Wikipedia is the largest and most read reference source in the world. Billions rely on it every day for unbiased facts and truthful information. Unfortunately, what they often get are slander and lies. This poses an existential threat to society, because lies and slander corrode the fabric of society and harm all of its citizens, no less than they harm the ones who are lied about and slandered.
If Wikipedia were a marginal website with little influence, it could be regarded as harmless, just as you might regard it as harmless to be bumped by a toddler on a tricycle traveling at a snail’s pace – but not if you were run down by a pizza delivery boy on an electric bicycle travelling at 30 mph. Because Wikipedia dwarfs every other reference source on the face of the earth not only in size but in influence, what is at stake is the very pollution of knowledge itself. What shall we do about it?
Should Wikipedia be censored to prevent it from publishing lies and slander? Absolutely not. There must be no pre-publication censorship in America, not even for lies and slander. On the other hand, neither should their be immunity from the consequences of deliberately publishing lies and slander, especially if it harms innocent people.
That is why we have libel laws.
If Encyclopedia Britannica or the New York Times or NBC or Netflix or any other media platform not only published lies about someone, but also refused to correct those lies when given the correct information, they would be faced with a libel suit – which they would almost certainly lose and be forced to pay millions of dollars in fines.
So how can Wikipedia get way with committing such brazen abuses of truth? How can Wikipedia deliberately lie about distinguished scientists, physicians and scholars – often ruining their careers – without facing multi-million-dollar libel suits?
Because, curiously, Wikipedia is immune from libel suits. Under Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, Wikipedia is classed as a “service provider,” not a “publisher.” Which means it is protected from liability for articles contributed by its “third-party” authors, whom the law naively presumes to be independent of control by Wikipedia ownership.
But that is a legal fiction.
Articles submitted to Wikipedia are edited and often totally rewritten by Wikipedia’s “editors” to reflect the biases and agendas of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, as well as the biases and agendas of the powerful corporations and government agencies with whom he colludes.
[…]
At present, judges continue to entertain the fiction that Wikipedia is a “service provider.” This protects it from libel suits. But as more articles like this one appear, the courts may reconsider Wikipedia’s status and reclassify it, more correctly, from “service provider” to “publisher”; much the same way that courts, after 1970, reclassified husbands who forced their wives to have sexual intercourse — from “spouses” to “rapists.”
[…]
Wikipedia has achieved the top position for being the most viewed and referenced encyclopedia in the world. As of May 2024, the English Wikipedia contains over 6.8 million distinct entries and is increasing at a rate of 534 new entries daily due to its army of over 800,000 registered voluntary editors. While countless people around the world benefit from the breadth and scope of knowledge the encyclopedia provides, for almost two decades it has equally been the target of growing criticism for its biases and lack of objectivity on many subjects that have a direct impact on people’s health and well-being.
There are over 200,000 health and medical-related topics. Although the majority of medical entries do not draw controversy and provide relatively accurate and clear encyclopedic definitions for the biology and the etiology of diseases and medical conditions, there is a significant quantity of approximately 700 pages that directly concern Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies and natural health modalities, including Chiropractic, acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), naturopathy, homeopathy, orthomolecular medicine, energy medicine, etc.
This grouping of articles is separated off from the medical arts and sciences and intentionally marginalized under the heading of “pseudoscience” and quackery – highly prejudiced and derogatory terms that do not belong in a legitimate encyclopedia.
[…]
Unlike other medical pages, there is an apparent lack of reputable medical professionals successfully editing these pages. The majority are anonymous amateurs who consistently rely on Skeptic websites and publications as primary reference sources. Despite the volumes of peer-reviewed studies and articles cataloged in the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine and other research databases confirming the efficacy of these non-conventional therapies, Skeptic editors rely solely upon those studies that may be used for censure and defamation. Since Skeptics now control and monitor these health subjects there is no opportunity for transparency and honest debate to correct gross errors are more often than not systematically shut down.
When looking for information about alternative health issues using legitimate, highly respected encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica we find fair, balanced, and scholarly reviews based on reliable objective sources and professional expertise. Britannica and other comparable encyclopedias name the editors and their professional credentials in any given subject. There is no debasement. There are no attacks. At no point in these highly revered encyclopedias is there character assassination, ridicule, mocking, or disparagement of people supporting an alternative and complementary medical approach at variance with medical orthodoxy. The process for crafting a subject entry is transparent, and instructive. Therefore, due to the lack of subjective biases and prejudices, users benefit from the information provided by being given the liberty to make up their own mind about an entry’s veracity.
Now let’s compare that to an experience on Wikipedia which calls itself an encyclopedia, but fails even the most rudimentary challenges. Most of the editors are anonymous with no reliable curriculum vitae to see if they have expertise in the area they are editing. Their use of words such as “charlatan,” “quack,” “lunatic,” “fringe,” and “pseudoscientific” are not uncommon. There is zero transparency. One feels an oozing sense of condescension viewing the biographies of highly respected and professional people who criticize conventional medical newspeak. They are held in utter contempt, and their expertise is pre-judged as having no legitimate value. Worse, they are condemned as quacks, charlatans, opportunists in Wikipedia’s virtual reality of Stalinistic show trials—condemned without an opportunity to respond to the allegations.
