Wikipedia: A Techno-Cult of Ignorance

by
Paulo Correa, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Alexandra Correa, H.BA.
Malgosia Askanas, Ph.D.

ISBN 1-894840-36-4

This article would not have been possible without the spirited help of the numerous friends of Aetherometry who gallantly threw themselves, day after day, into the Wikipedia slugfest, and supplied us with their observations and findings. We extend to them our most joyous thanks.

ANTI-WIKIPEDIA

Is Wikipedia a new fascism of knowledge perpetrated by disaffected leftists: a Wackopedia?

The following is a manifesto against Wikipedia - against its pretensions to being encyclopedic; against its false claims of openness; against its representation of a democratic access to, and democratic enunciation of, knowledge; against its institutionalized falsification of facts; against its sordid attempts to monopolize knowledge and rewrite history by blanking out parts of our collective memory and replacing them with imprimaturs. Yes, those are all aspects of the cyberbureaucratic fraud that Wikipedia is committing wholesale upon knowledge. The fraud that consists of producing false knowledge on an encyclopedic scale. Now, that's notable about Wikipedia, if nothing else is.

The facts and events related in this document unfolded in the course of an attempt to place in Wikipedia a factual and informative entry on the topic of Aetherometry. The unequal, rigged war which ensued crystallized perfectly what is corrupt and perverse in the workings of the wikipedian enterprise, and the utter impossibility for such an enterprise to produce anything even close to a factual and balanced reference source.

The term "Wikipedia" is a neologism designed to sound as if it denoted an encyclopedia, a community project developing and functioning through an effort of 'self-regulation'. That's what Wikipedia strives to be, right? Wrong.

It is more like a Wackopedia of the 'pediaphiles' and perverts of knowledge, the cyberpriests of infantilized knowledge. It suffices to read the falsifications committed in so many thousands of entries - ranging from Friederich Nietzsche or Gilles Deleuze in philosophy, to Black Holes or Autodynamics in physics, to Acupuncture or Morphogenetic Fields (that are both classified as Pseudosciences!), to entries on Peer-Review, Politics, Medicine, etc - and one immediately realizes that one is dealing with an over-writing machine, a digital abstract machine in charge of overcoding history and knowledge, but doing it in the fashion of a modern mini-State or a mass-mediated power mechanism: as a system of exchange of the simplest overwrites, a packaging of bullets of the most degraded information.

The reader will appreciate that we are not in favour of enshrined encyclopedias that lay down monolithically official knowledge and science - anymore that we can be in favour of a storehouse of mediocrities and inanities whose content and classification varies from hour to hour, like Wikipedia's. Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica was not far from the truth when he wrote:

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

However, he failed to notice that, like in most public toilets these days, the 'dirt' in Wikipedia is not a matter of chance but a matter of system, it is there in principle, it is systemic and endemic. And one knows that it was invariably left by either an Admin or a member of some squad or cabal, some officiating technopriest of the Cult of Ignorance.

It is all done in the name of a representation of a majority and culture for the masses. The unassailable mediocrity of the entries is the credo of Wikipedians, enshrined in a new ideology, sans-party, the cult of the NPOV (Neutral Point of View). The NPOV is supposed to be the result of the checks and balances of community participation in the Wikipedia project. But that's baloney - since the community effort is an exercise in power by the new cyber-bureaucrats that go by the name of Wikipedia Administrators, and the power-play in which the "house always wins" specializes in optimizing the degradation of information to fit it into premade slots. It is more an axiomatic of overcodes by voluntarily enslaved cyberbureaucrats, than a party-police machine. Yet, it functions with a hardline reminescent of fascism red or black, and deploys a thought-police filled with policies and procedural guidelines, as these excerpts from Requests for Adminship so well relate:

Jtkiefer has been a Wikipedian for about 2 months, but already has 1486 edits. He is active on RC Patrol, and could use a rollback button to help him. ABCD, 02:07, 27 July 2005

Kmccoy has been a Wikipedian since June 2004. (...) I believe he ought to have the delete button to finish the process. (...) Mindspillage (spill yours?), 22:37, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Madchester has 3,100 edits and has been here since January. He reverts vandalism a lot. Near 650 edits in the user talk and talk namespaces. I feel he would benifit from admin powers. Howabout1, 22:37, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

(...) A rollback button would enhance the work of a great vandal fighter. Canderson has been here for 5 months now, and according to Kate's tool has 1678 edits, 1078 to articles, 34 to talk, the bulk of the rest to User talk and Wikipedia namespaces. (...) Meelar, 16:29, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

It's hilarious, pre-pubescent and bizarre, all at once. They have standard questions that would-be Admins have to answer, like:

1. What sysop chores, if any, would you anticipate helping with? (Please read the page about administrators and the administrators' reading list.)
3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

And answers like:

1. I would check the Recent Changes page for any signs of obvious vandalism, and I would look at the Newpages for anything that could be speedied. I also might check the vandalism in progress page to keep an eye on anything.
3. Really the only thing I can remember is back when I first joined, I added a lot of box art to game articles and tagged them with the {{pd}} tag, which caused a couple other contributors to get a little upset (see my talk page), cause they had to go and re-tag them.

