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1. 00:02 Today we’re going to discuss the biggest narcissistic cult ever. Online or
2. 00:09 offline, it’s enormous. Tens of millions of participants, hundreds of millions,
3. 00:15 possibly billions of users with access to the cult and its machinations. And
4. 00:23 I’m talking about Wikipedia. My name is Svaknin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I’m going to enumerate my credentials my academic credentials right now uh because it’s relevant for
5. 00:38 the continuation of the video. I’m a professor of psychology and a professor of business management in the
6. 00:45 Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom. I am a former visiting professor of psychology for five years
7. 00:51 in southern federal university in Rosttoandon in Russia and I’m currently
8. 00:57 a visiting professor of psychology and a visiting professor of economics in Southeast European university um in
9. 01:05 North Macedonia. These are my academic affiliations. I am an editor in chief of um about eight or
10. 01:14 nine academic journals and I am an editor a member of the editorial board
11. 01:20 of another hund about onethird of these are peer-reviewed another one-third are
12. 01:26 open access uh what else do you need to know I’m on the organizing committee of well over
13. 01:33 200 international conferences all over the world so I know a bit about uh
14. 01:41 academia and research and publishing and peer review and all this. I’ve also
15. 01:48 worked hand in hand for several years with the encyclopedia Britannica. Oh, I also know a lot about encyclopedias firsthand from the inside the best encyclopedia in human history. Encyclopedia Britannica. I mentioned all these credentials
16. 02:05 because they are super relevant to the video you’re about to watch. I’m about to criticize an enterprise claiming to
17. 02:12 be an encyclopedia, a a narcissistic cult masquerading as an encyclopedia
18. 02:18 and also claiming to be an academic endeavor
19. 02:25 equivalent of for example a research peer-review journal. The these are the claims of Wikipedia. I’m going to debunk all of them one by one and I’m going to
20. 02:36 expose the underbelly of this um seriously flawed um group of people
21. 02:44 and what they’re doing. I think they were the ones who contaminated first
22. 02:50 contaminated the space of information online. They were the first ones to purvey and propagate and distribute
23. 02:59 misinformation, fake news and false information. And I think um they constituted both the
24. 03:08 fundamental foundation of similar things being perpetrated by artificial intelligence chatbots nowadays because artificial intelligence chatbots rely on content of the of
25. 03:21 Wikipedia and also Wikipedia legitimized many similar enterprises in in alternative
26. 03:29 media as it’s called non- mainstream media. IA. So, Wikipedia to cut a long
27. 03:36 story short is the mother and father and lineage and and ancestor of everything
28. 03:46 today that we see in the sphere of information. The pollution,
29. 03:53 misinformation, fake news, it all started with Wikipedia. And how do I
30. 03:59 know? I know because under the true founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, I
31. 04:06 was amongst the first contributors. Uh, at the time it wasn’t called Wikipedia because it was called Nupedia.
32. 04:14 Nupedia was Wikipedia’s uh predecessor, but it was peer-reviewed. We had a very
33. 04:21 strict process of peer review and then later on Jimmy Wales took over side
34. 04:29 sidelined um Larry Sanger ousted him in effect and converted Nupedia into
35. 04:36 Wikipedia uh the crowdsourcing platform. I spent
36. 04:42 many years on and off studying Wikipedia until I completely gave up on it and moved on. Interestingly, recently artificial
37. 04:53 intelligence chatbots are warning about Wikipedia. They cast Wikipedia as an
38. 04:59 unreliable resource. Now, mind you, artificial intelligence chatbot chatbots
39. 05:05 use Wikipedia’s content overwhelmingly, but they’re warning against it. They they issue it with a disclaimer. Try it out for yourself. In the English version of Wikipedia,
40. 05:18 there are only 500 active editors. These are editors who
41. 05:24 make more than 100 edit edits a year. 500, that’s all. Out of 50 million
42. 05:32 registered users. It is therefore no longer a crowdsourced
43. 05:38 resource because 500 is not a crowd but it is a closed delusional fantasyprone
44. 05:45 cult or in clinical terms shared a shared fantasy a narcissistic shared
45. 05:51 fantasy. Let me read to you how one of the
46. 05:58 preeminent Wikipedians um presents herself.
47. 06:04 I’m saying herself because she claims to be a female and she claims to be from Montreal. There’s no way to verify this.
