Can Wikipedia make us free?

That depends on whether Wikipedia's rules amount to a good epistemology.

Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. …
[A]s of 2022, Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world.
—Wikipedia

• These days people resolve questions and controversies by consulting Wikipedia.

• On political questions—which are historical questions—is this a good thing?

• To find out, we must investigate Wikipedia’s rules.

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Wikipedia is perhaps the most powerful social force in our present universe, because, when in doubt, we consult Wikipedia—more so than any other reference. Meaning this: Wikipedia creates our consensus reality.

Is this a bad thing? Well…

“As one can well imagine, any [Wikipedia] entry on any aspect of current events, as well as historical events, is subject to political interpretation.”¹

Whether people are consciously mendacious or innocently biased, their political preferences will lead them to represent reality in such a way that those preferences seem obvious and reasonable. A danger exists, therefore, that someone’s particular political interpretation will become our consensus reality. The actions of many will then follow from a false consensus reality that they honestly believe in.

That is a tremendous power.

I’ll make up an example to illustrate. Suppose that the Wikipedia entry for Gloobinland, a country, says that Gloobins (the dominant ethnie) are oppressing the Xylarks (a minority population). The effect of consulting that Wikipedia page, taken as a simple representation of reality, will be to generate lots of political support for the Xylarks by well-meaning people who wish to fight oppression.

Now imagine that what the entry says isn’t true. Suppose, for instance, that the Xylarks are a minority group of anti-Gloobin racist terrorists who’ve become really expert at Wikipedia editing. See the problem?

But perhaps that’s not really a problem, after all. The counterargument—again illustrated with my fanciful example—would go like this. Look, literally anyone with an internet connection can edit Wikipedia, so “peer review by the community,” as one scholar observes, “will be almost instantaneous.”² Since Xylarks don’t have a monopoly on internet access, Gloobins can edit too, and the truth will out.

This counterargument works if and only if Wikipedia’s rules for resolving controversies are designed to favor the most honest contributions. But if there are serious defects in those rules, such that all manner of falsehoods might be enshrined in Wikipedia entries, then the counterargument fails and we are back to our problem (a very serious one).

Another way of saying this is that Wikipedia’s rules, the Wikipedia ‘Policies and guidelines’, determine the construction of our consensus reality. The Wikipedia ‘grammar’—expressed in those rules—is therefore one of the most powerful grammars ever invented. Indeed, these two questions:

1. Is our consensus reality—on political (i.e. historical) questions—reasonable?; and

2. Is Wikipedia’s grammar, as coded in its rules, a good epistemology?

are one and the same question.

It follows, since nothing in the world is more consequential than our consensus reality, that we should be devoting a lot of time and effort to examining Wikipedia’s epistemology (that is, the manner in which Wikipedia decides that something is true knowledge), just as we devote lots of time and effort to the topics of parliamentary politics, legal reform, voting structure, and so on.

Yet, Wikipedia’s epistemology barely registers as a philosophical and scientific concern.

There has been a smattering of academic work on this question, mostly (it seems) by folklorists, but it does not exist as a mature research program and counts no specialized journals.³ Since nothing less than consensus reality is at stake, I pronounce myself astonished. We are not having what should be one of the central debates of our civilization: What, optimally, should Wikipedia’s rules be?

That’s the question I will begin considering here.

Wikipedia’s epistemology

As the system now stands, when Wikipedians (those who choose to participate in Wikipedia editing) cannot agree on something, how are their disputes resolved?

The short answer is that, in such cases, Wikipedians with opposing views each fight for their preferred content by way of legalistic jousts on a special ‘Talk’ page attached to a given subject’s main article. On this ‘Talk’ page they quote Wikipedia’s rules to each other as weapons and shields to defend their proposed additions, modifications, or deletions.

Two things may then happen:

1. of itself, a consensus will emerge over who has won a given dispute, and the issue is then resolved, with the relevant changes accruing to the article page; or

2. an unsettled joust becomes what is called an ‘edit war’—a deadlock where opposing parties keep adding and removing the same stuff over and over again. When this happens a super editor, known as an admin (administrator) or sysop (system operator) intervenes to arbitrate a consensus resolution. (Yes, anyone can edit Wikipedia, and all Wikipedia editors are equal, but some are more equal than others…).

