccuracies on the site is simply blocked.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, for example, has repeatedly tried to “correct provably false facts” about her background on Wikipedia, only to be told she’s “not a reliable source” and having her edits overridden by anonymous editors that guard her page, making sure her award-winning work is kept hushed and her character portrait tarnished.11 Other examples of “sanitizing” certain pages and tarnishing others can be found in a June 28, 2015, article12 in The Epoch Times.

Ditch Wikipedia and Use Other Online Encyclopedias

If you’re interested in learning more about Wikipedia, its history and inner workings, pick up a copy of Andrew Lih’s book, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”13 In it, Lih asks, “If Wikipedia is a minefield of inaccuracies, should one even be tiptoeing through this information garden?” It’s a fair question, for sure.

Similarly, in a 2005 blog post critiquing Wikipedia, Nicholas Carr, author of “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” noted:14

“[A]n encyclopedia can’t just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What’s the worth of an unreliable reference work?”

The good news is there are dozens of other online encyclopedias, many of which do not suffer from this entrenched ideological bias. Two great resources are encyclosearch.org and encycloreader.org, which allow you to search for answers across dozens of encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, at once. This way, you can compare a multitude of sources.



Examples of more specialized encyclopedias include Ballotpedia (an explicitly neutral encyclopedia of American politics), Scholarpedia, EduTechWiki, MedlinePlus (a medical encyclopedia), Encyclopedia Mythica (religion, folklore and mythology) and HandWiki (computing, science, technology and general).

Sanger is involved in the creation of encyclosearch.org, which he describes as an effort to “strike a blow against censorship and control of information by simply making it easier to find the all the other encyclopedias that are out there.”

Truth be told, Wikipedia is dependent on your lack of knowledge about how they really operate. Taking advantage of your desire for quick information, their goal is to shuttle your thoughts, opinions and knowledge into a silo that doesn’t allow anything in except what they put in there. And what they’re putting on their site is some of the most biased information you’ll find anywhere in media today.

  • 1 ZeroHedge August 3, 2023
  • 2 Wikipedia Main Page
  • 3 CNET.com September 18, 2012
  • 4 Hofstra University’s library Q&A Q: How can I determine if an author is credible? Answered by Georgina Martorella
  • 5 The SEM Post.com May 17, 2019
  • 6 Telapost 2019 Google Quality Rater Guidelines
  • 7 Royal Dutch Shell PLC December 18, 2011
  • 8 Working Knowledge, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia November 7, 2014
  • 9 Journal of the American Osteopathic Association 2014 May;114(5):368-73
  • 10 Journal of the American Osteopathic Association 2014 May;114(5):368-73 (Archived copy)
  • 11 Sharylattkisson.com May 25, 2019
  • 12 The Epoch Times June 28, 2015
  • 13 Amazon.com The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih
  • 14 Roughtype.com Nicholas Carr blog

Article cross-posted from Dr. Mercola’s site.

Fastest Growing





Two Storms, One Harvest

Empty Shelves

Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.

What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.

Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.

This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.

Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.

Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.

The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running

While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.

The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.

Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.

The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.

Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.

The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?

The System Has No Slack Left

The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.

Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.

There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.

The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.

What Joseph Knew

Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.

Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.

Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.

Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.

None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.

Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.

Tags: CIAConspiracyControlDeep StateGlenn GreenwaldInformationJimmy DoreJoseph MercolaLedePropagandaTop StoryWikipedia
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Comments 7

  1. jfhdsiu says:
    3 years ago

    I am shocked, shocked I tell you, shocked that anyone has to be told that wikipedia is, has been and always will be totally unreliable as a source of honest knowledge. I always ask everyone who wants to pass on info to me as to ‘where’ they got the info themselves. Whether I believe them or relegate them to the “dummy list” depends on their answer! Citing wikipedia gets them at the ‘top’ of the list and I don’t believe that person anymore on anything. Especially business matters..

    Reply
    • Gkee says:
      3 years ago

      No…it has not always been useless…that started about 10 years ago. When wikipedia allowed input from all sides and was widely used with citizen checks and balances, it probably was the most accurate source of info available. That’s because knowledgable contributors, not just the academics and power elites, fed the narrative. Now, however, the left-leaning, fake-news biases in Wikipedia are so blatant it’s laughable. It has become as useless as all fake news, lying BS media outlets.

      Reply
  2. Rumplestitlskin says:
    3 years ago

    All it takes is one unvetted lie to totally ruin a business like Wikipedia. Once I heard that certain searches only returned propaganda, we had to assume that NOTHING ON WIKIPEDIA COULD BE TRUSTED, so I stopped donating to it once a year and no longer use it.

    Reply
  3. Rumplestitlskin says:
    3 years ago

    IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH BECOMES A REVOLUTIONARY ACT ! – 1984

    Reply
    • jfhdsiu says:
      3 years ago

      As with the movie “IDIOCRACY” the book, “1984”, started out being a prophecy type story but has turned out to be a documentary.

      Reply
  4. Anonymous says:
    3 years ago

    1. Compare Wikipedia’s page on Gamergate to Infogalactic’s
    https://infogalactic.com/info/GamerGate

    2. The people who censored Gamergate on Wikipedia were working for Russia and Saudi Arabia
    https://wikipediasucks.co/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=2930

    3. Jimmy Wales’s Creative Commons team is running the “Aspen Commission on Information Disorder” and it is run by Paul Brest who represents Al-Qaeda. He knows exactly who is corrupting Wikipedia and is unwilling or unable to stop it.
    https://files.catbox.moe/fs3lfr.png

    Reply
  5. Glee says:
    3 years ago

    In the early days of Wikipedia, the elitist and academic mouthpieces railed against the site as not being trustworthy. But it was obvious then that the trouble wasn’t a lack of information integrity but with elitist egos being challenged and power brokers not being able to control the narrative. As more and more credentialed people began to contribute from all sides of an issue, the info became more and more reliable. All sides were represented on controversial issues. I loved the site, believed in its integrity, and almost always contributed to their annual drive….until… at least 8-10 years ago when all that changed.

    BUT…The info on the once non-political site started taking an obvious hard-left turn. In areas where I had some expertise, I recognized there was no longer legitimate “other views,” but the claims made were often and clearly agenda driven, blatant propaganda, and even total bullshirt. Either Wikipedia has been bought by the media BS regime or it has hired people so gaslit they don’t know fact from fiction. Whatever their issue, Wikipedia hasn’t gotten a dime from me in years. It is never a site I look at intentionally for information anymore…NEVER!

    Reply

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