 Recently, I've made a personal commitment to totally stop using Wikipedia for anything anymore. And that has been a long time coming. I think when I first knew about Wikipedia, I thought it, back in high school, back like, I don't know, ten years ago, I thought it was a really cool idea. I thought it was very surprising that it did as well as it did. But now the time has come that Wikipedia, I don't trust it for anything anymore. And in fact, a lot of times when I read something on Wikipedia, I sort of assume the opposite. It's so bad. It's gotten to the point where I trust Wikipedia, and to the same degree, I trust the mainstream media. And in fact, there's a reason to think that Wikipedia is just a repository of the mainstream media. I want to talk about why. Now first off, I'm going to put a link to it in the description. Two weeks ago, there was one of the co-founders of Wikipedia actually put out an article on his blog or something like that. And it's something like, you know, Wikipedia's Beyond Repair or Wikipedia's Badly Bias or something like that. And I think it talks about some of the things that anyone who has a pulse, or I guess as an adult is sort of aware of current events and reads Wikipedia, realizes really quickly. And that as Wikipedia has, you know, it doesn't, I mean, it pretends to have a neutral point of view. It says everything it wants you to think, as if it's a fact. But Wikipedia now more than ever has been totally devoid of a neutral point of view. On any controversial issue, Wikipedia will state what it, I mean, I won't say this is what we want you to believe. It'll just talk about things as if they are true, even if they're not, even if they're highly controversial. Now he talks about some political issues in particular, compare some articles. But here's my issue, okay? Wikipedia nowadays, actually in a live stream I did a couple of days ago, we talked about the, I forgot the name of it, someone reminded me, it's the Murray-Gelman effect. Okay? What is the Murray-Gelman effect? You need to understand this. You need to understand, you know, if you want to understand the media or something like that. The Murray-Gelman effect is, you know, let's say you know about a topic, let's say you're a mathematician, you're a physicist, you're a biologist, I don't know, and you read an article in the news media about, you know, biology or something you know about. What inevitably happens 100% of the time is that journalist that wrote that article and that publication that published that article, they don't know anything about any specialized topic or really anything. If you know about this topic and you read a news article about it, you will be cringing, you will, you know, you'll realize this journalist has totally understood issues backwards, they get basic terms wrong, they extrapolate from little tiny things, and they really, you know, they, journalists use specialized information as just sort of a playground for their own biases, for them to make up their own things and settle it off to people. And if you're a specialized person in a field, you immediately realize this in an article on your field. But then the Murray-Gelman effect is this, you go from that specialized field that you know about, then you go to something else. Let's say you read about Iran or Donald Trump or something like that, and then if you don't really know about that, you just accept, okay, well I guess the journalist is accurately representing this thing. And that's the Murray-Gelman effect. It's the fact that, you know, everyone sort of realizes that the media is wrong about the things they know about, and then they read about other things and they just sort of take it at faith, right? And the fact of the matter is that that's true with everything in the media. Now why do I mention this? Why do I mention, why are we talking about journalists in the media and with respect to Wikipedia? Well, Wikipedia is really just a repository of media biases nowadays. Now the co-founder, in the article I linked, or really the co-founder of Wikipedia who wrote that article, he's been a critic because Wikipedia, you know, it relies so much on journalists and it doesn't like professional opinions. And I think at the same, so, you know, it sort of has a bias for midwits, right? It has a bias for people who don't really know that much about a topic. They, you know, write news articles and stuff like that. And it's suspicious of highly formal academic, you know, distillations of information. But at the same time, he doesn't mention it, you know, it's, Wikipedia is also biased against people on the low, I mean, well I don't want to say low into the spectrum like they're stupid or something like that, but I mean, Wikipedia doesn't like original research, it doesn't like original information. Just an example, for things on the internet, let's say, you know, there is a lot of newsworthy stuff that happens, you know, I hate to say it, but on Reddit or on 4chan or something like this. There are a lot of sites where, you know, internet, I don't want to say memes but I mean like events, you know, newsworthy events happen on, you know, either social media sites or, you know, forums like 4chan or Reddit or something like that. And Wikipedia, the thing about Wikipedia is you can't just do quote unquote original research, you can't just say, here's a link to this Reddit thread where this person says this, what has to happen on Wikipedia is that you have to wait until the news media picks up on these internet events. You have to wait until the news media of, you know, basically filters the information in the way that they want. That's how it works on Wikipedia. So it's weird because on one, like you don't have real world information because you're not allowed to have original, you know, you can't just do original research and put it, you know, put the direct links on Wikipedia. But at the same time, you, you know, they are sort of biased against professional opinions as well. So what does Wikipedia end up being? It ends up being a repository of the news media. They just put out stuff that is basically, you know, every Wikipedia article is basically just like a bunch of news articles put into one page. And you wouldn't, most people would not trust