Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Wikipedia, Paid Contributors and Propaganda

by Miles Mathis
http://milesmathis.com/wiki2.pdf

First published February 28, 2014

I first noticed today a call for comments at Wikipedia concerning disclosure of paid editing. I won’t bother commenting at Wikipedia on this, since I know the whole thing is a diversion, but I will comment on it here. I say I know the whole thing is a diversion because I know they aren’t interested in my opinion, or yours, either. They want you to think they are interested in your comments, since that appears to give you some input and some power, but that power is illusory.

If you want to know how interested they really are in your opinion, try posting that opinion on any discussion page on the site. Go to some subject you know something about, then go to the discussion page behind that page, and see how much respect you get. As an unpaid reader, you will get no respect unless you agree with everything the paid editors have posted. If you question any of it, you will get piled on by a mob of paid editors, called names, threatened, and probably banned. Your ISP will be entered into their database with a red flag on it, and it is likely that database is linked to government and NSA databases. That demerit will be posted on your permanent record, and will follow you everywhere you go on the internet (and off).

This call for comments is just a smokescreen: a pretend response to the current NSA scandal and linking scandals. Because everyone’s trust in everything has taken a big hit recently, Wikipedia is trying to unruffle your feathers a bit by making you think they are going to require new levels of disclosure in the future. It looks like they are going to “require” that paid editors disclose who they are working for, to prevent any conflict of interest. But if you believe that requirement will be worth anything, you are wrong.

To make this as short as possible, I beg you to notice that Wikipedia says that failure to disclose may be an instance of fraud, and might be investigated by the FCC. Yes, it might be investigated by the FCC if you are a government critic or private entity. But if you are, say, an employee of the government, writing for the NSA or the CIA, do you think the FCC is going to investigate? Not a chance. Even if the FCC investigated one of these instances of fraud by accident, as soon as the letters CIA popped up, the FCC would be out. The CIA outranks the FCC, and no one at the CIA fears investigation by the FCC. So, as I said, this is all a diversion. Wikipedia is pretending to be considering putting up some little regulatory firewall, when in fact that firewall will be nothing but thinnest paper.

If you think about it for about half a second, you will realize that the greatest danger of Wikipedia is that it is written by government entities, including CIA, FBI, NSA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and so on. Those are the paid editors you should be on the alert for. The second level of propaganda comes from those who are influenced by those organizations, including other government

agencies, university academics, NGO’s, and the ubiquitous Foundation flunkies. All of them are immune from the FCC and are shielded from other regulation. The odds of their non-disclosure being caught and prosecuted is zero. The odds of being caught and hit with a civil lawsuit is tiny, and the odds that any court would find against the government is even lower. So none of this should assuage your fears in the least. It should only make you twice as vigilant.

I have to think that Wikipedia is actually shooting itself in the foot here, since a majority of people are probably so naïve they hadn’t even realized Wikipedia had paid editors. I suspect a majority of people had thought Wikipedia was really written and edited by readers, since that is the line we were sold in the beginning. I suspect a majority of people assumed that if semi-permanent editors and sweepers were needed, they were working as volunteers, since I am pretty sure I have seen Wiki talking about all its volunteers many times. It seems like every time they have a fund drive, they go on and on about all their volunteers, to make you think that in donating, you are just paying for bandwidth or toilet paper in the executive washroom or something.

This admission of paid editors should lead readers to the realization that Wikipedia is not an open project. If these editors are being paid, who is paying them and on what basis are they being hired? Shouldn’t that basis of choice also be divulged?

You see, a whole step in the process is being completely buried here, I have to assume on purpose. For instance, say a writer for the Pentagon discloses that he is being paid by the Pentagon. That still doesn’t tell us why Wikipedia is printing what he wrote instead of what someone else wrote. Say the subject is apple orchards, and you dodge behind the page to find it was written by someone at the Pentagon. Well, that disclosure isn’t the whole story, is it? You still might wonder why Wikipedia chose to publish his version of the apple orchard rather than the version of some apple farmer, say. There would seem to be another level of payments involved. The Pentagon pays the author, but who pays Wikipedia for the preference? The Pentagon again, right? Is Wikipedia suggesting that level of payment should be disclosed as well? No.

Wikipedia is just one more con-job, and everyone with any sense should know that. I go to Wikipedia a lot, but I go there to find out what the mainstream thinks it knows, and what the mainstream wishes me to know. In that way, it is indeed quite useful. It could just admit that is what it is, which would be so refreshing. Most people really do wish to believe what the mainstream thinks it knows, so Wikipedia could easily admit that. And a large majority also wish to believe what the mainstream wishes them to believe, although they wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. So the government has little to lose by being honest. They actually have more to lose by the constant con-job, because it is people discovering the con that is most dangerous to the government. It is only when people catch the government in a series of major lies that they stop wishing to believe what the mainstream wishes them to believe. If the lies are big enough, the people quit wishing to believe what the mainstream think it knows. That is what is happening now.

It would be so much better for everyone if Wikipedia just admitted the truth: it was created by the government and is written in full by government operatives of one sort or another. It is a combination of what the mainstream thinks it knows and what the mainstream wants you to believe. Like everything else you will come across in this world, it is a combination of half-truths and lies. Since human beings don’t know the whole truth about anything, the idea of an encyclopedia being a collection of knowledge is a fraud from the first word. An encyclopedia is only a collection of the mistakes we have made thus far as a species, and perhaps a suggestion of how to correct them, in part. Any suggestion that an encyclopedia is firmer than that, or that it is based on some kind of consensus,

is propaganda. Nothing in this world was ever based on consensus, and probably never will be. The sooner you understand that, the better. If you fancy yourself a scientist, you should have no interest in consensus anyway. Your only interest should be in sorting through the current list of half-truths and lies, to build your own temporary springboard into the immediate future.

No comments:

Post a Comment