Is it possible to save Wikipedia?
Opinion by Julian Adorney, Washington Examiner, 11/6/23
Writer Hava Mendelle had a piece in the Spectator Australia last week titled “Wikipedia at war,” which alleged that Wikipedia is providing left-leaning information on a variety of important topics. In particular, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t being covered in a neutral way. Mendelle notes, “Reading the initial two paragraphs [of the Wikipedia page for the Gaza Strip] would lead the reader to think that Israel occupies Gaza since 1967, that Hamas are not a terrorist organisation, and that Israel blocks Gazan land, sea, and air space for no reason at all.”
Mendelle is right, and bias at Wikipedia goes far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On any number of hot-button issues, Wikipedia displays a clear left-wing bias. The Wikipedia page for the COVID-19 lab leak theory, for instance, calls it a “conspiracy theory” that is “informed by racist undercurrents” and “fed by pseudoscientific … thinking.” That’s in spite of the fact that a 302-page Senate report found credible evidence for the theory.
Larry Sanger, co-founder of the online encyclopedia, says that Wikipedia doesn’t consider prominent right-wing news sites to be credible evidence. “You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all,” he claims. “You can’t cite Fox News on sociopolitical issues either.” Wikipedia itself notes that it suffers from a “moderate but systematic prevalence of liberal journalistic sources.”
How did we get here? Wikipedia’s other co-founder, Jimmy Wales, describes himself as “center-right.” He’s read prominent libertarian thinkers, and the whole concept of Wikipedia was based on an essay titled “The Use of Knowledge in Society” by libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. In this essay, Hayek argues that knowledge is dispersed and that market mechanisms help us to coordinate and synthesize this knowledge in order to make society function. “Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project,” Wales once said. Wales also founded the encyclopedia upon a bedrock principle of institutional neutrality.
The problem is that Wikipedia ran afoul of O’Sullivan’s first law. Coined by John O’Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, the law states that “all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Wikipedia set out to champion institutional neutrality. But in the absence of any way to enforce this ideal (all of Wikipedia’s editors are volunteers), the institution has drifted more and more leftward.
Wikipedia’s bias represents an immense problem for conservatives. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world. In 2021, it generated an estimated 6.1 billion views every month. It’s not that most articles have a liberal bias. But across the site as a whole, the bias is pervasive. As a result of this bias, conservatives and libertarians are being shut out of a key part of the online discussion.
But Wikipedia’s problems run deeper. Unlike sites such as Slate or National Review, people go to Wikipedia looking for neutral information on a topic. When they seek neutral information and instead find left-wing talking points, it’s bad for our public discourse as a whole.
So (how) can Wikipedia be saved? One option would be for the website to institute something like X’s Community Notes. Readers could add crucial context to specific Wikipedia articles or even specific sections of articles. Editors who contributed to an article could be blocked from interfering with the notes on that article so that the same editors can’t extend their bias over both the article and the Community Notes section. This would represent a continuation of Wikipedia’s foundational premise, and of Hayek’s insight about distributed knowledge, by relying on community knowledge to address problems of editorial bias.
And X’s Community Notes hasn’t seemed to fall afoul of O’Sullivan’s first law (perhaps because the law, coined in 1989, applied more to people who work with or for an organization than to readers). So there’s hope that a similar feature added to Wikipedia would fare equally well.
That’s just one idea, but ultimately, Wikipedia needs to take some sort of action. Wikipedia is the most popular library in the world, but a library whose authors mostly lean the same way is unlikely to provide as much value to humanity as its visionaries intended.
Julian Adorney is a writer and marketing consultant with fee.org and contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He has previously written for National Review, The Federalist, and other outlets.