48. 06:13 Wikipedia is utterly anonymous and does not insist on any ID documents or
49. 06:19 anything. Anyone can claim to be anything. We’ll come to it a bit later. But SLP1, who claims to be a female from
50. 06:27 Quebec, Montreal, has this to say about herself. I tend to edit articles that take my
51. 06:35 fancy and I have no con and these articles have no connection to my professional and academic background.
52. 06:43 She’s proud of it. Let me read this incredible sentence by an editor of an
53. 06:49 encyclopedia. Absolutely mindboggling, breathtakingly
54. 06:56 arrogant and impertinent sentence. I tend to edit articles that take my fancy and have no connection to my
55. 07:07 professional and academic background. Proudly said. And this is the culture of
56. 07:13 Wikipedia. It’s a cult with cult leaders and arcane, obscure, deliberately
57. 07:20 obfuscating language and procedures. Far more cumbersome than any university
58. 07:26 I’ve ever served in, any research lab protocols that I’m aware of, any peer-reviewed journal. All these institutions
59. 07:37 accomplish research. All these institutions add to human knowledge. None of them has 1% of the mountain range of obstacles to entry, barriers to
60. 07:51 entry that Wikipedia does. Wikipedia has become an exclusionary and xenophobic
61. 07:57 inroup, also known as cult. people who are regularly excluded or at
62. 08:05 least moderated in every other internet community, mostly rabid narcissists to
63. 08:11 to call a spade a spade are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-style encyclopedia. And then they rise to the top within this narcissistic cesspool. Let’s go back to history. Go back a few
64. 08:30 go back a few steps. There’s nothing new about the collaborative model that is Wikipedia.
65. 08:37 Before the age of Gutenberg, copies usually found in monasteries in scriptoria used to add their notes and comments to the text that they were copying as they
66. 08:49 went along without indicating which is the original and which are their own
67. 08:55 contributions. The Talmud has been crowdsourced from hundreds of luminaries over centuries.
68. 09:02 Its layout resembles the worldwide web with text hyperlinks to boot. The Oxford
69. 09:09 English dictionary first published in 1928 was the outcome of 70 years of combined efforts of 2,000 zealous and industri industrious volunteers.
70. 09:21 The difference between Wikipedia and the Oxford English Dictionary is that the latter appointed editors to oversee and tutor these teeming hordes of wannabe
71. 09:33 scholars. They were gatekeepers in all these enterprises. There were gatekeepers.
72. 09:39 Wikipedia has none. What Wikipedia is is self-styled
73. 09:45 editors who openly brag that they know nothing about the topics they’re
74. 09:51 editing. It’s the anathema, antithesis, an antonyym of an encyclopedia. The concept of mob wisdom or
75. 10:02 crowdsourcing is equally dated. Actually, nothing new. Ancient Greek and
76. 10:08 Egyptian luminaries from Aristoph Aristophanes to Tommy Tommy relied on
77. 10:15 eyewitness accounts of travelers to compose their enduring albeit utterly erroneous masterpieces.
78. 10:22 The distinction between layman and expert is a modern invention, an aberration in historical terms. Even so, every scholarly article and book
79. 10:34 submitted for publication first goes through peerre scrutiny by qualified
80. 10:41 experts who suggest additions and amendments to the material. Once published, authors frequently act on
81. 10:48 input by academics and the wider public. They issue irrata revisions and new additions to reflect this newly gained knowledge. Here’s what Jonathan Citrine
82. 11:01 had to say in The Internet is Rotting, published in The Atlantic, June 30th, 2021. Before today’s internet, the primary way to preserve something for the ages was
83. 11:12 to consign it to writing. First on stone, then parchment, then papyrus,
84. 11:18 then 20 pound a acid-free paper, then a tape drive, floppy disc or hard disk
85. 11:24 platter, and store the result in a temple or a library, a building designed to guard it against rot, theft, war, and natural disaster. This approach has
86. 11:35 facilitated preservation of some material for thousands of years. Ideally, there would be multiple
87. 11:42 identical copies stored in multiple libraries so that the failure of one storehouse wouldn’t extinguish the
88. 11:49 knowledge within. And in rare instances in which the document was surreptitiously altered, it could be
89. 11:55 compared against copies elsewhere to detect and correct the change kind of blockchain early prototypical blockchain
90. 12:02 technology, the distributed ledger if you wish. Wikipedia differs from traditional outsourcing in that it is indiscriminate. The qualifications, education, experience and credentials expertise of its contributors are frequently ignored
91. 12:20 or even derided and decrieded. Wikipedia is thus subject to the tyranny
92. 12:27 of the often narcissistic user or the community and their weapons.
