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I've read some people over here refer to Wikipedia like that. Do they only use western sources or something like that?

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I don't use such terms, but I'll try a possible explanation: There is indeed a certain tendency. Articles are mostly written by speakers of that language. For example English articles by English-spreading editors tend to be influenced by western ideology. If you'd look at, I dunno, Russian Wikipedia, I'd assume it's a similar situation.

It's known that there are indeed paid government agents editing Wikipedia. But even those that are not are influenced by the Zeitgeist, which itself is informed by state propaganda. So we don't need to assume intentional malice.

Ideally, people complaining about Wikipedia would have the time and skill to improve it. But that's easier said than done.

[-] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

Lots of editing done by IP addresses in Langley, VA.

[-] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 6 hours ago

The best way to think of Wikipedia is that the site represents the consensus of everyone who is proficient in a particular language; has the means and technical understanding of how to edit Wikipedia; and has a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia.

For English, this means that most edits are made by highly educated white US-Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, who either live comfortably off their parents, have a job that gives them a lot of free time, or perhaps they're even businessowners or get paid to edit Wikipedia to promote an agenda (see: CIA edits to Wikipedia).

In any case, this is going to give Wikipedia's most prolific editors a particular bias in terms of which sources have prestige, which topics they write about and how they write about them. There's also a lot that can be said of the political leanings of the site's founders, site admin/moderation, its biggest donors being Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon, etc.

this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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