The Self-Destruction of Wikipedia Is a Tragedy—and a Real Problem for Civic Life

Wikipedia was one of the great inventions of the 21st century. 

I’m not kidding, nor am I overstating its importance then, nor should we underrate the social disaster that the transformation of Wikipedia has wrought. It is, perhaps, the single most influential website in the world. 

First, the good: we grossly overstate the quality of Encyclopedias that were used as common reference manuals for the plebs. I remember I used to peruse our Encyclopedia Britannica back in the day, at least until the termites got into it (seriously, that happened, and was a signal to call the Orkin man). I just assumed that, at the time, I was getting the skinny on whatever I looked up, and that the Encyclopedia was a compendium of human knowledge as it existed then. 

I don’t mean to disrespect it, but that was never really the case. It was useful for what it was, but what it was wasn’t what it purported to be. Articles were written by people with credentials who needed money or were seeking prestige, and the people who edited them could by no means themselves be experts in all the subjects. 

At best, you were getting the received wisdom; at worst, you were getting the musings of young scholars who needed some cash or a free set of Encyclopedias for the kids’ school projects. I haven’t asked my dad, but I believe that our set was in compensation for an article he wrote on star formation back in the 70s. No doubt it was a great article, although I don’t recall reading it. He’s smart. Very smart, and a great photographer. 

Leftists immediately reverted my correction to Wikipedia’s opening claim that most scientists believe COVID is natural.

They had no citation for it, just random leftist media articles quoting a scientist or two – that’s not relevant to a claim that most scientists think… https://t.co/hOloeuQS8l pic.twitter.com/38fizbACit

— Joe Duarte (@ValidScience) July 28, 2026

Leftists immediately reverted my correction to Wikipedia’s opening claim that most scientists believe COVID is natural.

They had no citation for it, just random leftist media articles quoting a scientist or two – that’s not relevant to a claim that most scientists think something.

Wikipedia is epistemically savage, which results in lots of false claims and extremely biased articles. It’s an Orwellian firehose for the left. They only cite leftist media while barring non-leftist media, but it’s increasingly clear that non-leftist media is more reliable. Thus, their “Reliable Sources” list – for which they have no systematic evidence – is actually a list of unreliable sources. It’s a mess.

The great thing about Wikipedia, as originally envisioned, was that it was a collaborative project, and while it, too, had its flaws, it drew on the collective knowledge and intelligence of the world. While this had its downsides—everybody could contribute, in theory—the product one got at any given time was actually quite good. Surprisingly so. And you also got a good sense of the conflicting views on any subject, hopefully leading you to see it as a starting point rather than a final authority. 

Just grotesque how Wikipedia has become a top-down editorial propaganda transmitter rather than a bottom-up knowledge compendium when it comes to anything remotely uncomfortable for the establishment. @jimmy_wales https://t.co/aOlosbuAcK

— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) July 28, 2026

Wikipedia just deleted the DEFUSE proposal from the COVID lab-leak article because an editor called it “unnecessary detail.”

In 2018, EcoHealth, WIV, and UNC asked DARPA to fund inserting furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses. The proposal was rejected as too risky. 18 months later, SARS-CoV-2 showed up with exactly that feature, which no natural relative has.

That’s DEFUSE, and Wikipedia gatekeepers just decided that readers shouldn’t know about it. 

@lsanger

Wikipedia was never intended to be a closed ecosystem where a single Narrative™ was enforced, nor was it supposed to become a propaganda tool to push an ideological point of view. It has become both, with contributors getting banned, editors becoming enforcers, and editing wars that are nothing but attempts to emphasize some narratives and hide others. 

You can’t make this up:

The new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation (which owns Wikipedia) has a Wikipedia page that, before she was selected, had been created by a paid PR account and repeatedly edited by throwaway accounts at her university.https://t.co/4CCZSsIuMm

— Larry Sanger (@lsanger) July 9, 2026

It has become a playground for people who want to create alternate realities, so it should come as no surprise that the former Wikipedia CEO and now NPR head openly said that she thought that the effort to tell the truth was problematic because the goal was to create positive change, not tell the truth as it was. 

This is the byproduct of the woke ideology of Katherine Maher, who ran Wikipedia for five years before taking CEO position at NPR.

At Wikipedia, Maher infamously said that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction.” The propaganda peddled by NPR, NY Times, and… https://t.co/zvv0Ycz1mG

— Adam Mossoff (@AdamMossoff) June 25, 2026

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announced he was indefinitely banned from editing the site after he attempted to fight against rampant anti-Israel bias on the platform.

The information war is real. Big Tech and online encyclopedias are rewriting history and silencing anyone who defends Israel. Don’t rely on biased platforms for the truth.

Wikipedia is still technically collaborative, but that feature has been weaponized to the point where a few persistent posters and editors have taken over politically charged topics and decide what can and cannot be published. 

Yet Wikipedia is not just considered authoritative by many people; it forms the basis of an information ecosystem that underlies much of the information you and I see without realizing it. 

AI summaries you get when asking a question are largely based on Wikipedia articles, and all AIs use Wikipedia as a large part of their training algorithms. So even if you know Wikipedia can be unreliable, you are still being fed information from it all the time without realizing it. 

It now forms one of the main pillars of the information sphere, and relatively few people control it; many who do are indifferent to or hostile toward the truth. 

I still use Wikipedia as a quick-and-dirty place to get basic facts about some topic or another, but, as with AIs, I am quite wary of trusting it for much beyond dates or the occasional direct quote I can check. 

Unfortunately, most people don’t know how much they rely on it, even when they are nowhere near the site. Chances are it is the first website to pop up in any Google search, and the AI summaries are largely influenced by it, and therefore by self-interested editors and contributors. 

As with so much these days, there is little we can trust. 

Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it.  

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