By : Wikipedia has a problem. And that’s a problem that affects the whole world.Wikipedia is now the #1 reference resource on the Internet. Whether you love this fact or hate it, it will not stop being a fact any time soon. And unfortunately, in recent years numerous groups with resources and willpower have emerged to tromp minority voices on Wikipedia, a problem which has only worsened with time.
It used to be that with Wikipedia, all you had to worry about were errors written by people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Nowadays you don’t just have to contend with mistakes on Wikipedia, though. You also have to contend with overt censorship, bullying, and ideological thuggery–all of it invisible on the front pages of Wikipedia, but which can be seen on Talk, Revision, and Blacklist pages all over Wikipedia, by the people who control what the general public sees on the front pages.
While this rarely happens on noncontroversial issues (you can for example probably trust Wikipedia to tell you accurately what actor appeared in a film), if an area is remotely controversial and one side of an argument has financial and human resources the other side does not, the censorship becomes undeniable.
One of the areas where this is an acute problems is Wikipedia’s grossly discriminatory practices on men’s rights issues; they tromp the Men’s Human Rights perspective whenever possible, while bending over backwards to accommodate Gender Feminist ideologues. These feminist ideologues frequently and often hatefully tromp dissent and insert gynocentric gender ideology all over Wikipedia, poisoning much of Wikipedia‘s content.
For just one example, you should see the way they blacklist, censor, block, and vandalize the A Voice for Men page, accusing anyone who even tries to help on that page of working for AVfM, often undoing work to improve that page–work done by people we’ve never even heard of, who are just, in Wikipedia spirit, trying to help. This is clearly being done by Wikipedia editors with an axe to grind, using ever-shifting Wikilawyering to get away with erasing, reverting, and otherwise undoing the work of people who are just trying to contribute what is clearly accurate, encyclopedic information. They’ve even used the Wikipedia spam blacklist, meant to protect against spammers, and turned it into an HUAC-style blacklist instead, blocking AVfM out of pure malice; while the excuse they use is that years ago some people were inserting AVfM links inappropriately in some articles (and by the way, if we caught anyone doing that we’d ban them from AVfM forever), they have consistently refused any and all requests from any parties to remove us from the blacklist or at least add us to the whitelist on articles that are directly relevant to the prominent people who have contributed articles to A Voice for Men, or to the issues we examine. You can’t even add articles Erin Pizzey has written on A Voice for Men on Erin Pizzey’s page, or things Warren Farrell or Miles Groth have written on AVfM to their respective Wikipedia pages, because AVfM is blacklisted. We have articles written by distinguished historians, social scientists, and other academics, but their work cannot even be cited if it’s published here. Even though these people have Wikipedia entries, you can’t point readers to articles they’ve penned here. Hell, you can’t even link AVfM itself on AVfM’s own page because it’s blacklisted. We were not even allowed to type out the url of the web site, a Wikipedia editor reverted and and declared that since AVfM is blacklisted, even a non-hyperlinked reference to where to find us on the web was censored.
Even more delightfully, they reject, automatically, any objections by anyone affiliated with a site that’s been put on their McCarthyite blacklist. Indeed, when we first tried a private protest, then published a complaint about the Wikipedia censorship, the wikilawyering rationalizers used that as further proof we needed to be blacklisted: how dare we complain in public about being censored! This is still more proof we must be censored!
Can you get more Orwellian?
But let’s be clear, it’s not just AVfM: These Wikipedian ideologues who abuse their power (like those who run the Wikipedia Feminist Task Force) also often harass those who try to run the Men’s Rights Portal, having kept the Men’s Rights portal on probation for years, jumping on any excuse to portray anyone friendly to the movement as violent, dangerous, harassing, threatening, and so on. It’s to the point where most Wikipedians interested in the subject of men’s human rights just give up. Even adding prominent and important sites like Anti-Misandry, The Spearhead, Toy Soldiers, and other important sites will run you into static–although, quelle surprise, the Good Men Project and other feminist web sites with much less traffic and prominence than AVfM get a free pass all over Wikipedia. Even notorious discredited faux-journalist Dave Futrelle’s site isn’t blacklisted, despite his multiple documented cases of journalistic dishonesty, quoting people out of context, spinning their words, outright lying, and other hatemongering.
