Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained

In the media

Extraordinary eruption of "EVIL" explained

This last month has seen negative media stories about Wikipedia related to the US Congressional investigation of Wikipedia, Elon Musk, Israel-Palestine, but mostly to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and its aftermath.

Degrees of bad

From bad to worse

May we (not) live in 'interesting' times: AI cleanup offered ... on aisle 420? Elon Musk mused about creating "synthetic corrections" - that is having his AI program Grok create stories of its own for xAI to be training data for its next version - and then inventing "Grokipedia or whatever. It'd be interesting" in The Economic Times
Deleting Erika Kirk?: Fox News shows that it can write a detailed factual story about Wikipedia. But why all this fuss about a single AfD for an article that had just been created? At least three other news outlets had similar articles, Daily Express - US follows Fox closely, word-for-word in several sections. Newsmax at least added a bit of information about the widow. The Tab in Wikipedia is planning to take down Erika Kirk’s page – and the reason why is shockingly brutal does not even attempt to justify its clickbait headline.
Right now: Wisconsin Right Now reports that Anthony Stella, a Wisconsin county judge is defending himself from accusations of calling Charlie Kirk a "white supremacist" and "liar." Stella said Wikipedia was his starting point in gathering facts about Kirk, which WRN pounced on. All the facts shown in a Wikipedia screen shot taken by WRN are well documented.
"Wikipedia accused of censoring page on murder of Ukrainian refugee...": The New York Post [1] showed video of the killing of Iryna Zarutska and quoted President Donald Trump about the suspect saying "So they’re evil people. We have to be able to handle that. If we don’t handle that, we don’t have a country." The Post's main point was that liberal Wikipedians were trying to abuse their positions by deleting the article about the killing. A similar story in The Free Press, by Ashley Rindsberg, has the headline "Wikipedia Wants to Erase Her Story". Fox News cited the Free Press story. "Wikipedia editors attempted to suppress information about the murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, by deleting the entire article and removing the name of the alleged attacker." Not to worry, the community neither suppressed nor erased the article. The deletion debate ended up "keep" with a mention of WP:SNOW in the closing comments.
EVIL and Slanderous: Wikipedia Is EVIL and Slanderous in Unleash Prosperity – from an organization co-founded by Larry Kudlow. They don't quote Wikipedia but give 14 points as examples of what "Wiki writes about Charlie, as regurgitated by AI". These points do appear in the Wikipedia article and are well documented. – B, S

Worse than worse

Shameless smear: Fox News published Ashley Rindsberg's opinion piece Leftist Wikipedia editors twist facts in shameless move to smear Charlie Kirk. Rindsberg objects to the first sentence of the Charlie Kirk article. "The attack on Kirk begins in the very first sentence of the Wikipedia article, which identifies him as 'right-wing'." Of course Kirk was right-wing, but Rindsberg thinks that democratic politicians (e.g. David Plouffe and Al Sharpton) should be identified as left-wing in the article introductions about them. He quotes the Wikipedia article, that Kirk was known for "opposition to gun control, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; his criticism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr.; and his promotion of Christian nationalism, COVID-19 misinformation, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and false claims of electoral fraud in 2020," without disputing these facts, just writing that this is "a narrative designed to discredit" Kirk. Rindsberg complains that Google's knowledge panel has a similar take to Wikipedia. That's a fact, they do, but Rindsberg should let Google know about his complaint. Wiki editors do not decide what Google publishes. Do these facts amount to Wikipedia shamelessly twisting the facts to smear Kirk? – S