However it happens, whether as an emergent process or by way of administrative arbitration, Wikipedia’s rules require that consensus must be achieved by appeal to sources. Whoever has the best—most ‘reliable’—sources wins.

But which sources will be called ‘reliable’? This criterion is also encoded into Wikipedia’s rules. Wikipedia considers (as I will demonstrate below) that the largest, most traditional, powerful, established, and famous knowledge-making institutions are the most reliable.

In consequence, Wikipedia’s grammar is designed faithfully to reproduce what mainstream institutions, such as governments, universities, and large media organizations say. State-owned media is especially preferred.

I will now demonstrate this.

What is a reliable source, according to Wikipedia?

The game is like this: the Wikipedian with the most ‘reliable sources’ wins. So everything hinges on how Wikipedia defines ‘reliable source.’ The rules on sources say:

“The sources used should be trustworthy and from a reliable source. The information should be distributed by a special group that is well-known for checking their own facts as well, making sure the information is correct or true.”

When I first read that, I was struck by the power of the phrases “special group” and “well known.” From the phrase “special group” I inferred that, for Wikipedia, a reliable source is an institution, not a person. And from the phrase “well-known” I inferred that reputation is the key epistemological standard in Wikipedia.

Having formed this hypothesis about Wikipedia’s logic, I clicked on Wikipedia’s link for “reliable source.” Right away I found my hypothesis confirmed.

It says on that page that “sources used in Wikipedia should have been published.” But not merely published, for Wikipedia distinguishes between two kinds of published documents:

1. “Some published documents are written by just one person, and nobody else checks it before it is published. It is easy for these sources to contain mistakes or untrue information.”

And

2. “Other documents are written by people who have studied the subject for many years, and many other people have read them carefully to make sure that the information is correct.”

Having made this distinction, Wikipedia avers:

“Although both kinds of documents can contain things that are not true, documents that people have checked are more likely to contain correct information and to reflect the most common views on a subject. These are called reliable sources.”

Of course, an expert—an individual person who has invested years of study on a topic—might self-publish a document on that topic after carefully vetting it with peers for logic and accuracy. But Wikipedia assumes this is either impossible or exceedingly rare; it is established institutions rather than individual persons, in Wikipedia’s view, that can be assumed to care about logic and accuracy.

This is further adumbrated in Wikipedia’s remarks on relative reliability :

“How reliable a source is depends on context. Some publishers like the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] become well known for having a reliable publication process. This means that they only publish documents after they check them carefully. As a guide, the more people who help with checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and examining the writing, the more reliable the publication.”

What, according to Wikipedia, is the “context” that a source’s reliability “depends on”?

Brandishing its favorite example, the BBC, Wikipedia asserts that “the BBC [has] become well known for having a reliable publication process.” Well known: In other words, lots of people believe that the BBC is a reliable source, which is enough for Wikipedia to assume that the BBC will “only publish documents after they check them carefully.”

Wikipedia also asserts that “the more people who help with checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and examining the writing, the more reliable the publication,” and this also identifies the BBC as a ‘reliable source,’ according to Wikipedia, because the BBC happens to be “the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total.”

It is interesting that Wikipedia nowhere comments on which methods of knowledge-production, editing, and publishing might be reliable, nor does it claim to have audited the BBC’s methods to establish the BBC’s reliability. Reliability, for Wikipedia, is simply correlated with a good mainstream reputation and large institutional size.

Indeed, Wikipedia’s recommendations for sources—beyond its oft-repeated plea to rely on the BBC—are invariably to large, established, official, and well-reputed institutions of the West.

Is Wikipedia’s epistemological strategy reasonable?

Wikipedia’s rules on sources may be reasonable in some information ecologies but not in others. So consider this question: Would Wikipedia’s rules make sense in the Soviet Union or in the European Middle Ages?

In the Soviet Union, Pravda—the government newspaper—was certainly a very big institution. And lots of people checked Pravda documents before they went to print. But this did not make Pravda trustworthy and reliable because documents were checked not for logic and accuracy but for dogmatic ideological correctness plus usefulness for duping Soviet citizen-subjects. Why? Because the Soviet Union was totalitarian. Pravda told lies by design.

Soviet science was also intervened by the State, meaning that Soviet scientists could not freely investigate and reach their own conclusions. They had to parrot the State’s imposed reality whenever their research was considered politically relevant. And to the Soviet Politburo, even biology was politically relevant.

