Wikipedia is accused of conducting a purge of conservative media outlets, rejecting them as reliable sources of reporting about the integrity of the US presidential election, as it continues to ban these outlets from being used in that capacity.
The latest example is Newsmax, a news platform that has been gaining in popularity after the vote, as President Trump has been critical of some other conservative media reporting about election fraud that he and his legal team claim has happened.
T.D. Adler, a former Wikipedia editor who was banned from the site for pointing out to an administrator’s conflict of interest, writes about this for Breitbart, noting that after Fox News decided to accept Joe Biden’s claim of victory before Trump conceded and as his legal battle continues, the president urged his supporters to turn to the likes of Newsmax and One America News for information.
The resulting rise in popularity of Newsmax prompted a Wikipedia editor to try to bump its reliability rating on the website, only to reportedly invite an angry reaction from another, who wanted this outlet completely suppressed, i.e., “deprecated,” meaning that it could not be used as a source at all.
This look behind the scenes of how the Wikipedia articles “sausage” is made reveals chaotic interactions seemingly fueled by partisanship and personal ideological biases, where the argument to effectively ban Newsmax, a conservative platform, was supported by citing a left-wing one, Media Matters.
The report singles out Wikipedia editors going by the names of Paul Lee, Aquillion, and MastCell, whose former contributions to the site are said to reveal them as anti-Trump and or/left-wing, now being most vocal in their calls to ban Newsmax as a reliable source. Paul Lee is also behind the Wikipedia article on the now debunked “Steele Dossier” story that sought to discredit Trump, a part of a wider effort to show him as a Russian asset that is now considered by many to have been a hoax.
However, on Wikipedia, this article leans towards suggesting that the “Steele Dossier” is reliable, T.D. Adler writes, and notes that the editing strategy of the “online encyclopedia” originates from a PR firm run by the head of communications for the Clinton Foundation.
