Steven Crowder’s latest video takes a deep dive into the alleged left-wing bias of Wikipedia, the world’s most popular crowdsourced encyclopedia. While Wikipedia has an article on virtually everything under the sun, Crowder — like many other conservatives — has long suspected that it shields readers from the true set of facts, hiding ones that run contrary to progressive narratives on key social issues.
Rather than speculate, Crowder devised a simple hypothesis and test, aiming to see which edits Wikipedia allows on certain issues and which ones they reject. Crowder took the time to edit articles with factual statements and unbiased sources. He then waited for Wikipedia’s response, even tallying up whether “truth” or Wikipedia won out the day. His latest episode of “Louder with Crowder” claims to “prove” that Wikipedia is biased. The results seem to show that the truth does not always win out on Wikipedia.
Crowder lumped Wikipedia in with “Big Tech,” alleging, “As it turns out — and this should come as no surprise to anyone who knows even a little bit about how Big Tech operates — Wikipedia is full of bias.”
“Time after time, article after article, we decided to go in and add, edit, or clarify information with our own account,” he added. “We didn’t go in and say anything outlandish (as I once decided to do while bored out of my mind). Our team cited sources, provided verifiable information, or simply attempted to remove overtly biased opinions (in some cases, purely personal opinions). Wikipedia did not approve.”
Crowder’s team said they made their edits based on what they thought would comply with Wikipedia’s “neutrality test,” adding that the edits avoided opinion, unreliable sources, or sketchy data. Still, Wikipedia shot down their edits each time.
On entries regarding child transgender hormone therapy, the Texas heartbeat abortion law, and even the data regarding anti-Asian history — Wikipedia editors appear to have denied all of Crowder’s edits — allowing only one side of the argument to come into fruition.
“If there’s are things left-wing tech giants don’t approve of they’re facts, objective truth, and anything that doesn’t purposefully toe the party line,” Crowder claimed. “The ‘reasoning’ provided for negating our edits was ignorant, convoluted, and sometimes completely non-existent! The left need not have good reasons to silence opposing views, though. And if they have reasons at all, they need not explain themselves to you.”
For example, Crowder was left wondering why Thomas Sowell — a world-renowned economist — was not a reliable source under Wikipedia’s eyes.
In one entry about minimum wage, Crowder noted that the article was “extremely biased” in favor of the liberal persuasion of Paul Krugman. The New York Times economist was listed as an expert, something that Crowder said was not a problem in and of itself. The problem, according to Crowder, was that the column relied solely on Krugman’s point of view to craft the “truth” about minimum wage, which presented the view from only one side of the aisle:
The Wikipedia page obviously favors increasing the minimum wage. Before our edit, this is what it said, ‘According to economist Paul Krugman’ — I just threw up in my mouth a little — ‘the great preponderance of evidence indicates that there is no negative impact to employment from moderate increases on mimunum wage.’
Now here’s the thing, Paul Krugman writes. He’s an economist. I don’t know much he’s helped the economy or run a business but…there’s no right-leaning source offering a counter-balancing opinion. If this is going to be the number one research portal in the world, 18 billion page views per month, all we need to see is a counterbalance, which they claim in their own neutrality guidelines, right it’s supposed to be neutral?
So, in order to make it neutral and balanced, Crowder and his colleague added a quote from Hoover Institute fellow and conservative Sowell. That quote said:
“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”
“It would be hard to dispute the idea that there’s a more qualified economist in the world today than Thomas Sowell. He’s certainly up there, all of his peers respect him and he’s done a lot of work on the minimum wage issue,” Crowder noted.
Yet, despite his qualifications, the Sowell quote was removed within a day because, according to Wikipedia’s editors, “the source was unreliable.”
Crowder’s video appears to confirm the co-founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger’s belief that Wikipedia was pushing “propaganda” because it only was allowing one version of the facts, thereby benefiting the wealthy and powerful.
The entire video can be seen here and is well worth the watch:
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.