Wikipedia/Notability

Wikipedia/Notability
Wikipedia's supposedly impartial test used to censor topics, ideas and evidence from Wikipedia, while easy admission of disinformation sourced from commercially-controlled media.

Wikipedia's criteria for notability yield insight into its censorship process.

Official narrative

Wikipedia should only include "notable" articles, so it needs "a test used by editors to decide whether a topic can have its own article".

Problems

Wikipedia has an explicitly establishment friendly policy of assuming that commercially-controlled media is reliable, even though they are legally allowed to lie. Moreover, events that the corporate media choose to ignore are not deemed 'notable', allowing those who can censor the commercially-controlled media to effectively censor Wikipedia. Certain lines of thought in particular are reverted within minutes.

Criteria

The primary criterion used by Wikipedia to determine notability is that a subject has "gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time... from reliable independent sources". By excluding individual researchers (no oversight => questionable by definition), this cedes de facto control of topics to commercially-controlled media. This policy means that Wikipedia, although created mainly by volunteers, amplifies the power of those who have editorial control over television and other commercially-controlled media - those which they do not report on are excluded from Wikipedia.

Examples

Wikipedia's article on Le Cercle was cut down due to reliance on the same "self-published source" cited on Wikispooks to just over 200 words, as of December 2013, notwithstanding the fact that that source is the most informative source available.

Kevin Annett has been repeatedly censored as non-notable, decades of remarkable, devoted and successful work notwithstanding.

Abuse

Anonymous edits from IPs registered to the UK Government claimed that the death of Lee Rigby was “not notable enough” for an article pertaining to "terrorism".

Criticism and Proposals for Reform

Feminist writer TaraElla, founder of the WikiEqualize project, believes that the Notability Criteria should be abolished for the sake of structural equality, and has suggested that a Cultural Contribution Criteria be used instead. Such a criteria would not be dependent on popularity or attention in commercially-controlled media, but rather on contribution to human culture as a whole. She has written extensively on what such a criterion might look like, and how it can work. While she addresses the issue mainly from a feminist perspective, her argument that Wikipedia cannot be neutral when it excludes non-establishment viewpoints and voices can equally apply to many other areas, and her suggested reforms are intended to reduce Wikipedia's pro-establishment bias in many different fields.

Rating

9 July 2019 Robin  An explanation of one of the pillars of Wikipedia's censorship.
Wikipedia's explicit policy on what belongs there is very revealing. This explains how it allows Wikipedia to be an effective extension of Operation Mockingbird.

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