The Biases of Wikipedia – A Case History

By Wade Frazier

February 24, 2008 (slightly revised, with latest revision in December 2010)

Introduction

Our Massacre List Additions

Conclusion

Footnote

Introduction

Several Wikipedia articles have linked to my website over the years, and I have contributed myself a few times.  I found Wikipedia to often be a good source of information, but I also noticed a disturbing bias that mirrored the Euro-Anglo-American-centric bias that has dogged the West for centuries.  In late 2007, I read a Wikipedia article that referred to a list of massacres.  I studied that subject matter for many years, and was immediately stuck by the list’s overwhelming bias.  History’s greatest genocide was what the Spanish invasions inflicted on the Western Hemisphere’s natives during the 16^th century.  That genocide was punctuated early and often by massive slaughters, usually as a way of establishing political control.  In that list, there was not one mention of any of those slaughters.  In addition, the English version of Wikipedia is obviously dominated by Americans (with the British also well represented), and when the Indian genocide began happening on what became American soil, the massacre list’s bias was even more evident.  The Spanish initiated the mass slaughters of Indians in North America, beginning with Hernando de Soto in 1539, but they continued unabated (with the English, Dutch, French and Americans also inflicting large-scale massacres) until the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.  About two massacres of Indians by Americans made that massacre list, while more than a dozen Indian-inflicted massacres were on that list, with “massacres” of as few as three white people making that list.  The list also had very little documentary support. 

A few weeks after I came upon that massacre list, I mentioned my dismay to a friend and he suggested a little experiment: I would produce a list of omitted massacres, and he would use his technical skills to add them to that list. 

It was easy to quickly assemble a list of massacres that were far larger and more historically significant than three “pioneers” being murdered by some angry Indians in the Wild West.  I had already documented most of those slaughters that we added on my website.  I also provided sources for our massacre list additions.  The documentary support was very sparse on that list before we made our additions, and any “editing” of our entries on the grounds that they were not documented would be invalid, not when they were the only consistently-documented additions to that list.

In addition, many massacres on that list were wartime slaughters, particularly World War II slaughters such as the Katyn massacre, perpetrated by the Soviets.  American slaughters of civilians during World War II were conspicuously absent.  While my friend and others were adding the allied firebombing of Dresden and the American firebombing of Tokyo, I decided to contribute the “Grand Finale” bombing of Japan, made while the Japanese were surrendering.  I have also reproduced the text from the official Air Force history, describing that Grand Finale, below.  As Japanese peace activist Makoto Oda later related, accompanying the bombs dropped during the Grand Finale were leaflets that announced Japan’s surrender. 

Click on image to enlarge

As we suspected would happen, people immediately began editing our contributions.  While some edits were understandable, they were obviously made by white people who began framing the European/American massacres of Indians as somehow justified, or that the person in charge of the slaughters disobeyed orders to do so (which was a strained interpretation of the events), to provide “context.”  Then the jingoists charged into the fray, deleting entire entries, stridently claiming “bias,” that the massacres somehow lacked proper documentation, and so forth (not all of those kinds of attacks were directed at our entries specifically, but that was the trend of comments and general atmosphere under which the edits were made).  Somewhat surprisingly, among the worst offenders were Wikipedia's administrators.  It was not long before all of our additions were deleted, and the article is now almost back where it started, but at least the killing of three invading “pioneers” by the Indians is no longer on the list as a “massacre” (although as few as five whites killed by Indians still qualifies as a massacre on that list). 

Here is our list of omitted massacres, posted to the Wikipedia massacre article.  All of them have been removed, and there has been a recent effort to remove the massacre list altogether.  Some were moved to an Indian Massacre list, but the list itself originally began with Euro-American apologetics (calling Indian slaughters of the invaders “atrocities” and the white slaughter of Indians “retaliations" - in fact, the opposite was true the vast majority of the time - as of March 2009, that biased introduction was revised, for more evidence that there may be some hope for Wikipedia - however, it was changed back to the jingoist version by September 2009, and Indian killings of as few as two people have become a "massacre" on that list).  However, the really big ones, all perpetrated by the Spanish during the first century of conquest, have been completely removed from the massacre lists, except for the last two, which occurred on North American soil.  Somehow, Indian massacres south of the United States do not count. 

Our Massacre List Additions

Conclusion

This situation of Wikipedia’s bias in favor of the exterminators, while the exterminated receive passing mention, if at all, is typical in the West.  Today’s genocide in Iraq, to seize control over the world’s hydrocarbon deposits, is another typical instance of the West’s murderous, collective egocentrism.  Lies of omission are most commonly used in the service of propaganda, not lies of commission, and this instance of Wikipedia’s heavily biased massacre list is standard operating procedure.  Many criticisms have been published regarding Wikipedia recently.  One of its founders even began another web-based effort, where he has chosen “truth over democracy.”  My friend who helped me add to that massacre list had a series of dismaying episodes with Wikipedia, the massacre censorship being one of many incidents that pointed to Wikipedia’s shortcomings, and that goes for all the languages that it is presented in.  My friend has far more to say than I do about Wikipedia’s flaws, but my experience with that massacre list showed me how far Wikipedia has to go before it becomes a truly relevant and useful informational resource on the Internet.  It can be appallingly poor when dealing with fringe science and other controversial topics (free energy suppression and Gaston Naessens’s discoveries, for instance).  Whether it can overcome its obvious failings (which are largely due to the human condition these days) is an open question for me.  2019 note: My work suffered a far more spectacular instance of Wikipedia’s censorship practices in 2018, when I tried to improve Edward S. Herman’s libelous biography.    

Footnote

The next section: The Propaganda Model and Wikipedia (143K)

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