We all know Wikipedia is a free-for-all in which competing groups keep editing controversial topics to ensure that their spin dominates the open encyclopedia. 

By now, even though we all use it to get up to speed quickly on topics, we know that any entry on sensitive topics are likely spun wildly to echo a narrative, usually one that benefits the left. Given that the left has hordes of people who spend their lives trying to brainwash the public into believing falsehoods and hoaxes, they will keep winning the information war. 

They own academia, the mainstream media, the "fact checkers," and the nonprofit sector. 

But what you may not know is that the Wikimedia foundation, the nonprofit to which you may even have donated to help Wikipedia keep going, actually hires left-wing activists to curate sensitive topics. 

You can read the full @DailyCaller story here:https://t.co/ji3rfGIiqp

— robert schmad (@RobertSchmad) September 24, 2024

I sure didn't know that. I routinely donate tiny amounts to Wikimedia because I find Wikipedia useful, and while the leftward bias is more than a bit annoying, it is a good place to suss out information in a quick and dirty fashion. As long as you know not to trust it, it can be useful. That's the same reasoning I have for subscribing to a number of MSM outlets. 

But now I learn from the Daily Caller that my donations have been used to employ radical activists to lie to me. That pisses me off. 

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that maintains and manages Wikipedia, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars during the 2022-2023 fiscal year to activist groups seeking to bring the online encyclopedia more in line with traditionally left-of-center points of view, tax documents show.

Though Wikipedia’s readers are often met with solemn messages suggesting the site may lose its independence if they don’t donate, the Wikimedia Foundation had enough surplus funds between July 2022 and June 2023 to disburse grants to nonprofits dedicated to introducing feminist and racial justice perspectives to Wiki articles, according to tax forms. Wikipedia has been criticized by many for having a left-of-center slant, with the site’s co-founder in 2010 stating that it has a “liberal bias on most topics.”

“Feminism and racial justice are not neutral points of view; they are deeply political takes on the world that entail screening out contrary facts,” Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “If Wikipedia is actively trying to boost its feminist/racial justice content, it is guaranteeing that its entries will be one-sided, if not wholly inaccurate. The site is also betraying its original mission of anonymous, blind writing and editing, a mission that proved problematic for its leftist creators from the start.”

The groups Wikimedia contributes to don't even try to present themselves as anything other than activists. Their job is to push a leftist narrative and they are happy to tell you so. 

Art+Feminism, for instance, is an organization that received approximately $382,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation “to support work to further [its] mission,” according to tax forms. 

The feminist organization “envision[s] dismantling supremacist systems and creating pathways for everyone to participate in writing (and righting) history,” according to its website. “From coffee shops and community centers to the largest museums and universities in the world, Art+Feminism leads a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign that teaches people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia. 

A core part of the organization’s mission is getting more women involved in contributing to Wikipedia to correct alleged “gender biases in biographical articles.”

“When cis and trans women, non-binary people, Black, Indigenous and people of color communities are not represented in the writing and editing on the tenth-most-visited site in the world, information about people like us gets skewed and misrepresented,” Art+Feminism’s website reads. “The stories get mistold. We lose out on real history. That’s why we’re here: to change it.”

Art+Feminsim has organized events that have resulted in over 100,000 articles being written or edited since 2014, according to its website. Among its recent contributions to Wikipedia are translating a guide encouraging people to upload LGBTQ+ biographies to the site written with a “human rights perspective” and editing Wikipedia articles on abortion while raising money for an abortion fund.

Thus, every contribution you make to keep Wikipedia going is, at least partially, being funneled to activist groups pushing radical agendas on race, gender, abortion, and God knows what else. 

This is very different from what we have come to expect: the constant war between editors on how articles should look. While that state of affairs is suboptimal, it is in many ways superior to encyclopedias expressing an omniscient viewpoint that simply spews whatever the editors want it to say. 

Better to know that everybody is spinning than to assume you are getting unbiased reporting. 

But this policy of funding radical activists to pollute the already murky waters of Wikipedia information is another thing entirely. A platform that claims to be relatively neutral turns out to be just another propaganda outfit. It's not a platform but a secret publisher pushing a left-wing narrative. 

It's impossible to avoid Wikipedia because, damn it, it is so darn useful. But there is absolutely positively no way I am contributing another cent to it, and I will trust it even less than I do now.