Information gleaned from Wikipedia should always be taken with a grain of salt.  As much as open-sourcing a knowledge base has certainly given the site a well-deserved reputation for being a first-stop in doing research, this situation points out (again) that bias can creep in, even with multiple hands contributing.

Lawrence Solomon at the National Post writes about a topic that WUWT readers have known about for a long time: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.

We’ve known for some time that Wikipedia can’t be trusted to provide unbiased climate information. Solomon starts off by talking about Climategate emails.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

He then focuses on RealClimate.org co-founder William Connolley, who has “touched” 5,428 Wikipedia articles with his unique brand of RC centric editing….

It just seems that almost all the time, especially for highly-political issues, the censorship winds up leaning to the left.  This goes against what the Left says they stand up for; truth, free-speech, the marketplace of ideas, blah blah blah.  It’s just that when many of them are given power over ideas they do precisely what they accuse of Right of doing; censoring, silencing dissent, and all that.  Textbook projection.

But at least the "many eyes" principle, of having many editors attempt to ensure fairness and full disclosure, is working.  Now, at least.  It’s too bad that it took a major Canadian newspaper to finally get some traction in this particular case, and that the editors at Wikipedia were blind to it, but at least we might get some pullback from the bias.  Now, at least.

Related posts:

  1. Climate Research Unit Hacked – Sensitive Documents Dumped to Internet
  2. Climate Change’s Moral Authority
  3. Wikipedia Is Back
  4. Weather v Climate
  5. Climate Doing Its Own Changing

Filed under: Doug • Environment • Global Warming • Politics

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