Fjordman: The Bias and Dishonesty of Wikipedia

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at Europe News. Some excerpts are below:

I cannot and will not respond to all of the negative writings about me or accusations against me. My time is limited, and may be more usefully spent doing other things. My initial instinct was to ignore the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, too, but on further reflection, it seemed necessary to clarify the record.

Tens of millions of people use Wikipedia on a regular basis. They have a right to know just how biased this source can be and sometimes is.

Because Wikipedia is continuously edited by numerous unpaid volunteers in many countries, it changes more frequently than, say, the Encyclopædia Britannica Online. The following Wikipedia citations all refer to entries as they existed on June 15, 2012. One may hope some of these will later be changed for the better.

[…]

Arnulf Hagen, a technology professor at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in the city of Trondheim, claimed that Wikipedia has been manipulated by “ right-wing extremist networks.” He did point out some real flaws in the Wikipedia model, for instance that a tiny percentage of its anonymous users are responsible for a vastly disproportionate number of edits or entries there.

In a magazine published by the labor unions (LO), which cooperate intimately with the Labor Party, Hagen suggested that I have operated within a vast right-wing extremist network in the Wiki-world under the nickname Misheu, and there edited more than two thousand articles. That’s definitely a very interesting theory. The only problem with it is that is has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever and is 100% fabricated. I never had anything actively to do with Wikipedia at all under any name until well after the Breivik case, when I first contacted them to request that a few statements on their extremely hostile entries on me be edited. I didn’t even know how to log in there.

That fact didn’t prevent Mr. Hagen from publishing several articles about this issue and being interviewed about it by the national broadcaster NRK. Curiously, nobody asked me about the matter even though quite a few journalists have my email address.

In another venue, Professor Arnulf Hagen, again without having the tiniest shred of evidence, stated that the American author Bruce Bawer writes at the blog Gates of Vienna under the pseudonym The Observer. For the record: I know who The Observer is, and he is an ethnic Norwegian.

Wikipedia suggests that Eurabia is a “conspiracy theory,” despite the fact that those wring about this subject can back up every single claim using publicly available sources. I am also routinely refereed to as a “conspiracy theorist” in the mainstream media in multiple countries, despite the fact that they find it hard to pinpoint exactly what I have written that is factually wrong. Yet here we have a case where a respected academic at a noted national university simply invents things out of thin air, thereby implicating named individuals in a vast conspiracy. He had these claims published with nary a single critical question asked by established journalists.

It says bad things about the state of modern academia when an established professor, who is supposed to know a thing or two about sources and doing critical research, fails so utterly and publicly in this task. I hope Hagen is better at his job under normal circumstances. If not, perhaps he should consider finding a different line of work.

Read the rest at Europe News.


For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.