March 2024
Rampant bias and “sceptical fanaticism” plagues Wikipedia, says a group of writers researching content produced by editor of that website purported to be objectively factual.
Wikipedia’s biography of Rupert Sheldrake is a salient example of strongly materialist bias in the editing. SCREEN SHOT from Wikipedia.
The creation of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia was a marvelous expression of what the “wisdom of crowds” was able to achieve after the advent of the internet.
However, the number of people who actively edit Wikipedia articles is a tiny fraction of the number of people who read them. Groups of Wikipedia editors focus on certain topics and regularly “tidy” the associated articles. One such group, Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW), is dedicated to keep Wikipedia free of “pseudoscience” and “fringe” research, terms that the group itself defines. Their approach is decidedly physicalist.
GSoW was founded by Susan Gerbic in 2010. In an interview with The New York Times in 2019, Gerbic said that the group had 144 editors who worked on nearly 900 Wikipedia pages. GSoW’s parent organization is Center for Inquiry, CFI, whose aim is to spread atheism and secular ideas in general. On the CFI website it reads: “The Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project has fixed hundreds of Wikipedia pages.”
This spring, a group of independent researchers, journalists and others initiated an investigation into the activities of GSoW. The objective is to eventually expose these activities and explain why they are detrimental to neutral information.
The investigators particularly look into the biased editing of biographies of people who do research on topics deemed controversial in the mainstream, such as psi phenomena and UAPs. Two examples are Rupert Sheldrake and George Knapp.
“Wikipedia is a tragic mess of epic proportions and its crowning dumpster fire is Rupert Sheldrake’s highly contentious biography”, writes Craig Weiler, one of the independent investigators, in Paranormal Daily News. Weiler specialises in reporting on parapsychology.
The battle for Sheldrake’s bio took off after the biologist’s TED talk about the 10 dogmas of science was banned in 2013. Sheldrake has a website of his own, but Google puts Wikipedia’s entry first when you search.
Weiler thinks that if the investigation plays out the way it’s heading, “It’s going to absolutely rock the scientific world by casting a very public light on the worst sort of sceptical fanaticism”.
Anders Bolling