At the click of a button, these Administrators become empowered barbarians in a campaign of mutilation of facts, thought and history; cybervandals with a license to kill and a whole community of bureaucrats to support them. One gets the sensation that one is observing a strange electronic mix between Disneyland, maoist self-confession, a computer game of political monopoly, and a police recruitment questionnaire. RC patrol, war against vandals, keeping an eye on anything...Wait, there is more, above the admins come the actual 'bureaucrats' (sic):

Requests for bureaucratship

Bureaucrats are administrators with the additional ability to make other people admins or bureaucrats, based on community decisions reached here. They can also change the user name of any other user. The process for bureaucrats is similar to that for adminship above, but is generally by request only. The expectation for bureaucratship is higher than for admin, in terms of numbers of votes, ability to engage voters and candidates, and significant disqualifications. No bureaucrats have been appointed since October 2004. The three unsuccessful applicants since that time attracted comments about their experience and about there being little need for new bureaucrats. Candidates might consider initiating a discussion here of the prevailing consensus about the need for additional bureaucrats before nominating themselves. Bureaucrats are expected to determine consensus in difficult cases and be ready to explain their decisions.

Yes, it is almost, almost like a revamped fascist party, a cybership of bureaucratships muscling voters in electioneering campaigns and seeking to refashion knowledge by a bureaucratic consensus abusively represented as the majority consensus.

In a word, Wikipedia is the latest effort in the new leftist attempt to consolidate representative knowledge for the masses. It represents the migration of the old left into the field of cyber-information. Now programmers get to play at cyber-revolutions...

A new bureaucracy, subliminal and purely electronic, almost invisible, now manages to perform all those cybertasks necessary for the education of the masses and proper majoritarian representation with the new cybertechnical tools. An invisible dictatorship by administrators and annointed bureaucrats that have charted their plan for the ulterior evolution of knowledge - a kind of mental police of concepts and facts. It is the age of the publicitarian Left, permeated by a technobureaucratic vision of fake-democracy, self-policing and pure representation. A kind of masturbatory electronic pork-barrel.

What Wikipedia is not, is an effective repository of the best in knowledge - or even, much more modestly, of actual, factual and adequate knowledge. Instead, Wikipedia has become a forum for an officiating falsification of knowledge, a system for disinformation and an assurance of misinformation. Backed by cabals of administrators and bureaucrats, Wikipedia features the raw, unfettered and exhibitionistic domination exerted by ignorant and fascist bullies. It is easy to see how a few - ignorant and stupid ones - can, in the name of a 'democratic access to knowledge', establish the worst kind of dictatorship: the fascism of the expression, the fascism of the most mediocre and most ill-digested of commonplace notions. It is easy to see, because, in fact, our most public institutions are now subject to just that same kind of fascism - the diffuse fascism of unquestioned majorities represented by groups of loudmouths manipulated by bully boys.

Yes, Wikipedia is in the throes of a democratized, pervasive, disseminated, molecular fascism. The precedence for just such a kind of fascist attitude, for its rampant misinformation and disinformation and the collective sanction that it appears to garner is found in our very own social organization. Likewise, this goes to answer the question - 'what are the uses of such a falsified encyclopedia?'. The uses are simple - the commercial value of 'perceived information', irrespective of how false and falsified is the 'information' or its 'perception'.

How Wikipedia-fascism can be of use in the science and technology war

With a refreshing frankness , Joe Buff, in an article titled "Science versus Science" published in Feb. 2004 at www.military.com, raised a series of basic issues that confront, at one and the same time, both Big Science and the ongoing intelligence war in cyberspace with respect to science and technology - two areas pertinent to the present exposé of Wikipedia and its cultural fascism. This merits a careful going-over. Buff underlines how

Relative advantages in scientific and mathematical know-how have helped determine the outcome of every major war for at least two centuries - even for two-plus millennia.

We might say, it's far more than that, since the very history of development of civil societies puts into evidence how scientific and technological development of the forces and methods of socio-economic production was everywhere dependent upon the scientific and technological development of the forces and methods of military destruction. Buff acknowledges that the development of science is impelled by these forces, and

affects a nation's quality of life, economic vitality, and standing on the world stage.

