An unreliable source is one that stands in the way of the left wing agenda.
Unsurprisingly, this mirrors something that a medieval (IIRC) figure said: that if something in a secular source is also in the Bible, you might as well use the Bible, and if it's not in the Bible, it's not important and you can ignore it.
Left wingers mastering Wikipedia bureaucracy to control the narrative suggests that left wingers have a stronger Will to Power - they want to control institutions so that's what they spend their time on.
Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record
"Wikipedia administrator David Gerard cares a great deal about Reliable Sources. For the past half-decade, he has torn through the website with dozens of daily edits—upwards of fifty thousand, all told—aimed at slashing and burning lines on the site that reference sources deemed unreliable by Wikipedia. He has stepped into dozens of official discussions determining which sources the site should allow people to use, opining on which are Reliable and which are not. He cares so much about Reliable Sources, in fact, that he goes out of his way to provide interviews to journalists who may write about topics he’s passionate about, then returns to the site to ensure someone adds just the right quotes from those sources to Wikipedia articles about those topics and to protect those additions from all who might question them.
While by Wikipedia’s nature, nobody can precisely claim to speak or act on behalf of the site as a whole, Gerard comes about as close as anyone really could. He’s been a volunteer Wikipedia administrator since 2004, has edited the site more than 200,000 times, and even served off and on as the site’s UK spokesman. Few people have had more of a hand than him in shaping the site, and few have a more encyclopedic understanding of its rules, written and unwritten.
Reliable sources, a ban on original research, and an aspiration towards a neutral point of view have long been at the heart of Wikipedia’s approach...
The minutiae of Wikipedia administration, as with the inner workings of any bureaucracy, is an inherently dry subject. On the site as a whole, users sometimes edit pages directly with terse comments, other times engage in elaborate arguments on “Talk” pages to settle disputes about what should be added. Each edit is added to a permanent history page. To understand any given decision, onlookers must trawl through page after page of archives and discussions replete with tidily packaged references to one policy or another. Where most see boredom behind the scenes and are simply glad for mostly functional overviews of topics they know nothing about, though, a few see opportunity. Those who master the bureaucracy in behind-the-scenes janitorial battles, after all, define the public’s first impressions of whatever they care about.
Since 2017, when Wikipedia made the decision to ban citations to the Daily Mail due to “poor fact-checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication,” editors have waged an intense, quiet war over which sources to ban, which to give strict scrutiny to, and which to crown as Reliable. Based on the site’s policy, it’s easy to understand why: while editors with a stake in the frame of an article have to acquiese to determined opponents bearing Reliable Sources—or at least must have long, grinding disputes about what should be emphasized and why—if they can whip a consensus to declare the sources opponents would use unreliable, they can win edit wars before they happen. This extends well beyond simple factual coverage: cite an opinion or even a movie review from one of those sources, and Gerard or other editors sweep in to remove it as having undue weight.
The battle over the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online newspaper that alternates between tabloid-style sensationalism and serious, in-depth investigative journalism provides a good example of how this works in practice... As a result of those sparse discussions, Wikipedia editors treat the site as generally unreliable. Every citation to it is presumed suspect, and rather than spending time and effort haggling over each, editors are broadly free to remove them en masse after cursory examination. In practice, this means Gerard scanning through dozens of articles in the span of a few minutes, tearing out all information cited to the Free Beacon as presumptively unreliable.
In Gerard’s frame, and in Wikipedia’s, if something is not cited by a Reliable Source, it may as well not exist. As Gerard puts it: “if it's in [a Reliable Source] use the [Reliable Source], and if it's not in [a Reliable Source] then the real world didn't care.”
Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia...
Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.
In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed. Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.
Most interesting to me is the case of Huffington Post. See, in addition to volunteering as a Wikipedia administrator, Gerard is the system administrator and owner of the Twitter account for RationalWiki, a left-liberal wiki focused on directing snark and critique towards groups and concepts the authors dislike, from effective altruists to right-wingers to woo. Gerard has edited RationalWiki upwards of 30,000 times. He updated the site’s harshly critical article on the Huffington Post occasionally, one time adding one of its most scathing critiques: “The truth is not in them.”
When it came time to comment about them on Wikipedia, though, he was rather more enthusiastic, calling the site “a perfectly normal [news organization] on this level” and raising an eyebrow when people wanted to rate its politics section as less than reliable.
As of today, Wikipedia treats the Huffington Post as wholly reliable for non-politics content and unclear for political content.