93. 12:34 Arbitrary editing is weaponized. Arbitrary ball or hatchet reversions of
94. 12:40 texts, malicious smears, impersonation, sock puppetry, and other underhanded
95. 12:46 tactics. Wikipedia is a meritocracy of passive aggressiveness. The more
96. 12:54 ego-driven you are, the more passive aggressive you are, the more likely you are to rise to the top.
97. 13:00 Six cardinal and in the long term term deadly sins plague Wikipedia.
98. 13:06 What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple. Wikipedia dissembles about what lies about what it
99. 13:14 is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its
100. 13:20 success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of netizens but to the public
101. 13:27 relations savvy of its sleek and sleek operations. So let’s start to unravel
102. 13:33 Wikipedia. Number one, Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness.
103. 13:40 The overwhelming majority of contributors to and editors of Wikipedia remain anonymous or pseudonymous throughout the process. Anyone can register and members screen names
104. 13:53 handles mean nothing and lead nowhere. And so no one is forced to take responsibility for what he or she adds to the encyclopedia or subtracts from it. This amounts to an impenetrable smokec screen. Identities can rarely be
105. 14:09 established and evading the legal consequences of one’s actions or omissions is easy.
106. 14:16 As the exposure of the confabulated professional biography of Wikipedia arbitrator SJ in March 2007
107. 14:24 demonstrates, some prominent editors and senior administrators probably claim fake credentials as well or as we have seen in the case of SLP1
108. 14:36 brag about not having any credentials whatsoever in the articles in the topics with
109. 14:43 regards to the topics that they are editing. A software tool developed and posted online in mid 2007. A wiki scanner unearthed tens of thousands of
110. 14:54 self-interested edits by contributors as diverse as the CIA, the Canadian
111. 15:00 government, and Disney. This followed in the wake of a spate of scandals involving biased and tainted edits by
112. 15:08 political staffers and pranksters. Everything in the in Wikipedia can be
113. 15:14 and frequently is edited, rewritten, erased, reverted, re-reverted, undone,
114. 15:21 and you name it. And this includes the talk pages. Includes the talk pages. And even to my utter amazement, in some cases, the history pages. In other words, one cannot gain an impartial view of the editorial process by sifting
115. 15:36 through the talk and history pages of articles, most of which are typically monopolized by fiercely territorial
116. 15:44 editors who shoe off anyone who dares to try to contribute to their articles.
117. 15:51 History, not unlike in certain authoritarian regimes, is being constantly rejigged on Wikipedia.
118. 15:59 Problem number two, Wikipedia is totalitarian, not democratic or even anarchctic. Wikipedia is not an experiment in online democracy, but a form of pericious populist authoritarianism. Wikipedia has been the harbinger of many
119. 16:17 things we are seeing today all over the world. populism, authoritarianism,
120. 16:24 strong armed tactics, censorship, fake news, misinformation. All these
121. 16:32 all these were the foundations of Wikipedia. These are not bugs. These are features,
122. 16:38 structural features, procedural features. Wikipedia espouses two misconceptions. Number one, that chaos
123. 16:46 can and does lead to the generation of artifacts with lasting value. Number two, that knowledge is an emergent mass phenomenon. But Wikipedia is not
124. 16:57 conducive to the unfettered exchange of information and opinion that is a
125. 17:03 prerequisite to both A and B, to both one and two. Wikipedia is a war zone.
126. 17:10 It’s a battlefield where many fear to tread. Wikipedia is a negative filter.
127. 17:18 And this leads to the next point. Might is right editorial principle.
128. 17:24 Lacking quality control by design, Wikipedia rewards quantity.
129. 17:30 The more one posts and interacts with others, the higher one’s status within
130. 17:36 the community, within the cult, both in formal status and formal status. In the
131. 17:43 Wikipedia planet, authority is a function of the number of edits, no matter how frivolous. In other words, if you if you add 80,000 commas to
132. 17:55 articles, you rise to the top. Wikipedia have even has an elaborate structure of
133. 18:02 medals and rewards and ribbons and and which is very reminiscent of Soviet
134. 18:08 Russia. The more aggressive or even violent a user is, the more prone to flame, bully,
135. 18:16 and harass, the more inclined to form coalitions with like-minded trolls, the
136. 18:22 less of a life the this user has outside Wikipedia, the more they are likely to
137. 18:29 end up being administrators and top editors. The result is erratic editing and highly unstable entries.