Everyone should be greatly concerned that Wikipedia’s articles about alternative medical modalities to prevent and treat disease have been expropriated by an army of compromised editors whose sole mission is to undermine the therapeutic credibility and scientific evidence of these therapies. Practically all of these non-orthodox medical entries are dominated by people who are intent on preserving the pro-pharmaceutical status quo. Anyone can spend a little time searching through Wikipedia articles about homeopathy, chiropractic, popular herbal supplements and vitamins, etc and quickly discover that favorable peer-reviewed research are unwelcome. If anyone doubts this and feels game, register as an editor and try to make a constructive truthful edit about the medical efficacy of any of these alternative treatments, supported by an irrefutable medical reference, and it will be quickly removed within hours. Continue to make the same edit and you will eventually be banned.
Let’s take an example. The National Health Federation (NHF) founded in 1955 is an international consumer, health freedom organization dedicated to protecting citizens’ rights to consume healthy foods over-the-counter access to dietary supplements and access to alternative medical therapies. In the past NHF has had a formative role in getting chiropractors legally licensed in the United States, the recognition of acupuncture as a viable treatment and the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act that enables Americans access to dietary supplements under the assurance of government quality controls and good manufacturing practices.
Moreover, the Federation is recognized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with UN observer status and has a seat on the FAO-WHO’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, which establishes international food standards and guidelines including the use of pesticides, food additives, preservative, contamination levels, etc. In fact, with membership now representing 22 nations, the NHF is the sole consumer advocacy organization on the Commission uncontaminated by any individual government and the private interests of large food manufacturers, agro-chemical companies such as Monsanto, the pharmaceutical giants and their lobbyists. In other words, NHF is a highly esteemed consumer protection organization with a 70-year history of protecting individual health freedoms.
In 2007, NHF board members conducted a small experiment to test Wikipedia’s neutrality. NHF had no entry in Wikipedia; therefore, an entry was created that was kept very neutral without noting any unreasonable or questionable claims. After a period of time, the entry was radically modified to portray the federation in a negative light. Positive references were replaced by anti-natural health references. All attempts by the organization to restore the page’s original entry were rejected. An outside attorney’s effort to correct NHF’s page were met with threatening cease and desist notices.
NHF’s current Wikipedia entry describes the Federation as “an alliance of promoters and followers who engage in lobbying campaigns… uses the words ‘alternative’ and ‘freedom’ for its own purposes” and is “antagonistic to accepted scientific methods as well as to current consumer protection law.” However, these Wikipedia quotes are sourced back to a militant anti-alternative medicine organization, Quackwatch, which has a long history of harassing natural health practitioners and practically every modality of alternative medicine in order to further advance its drug-based and corporate food agenda.
[…]
There are numerous other examples of board certified physicians advocating for alternative medical therapies and professional health associations experiencing similar obstacles.
[…]
What type of person would attack medical doctors and individuals whose contributions to society have positively impacted the lives of so many people by non-orthodox means? Perhaps, psychologically under-developed ideological trolls.
[…]
Whether the pro-pharmaceutical editors are trolls, cyberbullies, or even professional medical ideologies such as the legion of doctors and professors in Skeptic organizations such as the Center for Inquiry, Evidence Based Medicine, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the James Randi Educational Foundation and Quackwatch, there is no denying that the majority of anonymous editors on Wikipedia’s pages about alternative and complementary medicine, and natural health advocates are engaging in the character assassination. These organizations are adamant that research spent on investigating the efficacy of alternative medicine is a dangerous foe to their narrow definition of science.
[…]
Skepticism’s assault against CAM therapies has become a counter-insurgent effort to delegitimize contemporary trends in medicine. In 2019, the World Health Organization reported, “traditional and complementary medicine is an important and often underestimated health resource with many applications, especially for the prevention and management of lifestyle-related chronic diseases and in meeting the health needs of ageing populations.”
The number of American medical schools offering courses in complementary and alternative medicine has been increasing rapidly. The most prestigious American medical schools now have departments for CAM or include these subjects in their curriculum including acupuncture, hypnosis and herbal remedies according to a recent US News article. A joint 2024 NIH-Johns Hopkins paper reported that alternative health approaches increased to 38 percent in 2022, and 49 percent of Americans use complementary therapies for pain management. Another government survey estimates that 62 percent of US adults use some form of alternative medicine annually. On the other hand, Wikipedia feels threatened by this trend as its editorial animosity continues to become more hostile.
It is crucial to consider the Wikimedia Foundation in the larger context of international corporate globalism and its imperialist agenda. As a nonprofit organization, the Foundation doesn’t act independently from many of the largest federal and international globalist entities, including private mega-corporations. Its largest declared donors include Google, Microsoft, Intel, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, Merck, Oracle, and Bank of America. Despite giving a wink and nod to the Constitutional rights of free speech, it has equally acted in favor of censorship.