Wikipedia's Liberal Bias Shows Why Alternatives Are Needed

Posted September 20, 2024

Wikipedia's stated goal is "to present a neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge in a fair and accurate manner with a straightforward, just-the-facts style." This is a noble goal, but in practice, Wikipedia is biased in predictably liberal ways.

The reasons for this bias are many, but the most important is that Wikipedia is written by volunteers, and the volunteers who write Wikipedia articles are overwhelmingly progressive in their political views. This is not surprising, as the tech industry is overwhelmingly progressive, and Wikipedia is a product of the tech industry.

The result is that Wikipedia articles on political and historical topics are often biased, unreliable, or flat out untrue. This is a problem, because Wikipedia is the first place many people go to learn about a topic, and if the information they find there is biased, it means the population is being biased to think a certain way by reading Wikipedia.

For example, Wikipedia's article on Zionism has been called "wildly inaccurate" and "downright anti-Semitic" because it propagates falsities and conspiracies about Ashkenazi Jews and the history of Israel and Zionism in general. Zionism, the belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state, is a mainstream political belief held by millions of people around the world, Jews and non-Jews alike, and it is not anti-Semitic to support it. Yet Wikipedia's article on Zionism is written in a negative way, making it seem like Zionism is a fringe belief held only by extremists.

Even the cofounders of Wikipedia admit its liberal slant. Larry Sanger, a cofounder of Wikipedia, is critical of the site's bias. One criticism he makes is that their article on Joe Biden does not do a good job addressing "the concerns that Republicans have had about him." If you want to read more about his criticism, Wikipedia even has an article on ideological bias on Wikipedia! Jimmy Wales, another cofounder of Wikipedia, has also acknowledged that the "Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average."

It's OK for there to be left-wing websites on the internet, but there should be alternatives to them as well. Just as there's both left-wing news (like the New York Times) and right-wing news (like Fox News), there should be tech institutions that provide a right-wing alternative to major tech properties like Wikipedia and Google.

At Rightsta, we believe that there should be a right-wing encyclopedia that people can use to get mainstream knowledge without liberal spin. That's why we're building our new encyclopedia: Wiki Rightsta.