138. 18:41 Many entries are completely rewritten, not to say vandalized, by a handful of
139. 18:48 power-hungry narcissistic editors and administrators on a permanent ego trip.
140. 18:54 Contrary to advertently fostered impressions, the Wikipedia is not a
141. 19:00 cumulative process. The text of Wikipedia goes through dizzyingly rapid and oft repeated cycles
142. 19:08 of destruction and the initial contributions are at times far deeper and more comprehensive than later
143. 19:15 so-called edited editions of the same entries are written, totally demolished,
144. 19:22 rewritten, totally reverted, destroyed, written again, time and again. And
145. 19:30 there’s never consensus, there’s never stability. It leads nowhere.
146. 19:36 You can see the traces of these edit wars in the talk pages and the history pages, the ones that are not censored. At least Wikipedia is misrepresented as
147. 19:47 an open-source endeavor. Nothing can be further from the truth. Open- source efforts such as Linux involve a group of last instance decision makers. These
148. 19:59 last instance decision makers, the court of last resort, the Supreme Court if you wish, they coordinate, these people coordinate, vet, they cull the flow of
149. 20:10 suggestions, improvements, criticism and offers from the public. They are gatekeepers.
150. 20:16 Open source communities are hierarchical, not stochastic, and never autocratic like Wikipedia. Moreover, it is far easier to evaluate the quality of
151. 20:27 a given snippet of software code than it is to judge the truth content of an edit to an article, especially if it deals with soft and fuzzy topics which involve the weighing of opinions and the
152. 20:38 well-informed exercise of value judgments. Number three, Wikipedia is
153. 20:44 against real knowledge. Wikipedia STEM articles, science, technology, ma mathematics stem articles
154. 20:53 are relatively trustworthy. Studies have shown that they are equal
155. 20:59 in quality to the Britannica’s articles. But these are only the STEM articles,
156. 21:05 articles that deal with hard sciences such as chemistry and biology and and uh
157. 21:11 neuroscience and mathematics and physics and so on. Everything else, which is the
158. 21:17 majority of the articles, including biographies, is highly questionable.
159. 21:23 Wikipedia’s ethos is malignantly anti- elitist. Experts are scorned, rebuffed,
160. 21:31 attacked, and abused. Chased out of the community with official sanction and
161. 21:37 blessing. The vitriol and diet tribes are celebrated.
162. 21:44 Since everyone is assumed to be equally qualified to edit and contribute, no one is entitled to a privileged position by
163. 21:51 virtue of scholarships, academic credentials, or even life experience.
164. 21:57 Bias and prejudice are rampant and all pervasive, especially in articles that deal with history, politics, and issues
165. 22:05 such as gender and sexuality. Wikipedia is the epitome and raification
166. 22:11 of an ominous trend. Internet surfing came to replace real true deep profound
167. 22:18 research. Online eclectic eclecticism supplanted scholarship and trivia passes
168. 22:25 for irudition. Everyone is an instant scholar. If you know how to use a search engine, you’re
169. 22:32 an authority. I call it malignant egalitarianism. Wikipedians boast that the articles in
170. 22:40 their so-called encyclopedia are replete with citations and references
171. 22:46 but citations from which sources and references to which works which authors
172. 22:53 absent the relevant academic credentials and education. How can an editor tell the difference between information and disinformation? Quarks, quarks and authorities, charlatans and scholars and experts, facts and hearsay, truth and
173. 23:10 confabulation. You need to know what you’re talking about. You need to adjudicate based on deep
174. 23:18 education. SLP1 who brags about not knowing the first thing about the article she edits is exactly the case in point. If she
175. 23:31 knows nothing about the articles she edits, how does she dare edit them? How
176. 23:37 does she decide which sources are reliable? How does she know which citations to
177. 23:43 preserve and which citations to omit? They’re coming to pick her up. So
178. 23:54 editors without the necessary credentials and background should never be allowed to touch articles in fields uh in which they have no no knowledge.
179. 24:06 And yet this is the norm in Wikipedia. Wikipedia, the vast majority of editors,
180. 24:13 perhaps all editors, edit articles they know nothing about. And they make
181. 24:19 decisions about which sources are reliable and which citations should be included and which excluded based on
182. 24:26 what. Gut instinct, intuition, consensus.