His focus, however, is as follows:

Yet American science is at war with itself. (...) The war is not about "junk science" or "pseudo science." It's being fought, if that's the proper word, by highly credentialed and deeply respected academics and researchers. I believe the science war has resulted because of a conflict between what science ideally should be, or ought to be, and what in the real world science actually turns out to be. Part of the scientific community, in fact, has jumped on the bandwagon of that intramural blood sport, electioneering -- and thus serves inadvertently as a test case and a learning tool for the military. This is because scientists, by weighing in on partisan politics and calling in doubt public policy, in my opinion have begun to undertake heightened Knowledge Warfare. Knowledge Warfare is defined as the broadest strategic level of manipulating how a populace thinks and makes decisions -- it includes information warfare (using cyberspace), and psychological warfare (a classic stratagem).

He has almost entirely plunged his finger into the wound: Knowledge Warfare - the broadest strategic manipulation of how a populace thinks and acts; employment of cyberspace and mass-media to control a mass-society and fashion a consensus to be called "democratic". He places the scientific community squarely at the focus of this Knowledge Warfare; and at the heart of that focus, the dispute between Big Science and small science, between the power-servant peer-review institutions of Big Science and the facts of science or discovery:

Science is supposed to be founded on objectivity, solid proof, and a spirit of open inquiry. The essence of this is called the Scientific Method, whereby an hypothesis is stated, and then experiments are performed to either validate or invalidate the hypothesis. A key part of the Scientific Method is that those experiments have results which are reproducible by independent laboratories. A crucial aspect of advances in science is that papers summarizing the results of studies be subjected to stringent peer review. The bottom line in peer review is whether or not the experimental results are correct and support the conclusions stated in the paper. Alas, if only it were that simple. (...) Many scientists are extremely conservative when it comes to new ideas that could demolish the established order. Big Science, as it has been called by commentators and journalists for years, is about three things: funding, funding, and funding. Much of that funding comes from the federal government. Consequently, science itself represents a form of pork barrel. It has its vested interests, its bitter rivalries, its successes and its failures, its insiders and outsiders. (...) Science is the handmaiden and queen of the modern battlefield.

This brings us squarely to the question of the uses of Wikipedia, and in particular, those that concern protection of the interests of Big Science. For Wikipedia is at the intersection of this Knowledge Warfare. Its cult of the sanctity of mainstream peer-review, and its determination to brand bona fide non-mainstream scientific efforts as Pseudoscience, lumping them together with doctrines or ideas that would disgust any good scientist, all point in the direction of a gigantic disinformation act. Tyrannized by fanatical lefto-facho bureaucrats and by zealots of Official Science surrounded by an always-ready supply of zombified adolescents, Wikipedia has become a supplement to the imaginary ‘peer-review system’ that supposedly rules the secretion called Official or Big Science. The unconscious entente of Wikipedia proves the collective adherence of its participants to the brave new concept of Official Science: if it does not occur within those institutions which embody the powers of the State (Academia), the Military Mechanism and Capital, it is NOT science, nor worthy of the Media (including mainstream peer-reviewed publications), not worthy of being endorsed for the strategizing of mass-control.

In a truly impoverished world there is a multiplication of the false; utterances or systems that would qualify as scientific or philosophical thoughts are few and rare. For these few, a new dilemma or double-bind arises: if they are not accepted by majorities, by the effective organs of majorities, they cannot ever gain the recognition of Big Science; and if they cannot gain that recognition, they are not eligible for public or private funds. They are, in a word, condemned to a minor existence, at best, or no existence at all.

As part of a global strategy to control the thought, perceptions and affections of populaces, there rise against these few efforts to think and research independently, the voices of the basest, with slogans like - “if this work were scientific it would have gained recognition by an institutional power, or been published in a peer-reviewed mainstream journal”; “if it is so good it would already have been commercialized”; "If it were science, it would not be ignored". These are just some examples of the gravest and stupidest of the base common-senses that ‘human automata’ are now programmed to regularly emit - and Wikipedia is replete with this mechanical exhibitionism of ignorance, close-mindedness and willful stupidity. For it is precisely this notion - the notion that nothing can be scientific unless it has been officially sanctioned as science by institutional powers - which bars pioneering efforts, particularly in basic science, from being taken seriously, from finding a source of worthy capital, from any possibility of success. It is a notion that works as a self-fulfilling prophecy, weeding out all that that threatens the equilibrium of the supposedly 'known'. Hence, disinformation wins, as legitimate efforts and innovation are effectively strangled by irrational and uninformed belief in that disinformation - a belief of a religious allure, only its content is 'science' not religion. And that's precisely why it is called Knowledge Warfare: because it is disinformation and not knowledge or science that wins.

