He is the chief communications officer at the Clinton Foundation. That's worth saying again: he is the chief communications officer at the Clinton Foundation. I wondered if this meant the Clinton family has Wikipedia under its thumb.
All this googling was being done early this year, around the time the NBC Brian Williams scandal was a big item. He had been caught exaggerating the danger he was in while visiting a world trouble spot.
I remembered that Hillary Clinton had been caught in a similar imbroglio over her 1996 visit to Bosnia, claiming to have exited her airplane amidst enemy fire. Years later, video emerged that proved her story to be as false as the Williams' story.
Hillary's fib is covered in a mere 40 words. That's just 4 percent the verbiage devoted to the Williams scandal. And the Clinton coverage seems to really gloss over Hillary's Bosnia fabrication. This Wikipedia entry has only one footnote. It's to a book published in 2010. There's no clickable link to any content. The footnote just gives the authors' names and the page numbers, not even the name of the book. So it's like a dead-end reference.
Then I postulated that the great difference in the fib coverage might be a result of the freshness of the Williams story, whereas Hillary's became news back around 2008. So I checked out another famous fib. It was that of Dan Rather's when he touted a false story about George W. Bush's questionable National Guard service. This was from 2004, older than Hillary's story. It got around 1,000 words in Wikipedia, just like the Williams story. So the short treatment of Hillary's fib seems to have nothing to do with how far back it was.
Certainly this is not an exhaustive examination of Wikipedia manipulation. But it sure looks suspicious. Do the Clintons hold sway over Wikipedia's content? Or is there some other explanation?
Wikipedia clearly seems to minimize an embarrassing transgression of Hillary's and to amplify fabricated defamatory allegations about Russia and its president. Isn't there anything that can be done about this kind of shenanigan?
Actually, there is something concrete you yourself can do about this troubling situation.
Anyone can become a Wikipedia editor. All you have to do is go to the Wikipedia site and create a free account. Then you will be able to edit existing content and add new material. If you see new information somewhere that is not covered in relevant Wikipedia articles, add it. If you see Wiki content that's wrong, change it.
Don't expect this kind of intervention will be a cakewalk, though. Wikipedia has self-appointed gatekeepers. They are people who are experts on Wikipedia's intricate and confusing rules for editing. And you should expect they will invoke that expertise to obstruct your efforts to introduce truth. One observer remarked, "I have a son who has made a particular correction on a subject in Wikipedia countless times. It is always immediately deleted and returned to the original lie." It seems to me those Wiki gatekeepers practice a kind of cyberbullying.
In October 2013, MIT's Technology Review magazine ran an article titled, "The Decline of Wikipedia." Among its conclusions: "Authoritative entries remain elusive."
The Wikipedia ideal is that a loose collective of well-intentioned editors will ultimately produce an outstanding encyclopedia. That's turned out to be a naive notion. It seems never to have contemplated that a loosely connected clique could use Wikipedia to distort the truth in serving their own ends. The result today is simply this: Wikipedia can't be trusted.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