183. 24:32 That’s not the way you build an encyclopedia. That’s the way you build a trivia house.
184. 24:38 That’s the way you that’s the way you end up having a Reddit or a Quora. Nothing wrong with Reddit and Quora, but
185. 24:45 that’s they are not claiming to be encyclopedias. Knowledge is not comprised of lists of
186. 24:51 facts. Lists of so-called facts, factoids and rumors, the bread and
187. 24:57 butter of Wikipedia. Real facts have to be verified, classified, and arranged within a
188. 25:04 historical and cultural context. And only then do these facts become
189. 25:10 knowledge. It’s a process of transmutation via structure and structure that relies on prior
190. 25:17 knowledge. Wikipedia articles read like laundry lists of information gleaned from secondary sources and they invariably lack context and deep true
191. 25:28 understanding of their subject matter. A big portion is completely wrong misinformation, disinformation and bias. Wikipedia is at best a sampling of raw
192. 25:40 material and artificial intelligence chatbots are much more accomplished at this kind of hoarding than Wikipedia is.
193. 25:50 Can teenagers write in encyclopedia? This is a relevant question. The vast majority of Wikipedia contributors and editors are under the age of 25.
194. 26:01 Many of the administrators, senior editors are in their teens. This has been established by a survey conducted in 2003 and in various recent interviews by Jimmy Wales, the
195. 26:13 co-founder of the enterprise and its and its uh adulter adulterator in chief. The
196. 26:21 truth is that teenagers cannot do the referencing and research that are the prerequisite for serious scholarship
197. 26:29 unless you stretch these words to an absurd limit. Research is not about hoarding facts. It is about identifying
198. 26:36 and applying context and about possessing a synoptic view of ostensibly unrelated data. Teenagers cannot tell
199. 26:45 hype from fact and fed from fiction. Teenagers lack the perspectives that life and learning, structured, frontal, hierarchical learning bring with them.
200. 26:57 They don’t even have life experience. Knowledge is not another democratic institution subject to voting. It is
201. 27:04 hierarchical for good reason. And the hierarchy is built on merit. And the merit is founded on learning. And the learning is built on structure. The structure relies on prior knowledge and it takes many years to get there and
202. 27:22 a teenager can’t do it. Simply can’t do it. It is not surprising that Wikipedia
203. 27:28 emerged in the United States whose so-called culture consists of truncated attention spans, snippets, sound bites, shortcuts, and cliffnotes.
204. 27:39 Wikipedia is a pericious countercultural phenomenon. It does not elevate or celebrate
205. 27:45 knowledge. Wikipedia degrades knowledge by commoditizing it and by removing all
206. 27:51 relevant filters, all credentialed gatekeepers and the barriers to entry
207. 27:58 that have proven so essential hitherto. Ironically, Wikipedia imposes barriers to entry which are procedural in nature and are intended to preserve the power of the cabal or the click that controls Wikipedia. There are no barriers to entry when it
208. 28:15 comes to knowledge and credentials. There are no there’s no gatekeeping.
209. 28:21 Let me give you an example. Recently on a discussion list dedicated to psychology with a largely academic
210. 28:27 membership, I pointed out a glaring rookie error in one of Wikipedia’s
211. 28:34 articles. I also provided the source. I provided
212. 28:41 20 20 books, academic books, and peer-reviewed academic journal articles.
213. 28:49 All of them claiming the exact opposite of the statement in Wikipedia. The responses I received were shilling.
214. 28:57 I have to add that most of the people on the list are Americans. One member told me that he uses
215. 29:03 Wikipedia to get a rough idea about topics that are not worth the time needed to visit the library or do
216. 29:09 research. Whether the rough ideas he’s getting from Wikipedia um were correct or counterfactual seemed not to matter to him. He couldn’t
217. 29:20 care less. Others expressed a mystical belief in the veracity of knowledge, so-called
218. 29:26 knowledge, assembled by the masses of anonymous contributors to Wikipedia. Everyone professed to prefer the content offered by Wikipedia to the information
219. 29:37 afforded afforded by the encyclopedia Britannica which is written 100% by
220. 29:43 experts established in their fields. Yes, you heard me correctly. uh a group of academics, thousands of them, most of them Americans, prefer
221. 29:54 Wikipedia to Britannica. That’s so Wikipedia is an American
222. 30:00 phenomenon. Two members attempted to disprove my assertion regarding the error in
223. 30:06 Wikipedia by pointing to a haphazard selection of links on the internet.
