The wild, wild, west of wacky Wikipedia social justice warriors
Somewhat over ten years ago I created a website for Dr. John Tanton, the founder of the modern immigration reform / immigration sanity movement. From the website:
John H. Tanton, M.D. is a retired ophthalmologist and eye surgeon in Petoskey, Michigan, having practiced medicine from 1964 to 1998.
John Tanton is a strong conservationist and leading advocate for the environment. In 1975, his essay "Human Migration" won the Mitchell Prize contest and was published as the cover article of The Ecologist.
He founded the Petoskey regional Audubon Society and has been active in a large number of environmental organizations. Dr. Tanton's recognition that continued human population growth is a significant contributor to environmental problems lead to his involvement with the Sierra Club Population Committee and to becoming President and board member of Zero Population Growth.
John Tanton is pro immigrant and pro legal immigration - at environmentally sustainable immigration numbers.
As immigration became the driving force behind unending U.S. population growth, John Tanton founded FAIR - the Federation for American Immigration Reform. He is publisher and former editor of The Social Contract. John Tanton is pro immigrant and pro legal immigration, but at reduced, sustainable numbers.... Read more about what others say about John Tanton.
I also created a Wikipedia entry for Dr. John Tanton. It included substantiated factual information which was included on the Tanton website.
Unbelievably, the entry was vandalized by social justice warriors who added unsubstiated, self-referential allegations of racism. You see, anyone can edit Wikipedia entries - even those without principle. I corrected the entry and the radicals once again defiled the entry. I escalated to so-called Wikipedia super-editors who supposedly possessed common sense - with no results. This cat and mouse game continued for years.
The following article provides a bit of insight as to the true nature the loony leftist haters who spend their time vandalizing Wikipedia:
Lunatics Take Over Asylum: Oliver D. Smith, RationalWiki, And The Wikipedeans, by Lance Welton, VDare, April 6, 2019:
... It should be no surprise that the controllers of Wikipedia, and even more so its woke competitor Rational Wiki, should object to such outdated and likely racist concepts as law and private property: to a fatal extent, they are crazed Social Justice Warriors—and a growing threat to political and scientific discourse.
In the ongoing war between reasonable people and Leftism, there is a vital battle being waged on Wikipedia, which, like it or not, is a latter-day oracle of information. Control the fourth-most popular website in the Western world (according to Wikipedia itself) and you, at least partly, control the Western mind. For this reason, online skirmishes over Wikipedia’s non-PC topics are particularly vicious, and the murky manipulators prepared to devote their time to the struggle take fanaticism, and even insanity, to levels that defy belief.
Of course, most of us like to think that we’re above relying on something as obviously untrustworthy as an anonymously-written encyclopedia dependent on non-expert contributors. But scientists really do read Wikipedia entries and reuse the citations in their peer-reviewed articles. [Science is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence From a Randomized Control Trial, by Neil Thompson & Douglas Hanley, MIT Sloan Research Paper, 2017] Which means that the SJWs who control Wikipedia actually help to shape science itself....
Wikipedia both reflects and drives a society that seems to be decreasingly interested in empirical truth. As Mark Hill noted in Cracked, Wikipedia also attracts a very specific kind of person. In order to get anywhere in the Wikipedia Wars, you have to be highly computer-literate. The editor must be prepared to spend inordinate amounts of time fighting with anonymous enemies, who will alter his changes, and with “vandals,” who will play around with entries they dislike to make them seem ridiculous....
Rational Wiki is a nakedly Cultural Marxist project, its entries openly mocking their subjects, not even pretending to be neutral....
But because of search engine optimization tricks Rational Wiki entries appear very high on Google’s rankings. If a “controversial” scientist lacks a Wikipedia entry, then his Rational Wiki combination of lampoon and defamation will rank first when his name is Googled; potentially damaging his reputation....
So, who are these Nerdish Leftists who dedicate their spare time to anonymously fighting in our increasingly violent Culture War?...
Research on Wikipedeans has found they are substantially motivated by “ideology,” specifically of an egalitarian kind [What Motivates Wikipedeans? by Oded Nov, Communications of the ACM, 2007]. They are lower than are non-Wikipedeans in the personality traits of Openness (which fits, because Openness predicts being ‘arty’ rather than a Nerd) but also in Agreeableness (altruism) and Conscientiousness (impulse control) [Personality characteristics of Wikipedia members, by Y. Amichai-Hamburger et al., Cyberpsychological Behavior, 2008].
When these psychopathic personality traits are put together with a childlike rejection of authority and of traditional purity rules based around sex [Jonathan Haidt: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives, by Jonathan Haidt, TED, 2008], then you have the typical Wikipedia writer.
In other words, the store of human knowledge is now being—at least to some extent—censored, manipulated, and even directed by anonymous, mentally unstable malcontents, quite a few of them literally living in their moms’ basements....
Such people can spend all of their spare time focused on their own little contribution to destroying Western civilization, facing no consequences whatsoever....
Wikipedia Co-Founder: “Wikipedia Is… Broken,” Controlled By Special Interests & Bad Actors, Geller Report, May 28, 2019:
I’ve done quite a bit of reporting about how Wikipedia is definitely not “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” It’s become a vehicle for special interests to control information. Agenda editors are able to prevent or revert edits and sourcing on selected issues and people in order to control the narrative....