If Wikipedia—with its current rules, which favor the largest and most established knowledge-making institutions—were to operate in the Soviet Union, it would just repeat State-sponsored lies.

The Medieval Catholic Church enjoyed a good reputation because it had the power to instruct people, from birth, on the Church’s absolute mastery of truth. And the Church was—by very far—the largest institution. If Wikipedia had been created in the Middle Ages, its current epistemological standards would have made it repeat Catholic dogma as alleged reliable knowledge.

So what is Wikipedia assuming is true about the modern West that makes it fundamentally different from the Soviet Union or the European Middle Ages? Of necessity, this:

• Wikipedia assumes that the modern West has truly free and competitive markets for news and science.

In a free academic market, scientists are autonomous from government and independent of each other. A free scientist cannot earn greater prestige unless he or she does better than competitors at explaining phenomena, and more prestige is crucial if that scientist wants a better job and more research money. In a free academic market, therefore, all scientists have a strong incentive to expose important omissions, errors, and lies in the work of their rivals. This keeps everybody honest.

In a free news market, similarly, news providers are autonomous from government and independent of each other. If a news provider, you make more money by growing your audience. Doing that requires demonstrating that you are giving people more accurate and relevant news than the competition. In a free news market, therefore, all news providers have a strong incentive to expose important omissions, errors, and lies in the product of rivals. This keeps everybody honest.

The point I am making is this: reliability is a function of market health. The freer your knowledge-production markets, the more reliable the information produced.

Significantly, free knowledge-production markets will keep even the government’s information honest. That’s because, if the government lies, free academics and news providers will profit from exposing the government. Thus, in a truly free and competitive market, even the BBC might keep honest.

Why do I say it like that? I don’t mean to be snide. I am merely recognizing a structural fact: the BBC—Wikipedia’s preferred all-around source for everything—is State-owned media.

The BBC:

1. was established under royal charter by the government of the biggest and most powerful empire ever known;

2. operates under agreement with a government functionary nicknamed the Culture Secretary (I kid you not); and

3. to this very day, by some measures, is still the largest news organization on Planet Earth.

So Wikipedia is really going out on a limb to make the strongest imaginable assumption of market freedom in knowledge production, for only thus can Wikipedia hold up the BBC—the BBC!—as an allegedly obvious example of ‘reliable source’ in a way that makes any kind of structural sense.

Only in a solidly free market would the pressure of private competitors discipline the British government to resist the daily temptation to use the world’s largest news-media system to manage reality via propaganda.

So it all boils down to this question: Is Wikipedia’s (unstated but necessary) assumption of market freedom correct? Is our modern Western world one of fundamentally free knowledge-production markets, such that, in all manner of political questions, even the planet’s largest State-owned news-media organization has been disciplined into honesty by its private-sector rivals?

Those who believe the answer is ‘yes’ may point to the fact that lots of different news brands pepper the modern Western news landscape. And in a free market you would expect to see that.

However, a free market is not the only imaginable model consistent with news-brand proliferation. An alternative model exists that is equally consistent with that. And this alternative must at least be considered and ruled out before we endorse Wikipedia’s epistemological grammar. Because what is at stake here, I remind you, is our very construction of reality.

The alternative model

The alternative model was proposed by Maurice Joly, a political theorist of the 19th century, in a profoundly interesting work titled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. I discuss him here:

Maurice Joly and the Theory of Counterfeit Democracy

Joly was writing at the very dawn of modern democracy. His book was published not long after the revolutionary fires of 1848 had forged the French Second Republic, when the radical innovation of male universal suffrage ushered in as new president of France the formidable Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (not to be confused with his uncle, the great conqueror).

As you might expect, there was lots of excitement in France after the election of Louis Napoleon. What could be done, now that democracy had dawned? So many possibilities! But Joly was pessimistic. Unable to join the celebration, he predicted that, because of a structural defect in the institutional architecture of modern democracy, this system of government would not survive.

The structural defect was this: the executive had been allowed by parliament to create a secret intelligence service.