224. 30:13 Not one of them referred to a reputable authority on the subject or to a book. Yet based largely on Wikipedia and a
225. 30:20 sporadic trip in cyerspace, they felt sufficiently confident to challenge my observation which was supported as may I
226. 30:28 remind you virtually by all leading luminaries in the field. Now there are Wikipedias in other languages but they
227. 30:35 are nowhere near the English Wikipedia which is 100% an American fraud.
228. 30:41 These gut reactions by academics mirror Wikipedia’s editorial process. To
229. 30:49 the best of my knowledge, none of my respondents on the forum was qualified to comment on the particular topic. Actually, none of them held a relevant academic degree.
230. 31:01 But in my comment, I strove to stand on the shoulders of giants. I didn’t claim
231. 31:07 to be an authority. I claimed that others are authorities. I spotted an
232. 31:14 error, but my correspondents explicitly and proudly refused to do so as a matter
233. 31:21 of principle. They trusted the wisdom of the masses, wisdom of a crowd.
234. 31:28 This may reflect the difference in academic traditions between the United States and the rest of the world.
235. 31:35 Members of individualistic, self-reliant and narcissistic societies inevitably rebel against authority. They are consumious. They tend to believe in their own omnipotence and omniscience.
236. 31:47 This culminated in the United States with the MAGA movement and the farright
237. 31:54 and conservative movement. Conversely, the denisens of more collectivist and consensus seeking countries and cultures are less sanguin, less grandiose, and more willing to accept teachings excedra.
238. 32:10 I didn’t say that. Theodore Milan said it, a great scholar and an undisputed authority on personality disorders. He suggested that narcissistic personality disorder is a limited American phenomenon. Number four, Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. End of story. Truth in
239. 32:31 advertising is not Wikipedia’s strong suit. It presents itself egregiously as an encyclopedia. Yet at best, it is a community of users who exchange eclectic
240. 32:43 so-called information on a regular and structured basis. Wikipedia is way closer to Reddit or Quora than to the Britannica. I’m sorry to see this deliberate mis misrepresentation snags most occasional visitors who are
241. 32:59 not acquainted with the arcane ways of Wikipedia and trust Wikipedia implicitly and explicitly to deliver facts and
242. 33:06 wellfounded opinions. May I add that most people have never been exposed to a real encyclopedia. Real encyclopedias are extinct by now.
243. 33:17 There is a lot Wikipedia can do to dispel such dangerous misconceptions about itself.
244. 33:23 For example, it could post disclaimers on all its articles and not only on a few selected pages.
245. 33:30 That it chooses to propagate the deception that it keeps telling people that it is
246. 33:36 an encyclopedia renders it the equivalent of an intellectual scam, a
247. 33:42 colossal act of corn artistry. It also pays of course. Wikipedia and
248. 33:48 Wikipdia rely on millions of in donations and their tax exempt in the United States. Quite a business.
249. 33:56 Wikipedia thus retards genuine genuine learning by serving as the path of least
250. 34:03 resistance and as a substitute to the real thing. Edited peer-reviewed works of reference
251. 34:11 are ignored. High school and university students now make Wikipedia and artificial intelligence not only their first but their exclusive research
252. 34:22 destination. It’s far easier than bothering to go to the library or
253. 34:28 trolling through a 700page book. Moreover, Wikipedia’s content is often
254. 34:35 reproduced on thousands of other websites without any of Wikipedia’s
255. 34:41 disclaimers and without attribution or identification of the source. The other
256. 34:47 day, I visited a website profaring a free encyclopedia. Excited, I clicked on it. It was a mirror of Wikipedia but without anything to indicate that it is
257. 34:58 not a true authoritative peer-reviewed encyclopedia. The origin of the articles Wikipedia was
258. 35:05 not indicated clearly. It could have been different.
259. 35:11 Consider for instance the online and free Stanford Encyclopedia of of philosophy or even the internet
260. 35:18 encyclopedia of philosophy. Each entry is written by an expert but is frequently revised based on input from members of the public and other experts.
261. 35:29 The Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy and the internet encyclopedia philosophy combine the best elements of Wikipedia
262. 35:36 feedbackdriven evolution of the articles with none of Wikipedia’s deficiencies.
