16 comments

  • brap 1 hour ago
    Wikipedia has long been hijacked to serve agendas. The “truth” is whatever the highest bidder wants it to be.

    Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...

    News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.

    • dataviz1000 1 hour ago
      When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.

      So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.

      I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.

      “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.

      • somenameforme 12 minutes ago
        Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.

        Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.

        Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.

        • dataviz1000 4 minutes ago
          Saudis controlled media by assassinating of Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, that is proof the Saudis kill to control media.
      • pavlov 34 minutes ago
        They hate Muslims, but they love money and theocracy more, and Saudis are top of the world in both.
      • gsky 54 minutes ago
        No wonder Terrorism is supported by oil money.
      • hgomersall 43 minutes ago
        What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?

        Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.

    • falcor84 1 hour ago
      There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.

      We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.

      • b65e8bee43c2ed0 34 minutes ago
        it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
        • philistine 22 minutes ago
          > mentally ill

          Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.

      • plastic-enjoyer 32 minutes ago
        > We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.

        Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.

        Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.

        • flir 26 minutes ago
          Every discussion about wikipedia, everywhere, now attracts comments from accounts with a poor history claiming it's biased. I assume bad faith.
          • philistine 18 minutes ago
            It is a great example of the shaping of opinions the OP claims Wikipedia suffers from. It is a textbook example of the way the detractors of Wikipedia comport themselves.

            Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.

          • brap 16 minutes ago
            Do I have poor history?
      • komali2 42 minutes ago
        If you can download the Talk pages and edit history, you probably have enough information to, on average, mostly be dealing with objective fact.
      • slfreference 42 minutes ago
        But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"

        German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM

      • pydry 28 minutes ago
        I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.

        Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.

        It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

        Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.

        Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.

    • agumonkey 1 hour ago
      it's one crucial topic imo

      internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia

      where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?

      my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with

      • graemep 51 minutes ago
        Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
      • whynotmaybe 29 minutes ago
        Not so long ago, the "truth" was mainly given by the priest or the mayor.
        • ajsnigrutin 2 minutes ago
          And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).
      • pydry 21 minutes ago
        We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.

        It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.

        For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.

        I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.

    • mch82 7 minutes ago
      I’m continually impressed by Wikipedia’s quality controls. In my experience people underestimate them.
    • komali2 44 minutes ago
      > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.

      What does this mean?

      • curtisblaine 17 minutes ago
        Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.
    • alex1138 1 hour ago
      You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
      • jahnu 1 hour ago
        Can you provide an example?
        • whynotmaybe 42 minutes ago
          Dr Raoult was very vocal in France about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult

          It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.

          > As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.

        • sigmoid10 1 hour ago
          They probably mean people like Robert Malone [1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone

        • brigandish 1 hour ago
          You can simply do a Wikipedia search for "misinformation doctor" and get plenty of results, even with its search system, let alone if you use a search engine to power the search.

          I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?

          • qudade 57 minutes ago
            If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected. Unless you are claiming that all hits for "misinformation doctor" are incorrect, a few examples to verify and correct would be helpful.
            • hagbard_c 45 minutes ago
              Some 'misinformation' is hard to correct because the corrections are reversed by those who are intent on spreading the 'misinformation'. This is especially prevalent around contentious and/or politically sensitive subjects like the mentioned SARS2-related cases. This is what makes it hard to trust articles on such subjects on Wikipedia.
              • komali2 40 minutes ago
                If this is quite widespread, it should be fairly straightforward to point to an example of a page that's being defaced with misinformation, which would include an edit history and perhaps a Talk page documenting whatever sides to the debate there is that's preventing consensus.

                I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.

              • breppp 35 minutes ago
                worse yet, you might read some topics and won't expect them to be poisoned with misinformation. Like the Holocaust history in Poland

                https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_news_articles/151... https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/how-wikipedia-covers-th...

  • akst 1 hour ago
    I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T

    I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.

    Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.

    It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso

    • nialv7 1 minute ago
      > jj mccullough‘s opinions

      holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...

      comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.

    • graemep 39 minutes ago
      Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.

      It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.

      The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).

  • edgineer 2 hours ago
    >just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works

    Not so sure about this; page titles change and redirects get removed. I'm thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nex_Benedict where initial news articles and her obituary used her birth name, Dagny Benedict, but soon this name was scrubbed from the wikipedia page, as well as its talk page and redirects, on the policy of deadnames.

    • usui 1 hour ago
      Wow, I would expect there would at least be a single mention of "born Dagny Benedict" somewhere at the beginning of the background section as is typical in other pages. If this is intentional, to omit this entirely seems like it unnecessarily politicizes the issue rather than documenting the history of a person.
      • philistine 11 minutes ago
        You’re hitting the wrong aspect of the problem. You should use someone’s old name when it’s absolutely necessary, not as a matter of course. People change their name for a reason after all, and if their latest one suffices, let it be.