Once allowed, the existence of a secret service doomed the entire system. For if the executive could spend the people’s money clandestinely, then Montesquieu’s hopes for dividing power in a democracy would be abolished. Why? Because the executive, acting clandestinely, would quickly corrupt everything. And he would begin, of course, by corrupting the institutions of news media and science in order to manage reality and thus augment and secure his power. Overt, violent oppression would be dispensed with unless it became strictly necessary to maintain power, Joly explained; the optimal strategy for a would-be totalitarian ruler elected to govern a recently established democracy was deceit and manipulation via the management of reality.

Why?

Because a citizenry basking in its post-revolutionary mood could easily be provoked into new uprisings by any too-obvious moves towards authoritarianism. And the uprisings of 1848—still fresh—had been tremendous. A clever ‘Prince’—as Joly (evoking Machiavelli) calls this would-be totalitarian—would therefore loudly celebrate democracy in public whilst using his spies to manage in the shadows the façade of a carefully preserved proliferation of (now corrupted) news brands, each manipulating its target audience.

Controversies, scandals, and attacks on government—that would all still happen, argued Joly. But it would now happen under careful management. Because the whole point was to give an appearance of freedom and independence in knowledge production, and thereby preserve public trust in the news and in science. With that trust, the ostensibly democratic ruler—always managing reality with his clandestine control, not only of the media, but also of civil society organizations and political parties—would acquire such power over the citizen mind as even totalitarians of a more frank and brutish persuasion can only dream of.

It was thus, Joly predicted, that democracy would be gutted from within, keeping only the puppeteered façade. And the citizen would be made a slave.

The counted few who study Joly seem invariably to consider him an exceptionally talented political theorist. He is commonly compared to George Orwell. That positive judgment and the flattering comparison, I believe, are both entirely fair. Maurice Joly was a genius.

It is equally fair, however, to observe that Joly was not theorizing in an empirical vacuum. He was describing. Every strategy detailed in Joly’s book was being implemented right before Joly’s eyes by Louis Napoleon. In one sense, Joly was taking notes from the political reality around him. But he was good at that, and also at reflecting on the articulation of the various strategies, explaining with great sophistication, at a theoretical level, the logic of Louis Napoleon’s amazing system.

Louis Napoleon—himself a genius, ergo no fool—threw Joly in prison the minute his vast intelligence services identified the man behind the anonymously published explanations of his methods. All copies of Joly’s book were confiscated. Later, true to Joly’s description of the system, Louis Napoleon let him go. And why not? Louis Napoleon was Master of Reality, precisely as Joly had described. Joly was no danger.

What would Joly say to us now?

An interesting thing to consider is that, regardless of which world we live in, Wikipedia’s current rules are not good for freedom. If Maurice Joly were brought in a time machine to the present, I think he would say to us precisely that. It would go something like this:

“Look, Wikipedia’s rules should not be structured, as currently, around trust in authority because that just turns Wikipedia into a vast, simple-minded machine to crowdsource the collection of bits and pieces of official, mainstream information. How does that advance human freedom? Yes, if you are already in a world of truly free knowledge-production markets, Wikipedia’s current rules will give you mostly reliable information. But if you are in my world, then Wikipedia’s current rules will assist the clandestinely authoritarian, top-down management of reality. Much better, therefore, to structure Wikipedia’s rules around skepticism of authority. For in this case Wikipedia will recruit the entire planet into a massive fact-checking organism that scrutinizes all mainstream information, and this will force everybody to be honest. If you are already free, already living in a true democracy, then a skeptical rather than trusting Wikipedia will do no harm; in fact, it will improve the fact-checking that your free institutions have already been doing. And if you are in my world, a skeptical rather than trusting Wikipedia will help you restore a free news and academic market, and therefore a true democracy.”

I think the above argument is rock-solid. So it follows that the people responsible for Wikipedia’s epistemological grammar have chosen a set of rules that are useful to stealth totalitarians rather than to the protection of freedom.

Does that mean we are in Joly’s world? Well, it is at least interesting that…

Wikipedia’s rules outlaw investigating which world we are in

Joly’s model of a democratic simulation with centrally governed, clandestine control of information is a conspiracy theory. And that’s a special case of what Wikipedia calls a “fringe theory.” As the Wikipedia section on “fringe theories” states, all such theories are outlawed by Wikipedia’s ‘Policies and guidelines’:

“Fringe theories are ideas about a subject that most people who know a lot about that subject would strongly disagree with. Some examples of fringe theories are conspiracy theories and ideas about science that do not have much scientific support. Books and websites that promote fringe theories are usually not considered reliable sources…”

Wikipedia is here simply reproducing a taboo that, as I explain elsewhere, is integral to mainstream university and news culture all over the West, and which forbids taking conspiracy theories seriously because they are allegedly always (or almost always) ridiculous and wrong.