263. 35:43 But it’s not a commercial enterprise. So who cares? Even the encyclopedia britannonica has
264. 35:50 implemented a crowdsourcing model but it is curated by scholars and there are
265. 35:56 other online projects such as citizenium and scholaredia which are far more reliable than
266. 36:02 Wikipedia and yet they didn’t take off because they don’t have the public public
267. 36:10 relation insolence public relations insolence of Wikipedia and they’re not willing to deceive the Number six, Wikipedia is rife with liel
268. 36:21 and violations of copyright. As recent events clearly demonstrate,
269. 36:27 Wikipedia is a hotbed of slander and liel. It is regularly manipulated by
270. 36:33 interns, political stuffers, public relation consultants, marketing personnel, special interest groups,
271. 36:39 political parties, business firms, brand managers, and countries, others with an axe to grind. Wikipedia serves as a platform for settling personal and political accounts, deflaming, distorting the truth, and rewriting history. Less known is the fact that
272. 36:57 Wikipedia is potentially and arguably the greatest single repository of copyright infringements.
273. 37:04 A study conducted in 2006 put the number of completely plagiarized articles at 1% of the total. Books from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual through David
274. 37:15 Irving’s controversial work are regularly ripped off and sizable
275. 37:21 chunks are posted in various articles with and without attribution that applies to articles online as well.
276. 37:28 They’re copy pasted into the into Wikipedia without permission. Wikipedia resembles P2P networks uh such as the first incarnation of Napster. Wikipedia allows users to
277. 37:40 illegally share pirated content using the application Wiki and the central website Wikipedia. In this sense, I
278. 37:48 can’t truly see a big difference between Wikipedia and Library Genesis or perhaps
279. 37:54 SciHub. In reality, despite it its ostentatious
280. 38:00 and ostensible mediation and dispute arbitration mechanisms, Wikipedia does not provide any effective mechanism to redress wrongs, address problems, and
281. 38:11 remedy liel and copyright infringements. Wikipedia favors administrators and top
282. 38:18 editors, and suppresses dissent. Editing the offending articles is useless as these are often reverted, restored by the offenders themselves. Even when wrongs are writed, the liel
283. 38:30 for example persists in the talk pages. Wikipedia has been legally shielded from
284. 38:37 litigation because hitherto it enjoyed the same status that bulletin board services and other free-for-all communities have. It’s like a social medium. um the same status like Meta or
285. 38:51 or Twitter. In short, there is no editorial oversight
286. 38:58 um exerted, no legal liability uh arises. Wikipedia’s claim is that the articles are not edited, there’s no oversight,
287. 39:10 that it’s a a free-for-all, it’s a forum, and so there’s no legal liability to the host, even in cases of proven
288. 39:17 liel and breaches of copyright. But this claim is false, is a lie. It’s a
289. 39:24 deception. Of course, Wikipedia is edited rigorously, closely, structurally by a tiny group of
290. 39:32 500 utterly identifiable people. They are anonymous online, but law law
291. 39:38 enforcement can easily find their identities. Wikipedia has been treading a thin line
292. 39:44 here as well. Anyone who ever tried to contribute to this so-called encyclopedia discovered soon enough that it is micromanaged by a cabal of of about 500 administrators, not to mention
293. 39:55 Wikipedia’s full-time staff fueled by millions of dollars in public donations. These senior editors regularly interfere in the contents of articles, thousands
294. 40:06 of them. They do so often without any rhyme or reason and on a whim, hence the the
295. 40:14 chaos. But edit they do. They have editorial editorial power and they exercise it. Therefore, Wikipedia is liable and should not be shielded.
296. 40:27 The fact and statements by Wales that to the effect that Wikipedia is actually regularly edited may provoke victims of
297. 40:35 Wikipedia into considering class action lawsuits against Wikipdia, Jimmy Wales personally, and their web hosting company. if not Wikipedia. There are already initiatives including by Larry Sanger to either revoke the tax exemption of Wikipedia or to force
298. 40:52 Wikipedia to become way less less biased and dictatorial in the so-called editing
299. 40:58 process. Wikipedia is an edited publication. Its stuff is even smaller than many
300. 41:05 manystream media. The New York Times is responsible for anything it publishes in its op ed
301. 41:13 section. Radio stations pay fines for airing obscenities in callin shows. Why
302. 41:20 treat the Wiki why treat Wikipedia any differently? Perhaps if it is hit in its wallet, Wikipedia will develop the minimal norms of responsibility and truthfulness that are routinely expected
303. 41:32 of less presumptuous and more inconspicuous undertakings on the internet and in real life.