Perhaps the most grimly amusing part of all of this is that Wikipedia does not even accurately enunciate Official Science. Rather, its cyberpriests are poor sods who entertain themselves with splattering over "dangerous" articles ready-made Stop and Caution signs, as if they were curators of public morals, guard-dogs intent on protecting the 'unknowing populace' from the horrors of scientific invalidity - and this with respect to scientific claims and endeavors whose content they openly and proudly proclaim to be ignorant about! Wikipedia is not an organ of Official Science; rather, Wikipedia is a volunteer enforcer of the politics of that ‘science’, a rank manager, an organ of an Officiating Science made up of norms that remind one more of the adolescent games of Alpha Beta Phi societies than anything resembling the thought of science. In a word, Wikipedia has become an officiating organ of scientific censorship and scientism. In that mass-media role, it now stands as the rule (the norm) of the most mediocre, an effective media dictatorship of falsified knowledge, and thus an effective 'mediocracy'.

To us, this is the Jed Rothwell syndrome, the Serpent’s Tooth, all over again - but on a larger and grander scale. A pervasive fascism, the wikipedic fascism of pseudo-knowledge. A 'pediaphilia' of the mind, often dictated by 10- and 14-year olds and written for them. The victory of infantilization as the best tool in the thought-control of a mass. From the viewpoint of power-systems, Wikipedia is indeed very useful. It keeps us all ignorant, but proud of it, all the happier for it.

Is Wikipedia's fascism and suppression of knowledge a fraudulent intelligence operation?

In the beginning, one could have wondered where the 'spontaneous' animosity towards Aetherometry came from. On closer scrutiny, the animosity was found to be not simply aprioristic and uninformed, and more intent on libeling scientists and their efforts than on creating an encyclopedic article, but also part of a general fanaticism displayed on all Wikipedia entries relating to new science and its controversies. While this alone shows Wikipedia to be an extraordinarily biased depository of so-called 'information', the archives of modifications and the discussion pages which accompany these entries record a shocking degree of zealotry and fanaticism backed up by an administrative power that is systematically abused through overt or covert deletion of texts expressing opposing views, through alteration of records, caricatural distortion of content, and the determined suppression of knowledgeable contributions.

One cannot but start to wonder - why is this animus so entrenched in a self-styled community project? Why do administrators abuse their power and control the project, instead of acting as balanced moderators? Why are they so wanton in their display of power and its abuse, why do they behave towards potential contributors like a swat-team towards rioters, why do they see fit to use war tactics and cover their tracks with tag teamwork, why are they so compulsively obsessed with a competitive scoring of bureaucratic points?

The answer that slowly emerges is that it has to do with the insidious, insinuating, small-time molecular fascism of Wikipedia. It is, when all is said and done, a private concern masquerading as a public service, with the pretension of revising the entirety of historical facts and human knowledge (science included). In a word, it is a major field for power systems to do battle in. But more than that - and this is where it becomes ever more interesting - the leaders of this neo-maoist cabal for the purification of knowledge are people like William M. Connolley, employee of the British government, or Dr. Fred Salsbury, who has worked with the US Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick, MD. Slowly, one begins to realize that this Wikipedia, and, at least its cabal in charge of science, is an intelligence operation where at all hours (in their private or their public life), these semi-government officials and semi-scientists, with their numerous, mostly anonymous and frequently under-age minions, engage in disinformation and open 'Knowledge Warfare' against their enemies. The attacks are aided and camouflaged by a mob of almost exlusively anonymous administrators who 'lend a hand', and who can be invoked ("there's thousands of us") and summoned to help 24 hours a day. In the gloating words of one of the most rabid ones:

This is how wikipedia works.Anyone can edit any article at anytime. If you don't like that then you'll just have to lump it. The Correas "work" is not proper science because they have refused to submit it to review by other scientists. Don't give me a load of crap about IE magazine or their own vanity press. That's not proper peer review. What's more, they refuse to let anyone see their papers in full unless they pay for them. That's well dodgy and quite rightly leads to suspicion of crackpottery and fraud. We have all been far too polite really. We've welcomed you and your junk science here, we've been insulted, bullied, accused of being a cabal and generally been given a hard time. But you won't win. Because there are a lot of us, thousands in fact. The aetherometry article will call a spade a spade, and describe aetherometry as what it is. Theresa Knott (a tenth stroke), 08:19, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

This half-veiled 'moronic-intelligence' operation which is presented as if it were a democratic undertaking, fair, square, and impartial (NPOV, Wikipedia's ideological catchword), is, in fact, a systematic operation of vilification and demonization of any knowledge, scientific or otherwise, that is NOT orthodox by Wikipedia's standards - i.e. cannot boast a sufficient number of Google hits and/or a record of publication in mainstream journals that are regarded as flagships of official science by a "consensus" of Wikipedia luminaries. It's a gross and obscene spectacle, a joke that is being perpretated on the public. And given the high Google ratings of this joke, it is also a fraud, with serious consequences. For what other name can one give to passing information that is false and created for explicit and exhibitionistic purposes of disinformation?

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