A taboo protects something sacred; here, what is sacred is the mainstream: what “most people who know a lot about [a] subject”—circularly identified as legitimate experts by the well-established, mainstream sources of authority—think.

Any Wikipedian hoping to propose on Wikipedia that our mainstream sources of authority might have been corrupted and captured by the intelligence services has already failed, for any such proposal is a conspiracy theory, and other Wikipedians can quickly kick that stuff out with straightforward and orthodox invocations of Wikipedia’s own rules.

Obviously, something that cannot be proposed cannot be investigated. It follows that ordinary Wikipedians have not been allowed by the true rulers of Wikipedia, the admins or sysops, to properly exclude the control hypothesis. Wikipedia therefore cannot self-correct; all it can do is parrot mainstream authority.

True, this is not a fatal problem for freedom if the Western world (outside of Wikipedia itself) is always self-correcting by the operation of free knowledge-production markets. In other words, this is not a fatal problem if we don’t live in Joly’s world.

But perhaps we do…

A handful of researchers have established that a few copies of Joly’s book were preserved in the 19th century among the undemocratic power elites of the West, who studied carefully his precise explanations of Louis Napoleon’s methods. I address that here:

Maurice Joly, the 'Dialogue in Hell,' the French proto-Nazis, the Catholic Church, the Russian Tsar, the Protocols of Zion, and the Shoa.

It is at least possible, therefore, that the modern Western transition to democracy was phony and that would-be totalitarians have been biding their time at the top, pretending to be democrats, managing the democratic simulation, and waiting for their moment. Which moment is that? The transition to frank totalitarianism, when all democratic pretense is finally abandoned and outright slavery is reimposed.

So which is it? What world are we in? Might there be a ‘tell’ that can help us decide the issue? I believe so.

Recall that Wikipedia insists very strongly that the BBC is the best example—indeed, the epitome—of a ‘reliable source.’ That should worry you, because, as several historians have documented, the British media, starting with the BBC, have been intervened by the British secret services, precisely as Joly predicted they would be. And that happened way back in 1937, with Neville Chamberlain. Moreover, Neville Chamberlain, as has also been documented, was no ‘appeaser’ but a closet totalitarian in love with Adolf Hitler (see below).

1. Westerman, W. (2009). Epistemology, the sociology of knowledge, and the Wikipedia userbox controversy. In Blank, Trevor J. (Ed.) Folklore and the internet: vernacular expression in a digital world. All USU Press Publications. Book 35. (p.129)
http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/35

2. Ibid. (p.128)

3. For example, Don Fallis, from the School of Information at the University of Arizona, wrote:

• Fallis, D. (2008). Toward an epistemology of Wikipedia. Journal of the American Society for Information science and Technology, 59(10), 1662-1674.

It has garnered an average of about 20 citations per year. Not bad for Fallis, but hardly indicative of an urgent civilizational concern.

That comment goes double when you consider that his paper appears to be the most cited when you sort for relevance the Google Scholar results for the conjunction of ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘epistemology.’

And it goes triple when you consider that Fallis wrote a programmatic paper calling for this area of study to be developed. If our community of scholars had agreed that this was an urgent issue for Western civilization, his citations would be at least in the low thousands, rather than a grand total of 329.

Another evidence of the poverty of work in the epistemology of Wikipedia is Wikipedia’s own article on ‘Epistemology of Wikipedia.’ You would expect Wikipedia to toot its own horn, but then one must conclude that it can’t. The article has almost no content—it is practically a stub. The paper by Fallis, which called for this field to be developed, is one of just three works cited in the article!

Not cited, by the way, is what I consider to be the deepest contribution on the epistemology of Wikipedia:

• Westerman, W. (2009). Epistemology, the sociology of knowledge, and the Wikipedia userbox controversy. Folklore and the internet: vernacular expression in a digital world, 1, 123.

This paper itself has a grand total of 30 citations, which is about 2 citations per year. Pitiful.