Still, as someone who’s been a Wikipedia editor for about 10 years (my first recorded edit was in 2004 I believe), I find all this shameful. Yes, Wikipedia has always been imperfect, but in the early days I never believed it would become a site dominated by ideological thugs. But that’s exactly what it’s become. Not just in the Men’s Rights arena, but in any area where people with an ideological axe to grind and the resources to quash dissent are available. The Wikipedia Feminst Project, giving students credit just for inserting their ideology all over Wikipedia, is a symptom of a larger problem: Wikipedia, a project I used to love and hold dear, can’t defend itself from those who wish to subvert it and who have the resources to quash dissent. Nor can it defend itself against anonymous users who will engage in “well-poisoning,” saying batshit stupid things pretending to represent a certain point of view to make that viewpoint look crazy and thus justify a ban on anyone else expressing those views. Apparently, that kind of sock-puppeting isn’t something Wikipedians even want to quash.
There is no point in protesting Wikipedia’s censorship on Wikipedia; indeed, gender ideologues who hate us will often go in there, pretend to be one of us, and do that exact thing to make us look bad.
No, the path to resistance to censorship is nonviolence, and creating alternative resources.
So, in the light of this ongoing censorship of men’s rights (and other) issues, and dominance by hateful Gender Feminist dogma that’s infected Wikipedia, AVfM has been working diligently to try to combat it with other resources. The truth is, there have been numerous efforts in the English-speaking world to create alternative wikis with information and viewpoints Wikipedia censors. Most have failed to get more than a little traction. Still, we have to try.
One way you can help is with the AVfM Reference Wiki. Now that wiki is meant to contain mostly just primary research references, but you can help expand it; all you have to do is sign up here and then after you have your account go here and request permissions to add content. (Does that process sound complicated? Well it is, to prevent vandalism, and also, if you can’t figure out how to sign up for an account and then after that just go and ask for permission to add content, explaining who you are and why you want to help, well, how serious can you be?) And by the way, we aren’t just looking for people to volunteer to add information, clean up typos and grammar, etc. We’re also looking for a volunteer to actually take the lead on the AVfM Reference Wiki, making a point of monitoring it regularly, figuring out how to organize content, etc. If you’re at all interested in that, please leave a comment or drop me a note.
The AVfM Reference Wiki is, however, limited in scope: we want to keep it restricted primarily to strong fact-based, verifiable empirical information, and as free from opinions, speculations, or general debates or etiquette or whimsy. We want it to be useful for activists trying to make their case to a skeptical public, getting them information that’s hard to find elsewhere.
But what about issues like terminology, history, debates within the movement, and so on? Also, what about non-English speaking Men’s Rights Activism? We are a movement that is global and are getting involved with people who speak many languages other than English. What about them?
Well we have an alternative project on this that will be announced within the next day or two. So watch this space. In the meantime, if you think you can help on the AVfM Reference Wiki, adding to the body of scientific, fact-based, primary reference material, please follow the steps above and pitch in, we definitely need more help, including leadership help, there. And if you want to get involved in an international effort to cover more than just the dry science, and to help Men’s advocates from around the world with a general-purpose Men’s Rights Movement wiki in multiple languages, you’ll be pleased to see the upcoming announcement. So stay tuned!
Its like Bax told us 100 years ago:
When, however, the bluff is exposed… then the apostles of feminism, male and female, being unable to make even a plausible case out in reply, with one consent resort to the boycott, and by ignoring what they cannot answer, seek to stop the spread of the unpleasant truth so dangerous to their cause. The pressure put upon publishers and editors by the influential Feminist sisterhood is well known.Wikipedia is now bunk. Time to work around them.
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