During discussions of PinkNews, an LGBT-focused news outlet, the user gnu57 provided several examples of journalistic misconduct:
The site defamed lesbian Scottish politician Joanna Cherry, falsely claiming she was being investigated for homophobia, retracting only after Cherry pursued legal options against them.
The site falsely claimed the Israeli health minister had called coronavirus a “divine punishment for homosexuality.”
The site made salacious, misleading claims about Bill O’Reilly.
The site has a history of tabloid-esque sensationalism, clickbait, and photoshops about celebrities
Gerard, examining the outlet when it came up for comment, lauded it as highly reliable, emphasizing that “claims of journalistic malfeasance on their part didn't check out at all when we looked into them and discovered they'd actually handled them in an exemplary fashion.” Later, he pushed successfully for it to be treated as a fully reliable source despite a note from the discussion that caution should be used.
Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source.
He regularly makes similar nudges around sites like The Daily Beast (“Generally reliable - not perfect, but a normal news source, editorial processes, etc - no reason not to use it as a source") and Teen Vogue (“Their news coverage is solid - surprising for a fashion magazine, but it's like the surprise when Buzzfeed News turned out to be a good solid RS too”), as well as supporting the removal of any notes of partisanship from Vox.
What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly and not unreasonably, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn't be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.
He would prefer to see Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess, banned from the site entirely: “unreliable, editorially incompetent, repeatedly caught publishing false information, conspiracy theories and hoaxes, [undue weight] for opinions.”
What about The Free Press, created by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss to cover investigative stories and provide commentary she felt was being stifled at the Times? To ask is to know the answer: “It was created not to be "reliable" in any Wikipedia sense, but to feed the opinions of the sort of conspiracy theorist who uses large words spelt correctly. If TheFP ran that the sky was blue, I'd see if I could find an actually-reliable source and cite that instead.”
While he has not yet succeeded in getting either source formally deprecated, Wikipedia considers both unreliable and he prioritizes removing citations to them in his edits.
His treatment of the libertarian flagship publication Reason Magazine (which, despite him, remains a Reliable Source even on Wikipedia) stands out the most: based solely on tendentious readings of issues from nearly fifty years ago, he warns people to “apply extreme caution,” saying he “wouldn't use it at all except where unavoidable.”
In each instance, he is backed up by a vocal contingent of equally opinionated like-minded editors, who go by pseudonyms such as Aquillion, XOR’Easter, or NorthBySouthBaranof. This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on—just the natural outgrowth of common traits within the set of people whose Special Interest is arguing about sources deep in the bowels of an online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable. The debate, to be clear, is not between tabloids and the New York Times, a battle the Times cleanly wins. In Gerard’s world, scientists and academics who publish in Quillette or Reason are to have even their opinions discarded entirely, while to cast any doubt on the reliability of the word of Huffington “the truth is not in them” Post and PinkNews is absurd.
From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia...
While Gerard’s early years as an editor and admin mostly went smoothly from an outside view (notwithstanding the complaints of Wikipedia’s own sneer club of the day), he showed some early signs of willingness to abuse his role to further petty feuds or to smooth over inconvenient moments. Cade Metz, now a New York Times tech correspondent, documented many of those moments in his years of Wikipedia muckraking...
After Gerard apparently used his IP-revealing (“checkuser”) powers to post Landeryou’s personal information in a scathing blog post, Wikipedia’s “arbitration committee” (ArbCom) elected to strip him of those powers for abuse, dissemination of private information, and “failing to maintain proper decorum in public fora.” In response, Gerard accused the committee of libel, and Mike Godwin (of Godwin’s Law fame), then general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, pressured the committee to reconsider and permanently delete all record of their decision. This was mostly unprecedented on Wikipedia, and the whole thing caused an enormous stir...
“LessWrong irritating me seems good for me. Or productive, anyway,” he mused in his introductory post. “This may not be the same thing.”
The introduction would, in a peculiar way, prove pivotal for both Gerard and LessWrong, with his time on the site and his eventual revulsion towards it acting as a microcosm for a much broader change sweeping the internet and setting the stage for one of his longest-term obsessions: controlling the public image of its users through every tool at his disposal...
The consensus LessWrong position on RationalWiki, meanwhile, was best put by the user Vladimir_M:
Pretty much any RW article I've ever seen takes the premise that the position of the mainstream academia -- and, in case of more explicitly politicized topics, the left-center of the respectable public opinion -- is correct, and any serious contrarian position can be held only by comically nutty crackpots or sinisterly malevolent extremists. Now, this isn't always a bad heuristic: it produces more or less correct conclusions on topics where the aforementioned institutions are usually reliable, such as, say, physics. But on any topic where they are significantly biased, RW ends up as a passionate defender of all their biases and falsities. And from what I've seen, the RW writers typically make no serious effort to study such topics dispassionately, but instead jump at the first opportunity to engage in ideological warfare, typically via ignorant sneering and mocking.
