Jimmy Wales is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist (and a fan of Ayn Rand) who runs an allegedly non-profit organization, Wikipedia. All NGOs are corrupted, in one way or another, generally over the funding issue (all prominent human-rights organizations are shams, for instance – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Wales’s wife was Tony Blair’s secretary, whom he met while speaking at the capitalist enclave at Davos.
In 2008, Wikipedia’s racist bias was obvious, I tried to do something about it, my contributions were erased in days, and the admins were worse offenders than the editors. A couple of years later, I did battle with Wikipedia’s editors to improve Brian O’Leary’s bio, and I can live with it as it stands (and wormed his free energy work into his Wikiquotes page, which I created), although there was a recent effort to delete it. Brian thought that his free-energy work was his life’s most important effort, but even mentioning it was forbidden at Wikipedia. The free-energy issue at Wikipedia has been dominated by trolls, but has been largely pushed into oblivion.
So, when I offered to improve Ed Herman’s libelous Wikipedia bio, I had a pretty good idea what I was in for. But even I was surprised by the viciousness at Wikipedia, and again, particularly that of the admins. Herman’s bio remains libelous to this day, and today when well-meaning editors stumble into the libelous treatment of Ed’s bio and try to fix it, they are immediately chased away with admin threats and a chorus of lies from the editors, who watch Ed’s bio like a hawk and defend the libelous statements, several of which were introduced by Wikipedia’s most notorious editor.
I finished my article on Wikipedia’s propaganda function by noting that its libelous treatment of Ed’s bio actually was another confirmation of his Propaganda Model, just as his obituary in the New York Times confirmed his Propaganda Model. Ed might be laughing in the hereafter at that.
The fact that Wikipedia is a propaganda conduit on many subjects (the USA’s imperial behavior, Western medicine, the paranormal, etc.) is partly due to its many corrupting influences, which I explored in my essay, but it also reflects how successful the brainwashing of the public has been. There is nothing like Wikipedia on the Internet, but I use it very carefully. Basically, for issues that have no current political-economic relevance, Wikipedia’s articles can be pretty good summaries of the issues and evidence, such as the demise of the dinosaurs. But for anything that touches capitalist or imperial interests, those interests themselves manage Wikipedia, and usually surreptitiously, although the CIA and FBI have been repeatedly caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
These really are only further examples of my journey’s primary lesson. Ed warned about the Internet from its early days, again warned about in his final interview, and he was prescient on that issue, as he was on so many others. Wikipedia is part of the problem.