Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.

“I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation,” Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in a letter dated October 3. “Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That’s what makes reports of Wikipedia’s systemic bias especially troubling.”

Citing research from the conservative Manhattan Institute, Cruz wrote that “researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias.” Cruz alleged that “bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia’s reliable sources/perennial sources list” because it describes “MSNBC and CNN as ‘generally reliable’ sources, while listing Fox News as a ‘generally unreliable’ source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a ‘blacklisted’ and ‘deprecated’ source that Wikipedia’s editors have determined ‘promotes disinformation.’”

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      Wikipedia tries so hard to keep all articles factual and free of value judgements, while Conservapedia strives to jam partisan value judgements into every single sentence. Even their article on the Titanic is mainly there to whine about liberals. And conservatives are too stupid to understand the difference.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia

        It gets really wild when you see what motivated its creation. These people are unbelievably stupid snowflakes.

        Schlafly also claimed that Wikipedia’s allowance of both Common Era and Anno Domini notation was anti-Christian bias.

        OMG! Using CE for dates!?

        /clutches pearls

        Also, apparently they don’t teach very goodly at the Eagle Forum University. This guy seemingly has not even had a 101-level course in ethics…

        However, some users may object to certain entries, such as that for ‘Atheism’: "Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard.

        “They live their lives according to the rule that ‘anything goes’. In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime, drug use, pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy, pedophilia and bestiality.”

        This is the kind of argumentation you’ll hear from complete dumbasses in junior high: “You guyz don’t even believe in my god, so coming from a framework that bears no relevancy outside of accepting that framework on faith, I declare that you have no morals!”

        Er, okay then.

        • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works
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          It’s been said before but if all that is keeping you from raping and pillaging is fear of an invisible sky daddy then that says far more about you than anybody else.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          It’s worse than that, it’s always such a self-report: “the only thing stopping me from doing evil is fear of punishment, so everybody else must be inherently terrible shitheads too!”

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          The website was established in 2006 by American attorney and activist Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly,[4][5

          I was not aware of this.

          The shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree, Rand.