đź”’ You Cannot Create an "Unbiased" Wikipedia
How would you write a completely unbiased encyclopedia article about the violence currently occurring in Gaza?
I mean completely unbiased. I want you to bracket off and ignore every opinion you have about it whatsoever. Not taking anyone’s side. Nobody is wrong or right. Just the sterile facts. What do you write?
Well, you’ll probably want to begin by saying something like, on October 7th, 2023, a certain number of armed militants from the Gaza strip in Palestine invaded Israel and murdered a certain number of civilians. They also took a number of hostages back into Palestine, and then we get into Israel’s response to that attack. But you’re already being biased, here, on many points:
People on one side will object to you calling the Palestinians “militants,” implying they are a legitimate military force, and will prefer “terrorists,” but that’s biased in the other direction. We will have to retreat to “men.” (I don’t think there were any women among the assailants, but if there were, we will say “persons.”)
People on the other side will object to you calling it an “invasion,” calling what they did “murder,” and the people they killed “civilians.” This is biased against those who see this as a legitimate military operation and see the Israelis as an occupying force. We can’t really call them “hostages” either, maybe everyone can agree on “captives.”
So let’s say: On October 7th, 2023, a certain number of men entered Israel from Palestine and ended the lives of a certain number of individuals, and took a certain number captive, and then we can get into Israel’s retaliation.
This is still biased, because it presents Palestine as the initial aggressor rather than it having been in response to pressures exerted upon it by Israel. But you can’t call Hamas’ actions on October 7th a retaliation, because you’re discounting the reasons Israel may have been exerting those pressures. We cannot write this article without starting it at least one hundred years ago, and now understand: I asked you to write an unbiased article about the present Gaza conflict and we can’t even write an unbiased sentence about October 7th, 2023.
It was a fool’s errand to begin with, framing this as a conflict between Israel and Palestine, because you can’t use those words either. A large number of people on one side don’t believe Palestine exists legitimately, and a large number on the other don’t believe Israel exists legitimately.
I can’t continue this example without a lot of people getting mad at me, if they’re not already, but you get the idea. There’s no way to write this article and retain any amount of useful information whatsoever. A machine couldn’t do it. So let’s cut to the chase:
Elon Musk wants to kill Wikipedia, because it’s biased.
His beef with the online encyclopedia is longstanding and grows more intensified by the fact that it’s one of the few things he can’t control with brute force of capital. Musk lives in a world in which everything is for sale, including governments, but he can’t buy Wikipedia—as a nonprofit it isn’t publicly traded. He’s tried looking at ways to choke off its income, but it relies on donations. Capitalism is the only weapon he has, so finally, he’s just decided to make his own, better, alternative and compete it to death.
He doesn’t go much into what he thinks is wrong with Wikipedia but I’m almost certain I can guess. Wikipedia’s article about January 6 is titled “January 6 United States Capitol attack,” and begins like this:
On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep him in power by preventing a joint session of Congress from counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of then president-elect Joe Biden. The attack was unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a plan by Trump to overturn the election.
The article about the Great Replacement starts like this:
The Great Replacement (French: grand remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory coined by French author Renaud Camus. Camus' theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview.
The article on climate change states clearly that it is driven by human activities. The Covid-19 article says that the virus came from bats or another related animal and theories of it being engineered by humans are unsupported by the evidence. The Gamergate article says it was a harassment campaign started as a right-wing backlash against feminism.
You get the idea. Wikipedia is woke, but only because the preponderance of evidence is woke, and Musk’s contention is that this means the bulk of evidence is, in fact, fake manufactured propaganda.
His coming alternative, “Grokipedia,” will be written by Grok, his large language model AI, which will reform the entire corpus of human knowledge from a neutral point of view, objective, and free of bias. It was supposed to launch Monday October 20, but…
So let’s get this right out of the way first: We all know that Elon Musk doesn’t want to build an unbiased Wikipedia, he wants to build a very far-right Wikipedia. But that sort of is the crux of the issue: That, to him, is unbiased. It’s why he consistently considers himself a centrist, or even a liberal, despite his politics being to the right of the majority of people—he thinks everything he believes is simply correct, and to that end, unbiased, neutral, and objective. His worldview is the nucleus of truth, and everyone who disagrees with him on any issue is orbiting him on various different levels of wrong.
This is true, to some extent, of all of us.
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