the news media for anything nowadays. So why would you trust Wikipedia? That's what it ends up being. And the only difference is this, the difference is a difference of tone. The news media, especially nowadays, you can thank Donald Trump for this, but you can thank other people as well. The news media barely pretends to have no point of view. I think sometimes they will say, oh yeah, we're calling it, you know, down this, we're just being objective, blah, blah, blah. But everyone sort of understands if you turn on CNN, you are getting a propaganda channel. If you turn on Fox or MSNBC, you are getting nothing, literally nothing but propaganda. They don't even care about the real world. The real world is just a playground for them to, you know, sort of squint their eyes at and have their biases fill in everything. And then they report that to you with this, you know, totally flat tone. That's what the news media is. And what's happened is, you know, now Wikipedia, the only difference there is Wikipedia sort of cleans it up. It says, oh well, well, you know, we won, oh Anderson Cooper, when he says these things, he sounds, you know, like he's obviously perturbed. So we got to clean it up. We got to, you know, make it sound a little more, you know, well-presentable and stuff like that. As if. I mean, this is the thing that's most annoying to me, actually. I will say this because you guys who watch my channel will know I'm the kind of guy. If I say something that's controversial or, you know, I know that a lot of people might disagree with, I'll usually say it as if it's a joke, okay? And that's not because I'm actually saying it as a joke, but I'll say it in a way that says, okay, I'm saying this thing. I know it's controversial and you're welcome. I know that people disagree with it. You're welcome to voice your disagreement. And that's the way that most people usually communicate. They understand, like, what is a common level of understanding. Like, we know that there are issues that are controversial, okay? Whereas the news media and especially Wikipedia has now taken it upon themselves to say these issues, we are not going to say that you're allowed an opinion on them. We're not going to present controversies and things. We are just going to state what we believe in a totally face-saving way. This is the same kind of thing, you know, the media, of course, since no one believes the media anymore. The news media had to invent this thing called fact checkers. Now, what is a fact checker? It's just the same journalist that wrote the lies in the news article. Now they're just writing lies in a more objective tone. But there's a difference between saying something objectively and actually representing things well. And one of the biggest problems that I think a lot of people have psychologically is they can't distinguish between someone saying things as if it's fact. And I'm just going to state my opinions. And I mean, if you can think this, but you're just simply wrong. You just don't know what's going on. People have a lot of problems distinguishing a flat tone that is really just the way of psychologically convincing people that you're just unbiased, you don't have any emotions in the affair. When in reality, I mean, you can just go on Twitter and see what journalists actually think about everything. They're all nuts. They're all crazy. They're all deluded in weird ways. So anyway, Wikipedia, I don't trust it anymore than I trust the media at all. And I don't think anyone else should. And I really want to stop using it, even for things that it might not be, even for raw factual things that I wouldn't even think they'd be biased on. Sometimes the point of view just seeps in in ways you will never really understand. And the worst thing about Wikipedia is if you can go to the talk page on any controversial topic or even topics that aren't controversial, and you'll see that people who edit Wikipedia, they know very well what they're doing. They know very well that you can lie with the truth and you can tell the truth with lies. And if you were to sentence in just the right way, you can tell people things that are only truths. You can only tell them facts, but you can lead them into a lie. You can lead them to believe something that isn't true. And this is something that the media has perfected and Wikipedia has perfected. So what is the solution? I don't know what the solution to Wikipedia is. I am just not going to use it. You guys know that I'm a big proponent of a decentralized internet. I think that it's dangerous that Wikipedia has become a site that people rely so much on. It's now integrated into other websites and stuff like that. Wikipedia with all its biases, of course, Google is going to use Wikipedia. It'll put Wikipedia pages in video descriptions that it doesn't like or stuff like that. So I definitely think that just in general, even if Wikipedia just disappeared and there's no replacement, I think that would be an improvement. Because we go back to the wild west of the internet where people had to actually go out and figure things out for themselves. And you might say, well, there might be a lot of untruths out there. But the fact of the matter is people have natural BS detectors. They are able to pick up on what's true and what isn't. They don't need the condescension of a journalist or a Wikipedia editor, which in reality really just centralizes the biases. Now we have one flavor of opinion, which is all journalists. I know they like to think they're different, but they're basically all the same person. One flavor of opinion whose biases, whose oversights we are all liable to. As if we all, I want to be accountable to for what I believe. But I don't want to have to rely on what a journalist believes. I don't want to have to trust some stupid authority. If I get something wrong, I'll get it wrong and I'll pay for that. I don't want society to be reliant on the biases on one particular person, including myself, but especially a journalist. Because I know journalists are morons. Everyone does. I don't know why this is controversial. I don't know, stop using these things. Stop using Wikipedia. Don't even, whatever. It's time for another video, whatever. This isn't long enough. See you guys next time.