        In the case of this person, they were not notable under their birth name. Unfortunately, their transgender status is the whole reason they’re notable, and the article clearly states that they are. I don’t need that person’s old name to understand the situation.

      • dungg 41 minutes ago
        the current one is better, sounds like eggs benedict
      • beardyw 1 hour ago
        It's Wikipedia. Change it. There is no "they", you can be an editor.
        • usui 1 hour ago
          This is a naive take that belies the reality of pages with a lot of traffic, and is the reason why there can be controversial discussions in the talk pages. I know nothing about the history of this page, which is why I said "if it's intentional" regarding any deliberate scrubbing.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

          EDIT: On further inspecting the page history, this definitely looks intentional, or at least is a controversial page.

        • edgineer 27 minutes ago
          The page is protected, the general public can't edit it.

          There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].

          From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.

          [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...

          • curtisblaine 9 minutes ago
            > From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.

            If this doesn't sound 1984-esque I don't know what does.

      • littlestymaar 1 hour ago
        There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.

        The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.

        As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.

        • mrighele 56 minutes ago
          > There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.

          Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.

          But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens

          [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali

          • philistine 7 minutes ago
            Notability. Those two celebrities were known for a very long time under their old name. To prevent confusion, their old name is shown.

            The victim of a crime was not notable before their name change.

          • komali2 36 minutes ago
            The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?
        • lukan 1 hour ago
          "if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again"

          Writing someone was called XYZ, is not calling the person by that name again. It is just stating a historic fact.

          • philistine 6 minutes ago
            Not all historic facts are relevant. Using someone’s old name when relevance can be achieved by stating the person was transgender is preferable.
        • graemep 1 hour ago
          Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia. It makes it harder to find other sources of information on someone. it makes it harder to make connections between things you know.

          Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.

          Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?

        • usui 1 hour ago
          > The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.

          Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement

        • dungg 37 minutes ago
          these snowflakes who think the world revolves around them always ruin everything

          always offended by something

        • kmaitreys 49 minutes ago
          I don't think what should be neutral account of factual events should take into account if it would be rude to an individual.
    • SirHumphrey 1 hour ago
      Admittedly I do not know how much of a sensitive issue this is, but I find it surprising that the name given at birth is not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page, even though in other cases of name change usually "Name (born Old Name)" is written.
  • CrzyLngPwd 1 hour ago
    Oh goodness, if wiki is news, then it's the most biased and easily editable news outside of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Truth.
    • whynotmaybe 36 minutes ago
      > the most biased

      Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?

    • decimalenough 56 minutes ago
      Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a lot of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
  • endoblast 48 minutes ago
    It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.

    Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.

    Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.

  • nialv7 16 minutes ago
    Although, due to Wikipedia's own policy, that it must cite other reliable sources, it can never be a source of first-hand news.
  • roomey 12 minutes ago
    Is there an RSS version of the weekly newsletter about Wikipedia articles?
  • Aardwolf 1 hour ago
    When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
  • horsh1 1 hour ago
    Comparing the same article in different languages sometimes gets very educational.
  • gsky 51 minutes ago
    I prefer subject experts over Wikipedia.
  • jaccola 1 hour ago
    In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.

    It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.

    Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).

    It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.

    ^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".

    • graemep 54 minutes ago
      I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.

      As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.

      Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.

      I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.

    • have_faith 58 minutes ago
      No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
    • gsky 49 minutes ago
      BBC has very little credibility in the developing world
  • beardyw 1 hour ago
    It seems a shame Weeklypedia doesn't have an RSS feed.
  • efilife 1 hour ago
    Keep in mind that Wikipedia itself tells you that "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...

    While having an "In the news" section on the front page

    • LudwigNagasena 1 hour ago
      It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
    • input_sh 1 hour ago
      Those two statements don't contradict each other.
    • hahahahhaah 1 hour ago
      Which is fine and not contradictory. It is not a newspaper (like HN) but it may overlap with some mainstream news (also like HN).
  • 4rtem 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • larodi 2 hours ago
    after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
    • RestartKernel 1 hour ago
      Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
    • armchairhacker 1 hour ago
      Context: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...

      tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.

      Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.

    • giuliomagnifico 2 hours ago
      You’re saying Wikipedia was created 25 years ago to sell its content to train LLMs that didn’t even exist?! I doubt it…
      • littlestymaar 1 hour ago
        “Jimmy Wales is even more of a visionary than we thought”