Another point of view

All Things Considered, it's bunk: "Recent attacks on Wikipedia may have more to do with politics than accuracy" says NPR's All Things Considered. Juana Summers interviews Josh Dzieza, of The Verge, who "argues that Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of objective, accurate information to be found on the internet."
"[T]he endgame for Wikipedia’s bad-faith attackers is post-truth": So says Stephen Harrison at Slate investigating "Why Right-Wing Outlets Attacked Wikipedia After Charlie Kirk's Shooting". The attacks included "Utah Sen. Mike Lee (who posted on X) that 'when it comes to Charlie Kirk, they’ve gone out of their way to put the wicked in Wikipedia'," and the Rindsberg opinion piece on Fox News's website.
Here they come: The right wing is coming for Wikipedia Stephen Harrison and Molly White are interviewed by Meghna Chakrabarti for American Public Media's On Point, dealing with criticism from the US Congress, Ashley Rindsberg, and the following quote about the Erika Kirk AfD discussion from Jesse ON FIRE. "You are reprehensible, disgusting, evil people who are trying to cancel her and get rid of her because you are leftist."
Solution offered: "I Founded Wikipedia. Here’s How to Fix It." by Larry Sanger (The Free Press) - see also News and notes ("Larry Sanger is 'baaaaack!' with 'Nine Theses on Wikipedia'")

One billion US dollars per year

Robin Berjon in Tech Policy Press tells us How Wikipedia Can Save the Internet With Advertising.

Berjon believes that the entire internet is in trouble, that the current commercialized model of the internet puts the power and money, as well as private personal data into the hands of a "broligarchy" and the advertisers they serve. Authoritarian governments have power as well. But none of these players have an incentive to represent the public interest and the information that the public consumes is distorted.

He starts with the premise that

"There is ample evidence around the world that media organizations, when they choose to, have been able to develop imperfect, occasionally failing, but nevertheless viable institutional arrangements that have shielded newsrooms from advertising money across more decades than we've had digital computers."

It's not just Wikipedia he wants to save, but local, national, and international newspapers, and digital media. The whole internet.

Berjon calculates that advertising on Wikipedia could bring in one billion US dollars per year in revenue. What could we do with a billion dollars each year? This reporter first would stash some in the Wikimedia Endowment and then get a larger and more powerful legal team to protect us from autocratic governments in almost any crisis. Then better software and faster servers. But other Wikipedians will have different priorities. The possibilities are nearly endless. Please share your priorities for a billion dollars per year in the comments section below.

But this is where many of us will get confused by Berjon's argument, or simply disagree with his priorities. Some Wikipedians won't trust the WMF with more money, some won't want the WMF to, even indirectly, subsidize other media outlets, or to get more involved with politics.

Berjon's vision does not offer a detailed roadmap to where he wants us to go. There are implicit subsidies to digital media and not-for-profit organizations, including a "Public Interest Internet Fund". Mostly though, he just wants us to show a significant part of the internet how to use advertising as a non-damaging source of funds:

"The Wikipedia community is in a position to create substantive power for the public interest internet at a time when it is being pushed to the edge of extinction. We will not survive without the funds to take a stand. We will not survive without a principled advertising infrastructure that can sustain usable, viable public interest digital services. Perhaps, if we can stop retreating to self-defeating principles with no grounding in empirical reality, we can try something different: We can choose to win."

– S

In brief

Perhaps Wikipedia's evil twin has a goatee? But unlike Vulcans, it is not "incapable of lying".

Altering the economic bargain: The Economist in "AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?" (limited free access available) argues that fundamental changes in the economics of media on the internet are underway. Readers will often stop searching at Google's AI output, rather than going on to Wikipedia or other media.
WMF won't challenge UK ruling: UK tech news site Silicon reports the Wikimedia Foundation "will not appeal a dismissal last month of its legal challenge to the UK's Online Safety Act, a set of rules for online services that it argued could threaten its ability to continue operating [Wikipedia]." (See also last issue's "News and notes": "Wikimedia Foundation court challenge to UK Online Safety Act rules dismissed")
Semi-protected rapture The rapture again didn't happen, this time on September 23. But D. F. Lovett in his Edit History blog on Medium happened to cover what did happen to the Wikipedia article: it got semi-protected. See previous Signpost coverage.
Evil twin will get new "facts" on demand: XDA tells about a sort of evil twin of Wikipedia, "A self-hosted Wikipedia that is wrong about everything", "vibe coded experiment in hallucination" called Endless Wiki [2]. The software is called an "LLM of lies [that] will confidently write wiki pages almost faster than I can type in new prompts". The project's GitHub page promises "if you don't like the facts you've been stuck with you can always refresh to get new ones".
Rotten luck: Boing Boing covered a 2024 Pew Research study that found 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their "References" section that points to a page that no longer exists. It's part of a larger phenomenon of link rot on the World Wide Web — over a third of web pages from 2013 are no longer accessible. [3]
AI slop begets language extinction: MIT Technology Review shows how training AI on Wikipedia-hosted slop translations in human languages at risk of extinction could create a doom loop and their even more rapid loss, according to researchers.
A messy, multilingual reality: In Wikipedia: Editing the narrative The Linguist follows the history of the airplane in English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias. It finds that there are "many origin stories", including two inventors not named Wright credited for the invention in the French and Portuguese versions. Different languages, culture, sources, and maybe even governments might explain the differences in the articles.
Banned from Bowery: "Inside NYC's Wikipedia community drama" Gothamist
We are not amused, but are we reliable?: New York Post editorial board expresses upset about being included in a list of unreliable media, while Mother Jones is "graded incorruptible".

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2 October 2025 (all comments)

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I'd personally spend for a bigger and better legal team, better software and servers, and maybe pay the administrators who have to deal with idiotic behavior on the daily. But definitely put money into the endowment, and make it so we don't have to fundraise TheClocksAlwaysTurn (The Clockworks) (contribs) 13:52, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I generally agree (per above). It's a place to start. But the idea that we could get an endowment big enuf to sustain us in perpetuity without more fun̈draining is unrealistic. If we wanted 200 million per year forever at a real interest rate of 5 percent we would need an endowment of 4 billion Usd. 4 billion times .05 = 200 million. Then there are folks who want to do new things with the money e.g. lots of videos, oral histories, training, new types of media, There might never be enuf money to cover what everybody wants to do with 4 billion.AltSmallbones (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 16:01, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The New York Post complaining about being considered generally unreliable as they innacurately describe Mother Jones as being "graded incorruptible", when it in fact, graded as "generally reliable" with a note that "almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source" is golden. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:18, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Even worse than even worse? Wikipedia’s censorship is a threat to civilization itself. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:12, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Boy, that escalated quickly. That really got out of hand. —Ganesha811 (talk) 21:34, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In order to combat the market place mistrust of the reliability of Wikipedia articles, effort should be made to increase the awareness of article talk pages. Every article has one and in the case of "contentious topics" the talk pages display the ebb and flow of article construction via editorial communication. The interested public sees the momentary snapshot. WE all know how quickly the picture will change. Buster Seven Talk (UTC) 19:34, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I do think it would be good if the general public had more of an idea of how we actually worked. It'd give less power to the fearmongering. When you don't know what you don't know, it's easy for conspiracies and chaos to fill in the gaps. I do think the pseudo-anonymous nature of a lot of our editors makes it a bit harder for people to humanize the person on the other side of a screen as well. I've seen many people see templates and assume the editor giving them is a bot. I'm pretty sure I once had someone ask me if I was a human as a mentorship question, too. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:36, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While I find Ashley Rindsberg's criticisms to be largely attacks on the encyclopedia as a whole, they do contain substantial questions about our processes and content and he is at least knowledgable about how Wikipedia and its policies operate unlike some of the other commenters listed here. Gotitbro (talk) 12:07, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking of "evil", I only recently became aware of M. Scott Peck and his incredibly relevant and timely definition of the term. While Peck has some peculiar idiosyncrasies in his overall belief system (he seems to believe in some version of the "devil" and in exorcisms, which is quite strange), I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater entirely. Peck describes evil as a kind of personal "militant ignorance", which is a term I first noticed in comparative religion discourse to differentiate Buddhism from Abrahamic religions. It turns out Peck was a Christian psychologist who was heavily influenced by Buddhism. According to Wikipedia, Peck believed an evil person is "consistently self-deceiving, deceives others, psychologically projects his or her evil onto very specific targets, hates, abuses power, and lies incessantly. Evil people are unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience (through self-deception) and views this as being quite distinct from the apparent absence of conscience evident in sociopaths. He also considers that certain institutions may be evil..." Viriditas (talk) 02:28, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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