... Gerard emphasized alongside this that he is extremely conservative about changing his mind or embracing new ideas...
In August of 2013, when military leaker Chelsea Manning announced her gender transition the day after her sentencing for providing hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive documents to WikiLeaks. Another editor immediately renamed her Wikipedia page to “Chelsea Manning” over objections. After a brief edit war, Gerard blocked non-admins from editing the page. From there, well, all hell broke loose...
When the dust settled, ArbCom formally admonished Gerard and restricted him from using admin tools on pages related to trans issues, then banned Sandifer from the site indefinitely. This was the last straw for Gerard: in his eyes, he had used his judgment, prioritizing people over blind process to make a compassionate decision, and Wikipedia treated him as a villain for it while allowing transphobes and bigots to run free so long as they followed the letter of the law—then, worse, banned his longtime friend for fighting on the side of right. Gerard would make his own run for Wikipedia’s ArbCom at the end of 2013, shortly after these events. He castigated the site and its authorities for “strange and disturbing decisions” that, in his telling, saw “the reputation of the English Wikipedia dragged through the mud.”...
A couple of weeks before the Manning blow-up, he commiserated with another aggrieved user about “the racists, sexists and Libertarians” on the site and “the assumption that these are fine positions to hold and variance from them is mind-killing.” By early 2014, though he was still posting and participating in open threads on the site, he noted that he “[found] quite a lot of LW utterly offputting and repellent.”
In particular, Gerard gradually started mentally associating LessWrong with neoreaction, though for a time he acknowledged he only saw incidental encounters between the two. Starting in early 2014, the RationalWiki article on neoreaction became his second baby, as he tweaked and re-tweaked it to explain just what he found off-putting about them.
My impression is that Gerard fixated on neoreactionaries as the one small part of a much broader rise of the online right that was happening in his own online neighborhood. In the old internet culture he had helped build, explicitly right-wing people were rare and often targets of mockery. That became unsustainable as more people came online, and eventually they built their own spaces and started poking their heads in where people shared some of their interests. The same lack of censorship Gerard harangued Yudkowsky to maintain on LessWrong meant that, by and large, the site would give people a hearing out before dismissing them. Because Gerard was on LessWrong when the internet splintered and polarized, he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level the site became his go-to scapegoat for all that was going wrong for his vision of the internet...
In 2014, Gerard was mad. In the prior two decades, he’d given countless hours of his life in volunteer efforts to build and fight for the internet, his adopted tribe. And for what? Wikipedia, the site he had so devoted himself to, had betrayed him, standing for pedantic rules-lawyering over justice. The world had betrayed him, prosecuting and imprisoning or killing the activists who embodied the ethos of the internet he loved. The internet itself had betrayed him, giving rise to a movement he feared and loathed as much as any he had railed against before. The ill-fated relationship between two gamers that would bring the unified online culture he had idealized to a final, ignominious end had already begun, though he didn’t know that at the time.
He had started out on the internet 20 years before as a passionate partisan for his new tribe and its potential to transform the world. In the intervening decades, though, his optimism had waned. He went from assuming good faith in a collaborative effort to viewing online culture as a struggle between good and bad, his righteous allies and his evil opponents. As for the process he had argued so passionately about keeping human-centered and sane? Well, Wikipedia violated that truce, and now the barbarians were at the gate. He knew more than almost anyone alive about Wikipedia process, and now it would be just another weapon in his arsenal.
Wikipedia trench warfare is an elaborate game, opaque and bizarre for outsiders to even contemplate, in which motivated figures fight to exhaustion over often trivial-seeming changes with deep significance to participants. Given that, I’ll expend my last remaining bit of sanity to bring legibility to a few of Gerard’s skirmishes. When Gerard fixates on something within an article, he touches it up via a series of gradual, mild tweaks: often individually defensible, usually citing one policy or another, all pointing one direction. He removes neutral information tangential to his fixation, gradually expands and adds citations to the sections he fixates on, and aggressively reverts any change that goes against his vision. When challenged, he raises policy names, invites editors to escalate, requests hard proof for straightforward claims he knows are true, accuses opponents of being fringe conspiracists, and if all else fails, simply goes silent and waits for people to shift their focus before returning to what he wanted to do in the first place.
The article for Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich, one of Gerard’s quiet focuses, provides an illustration. Gerard had made his article, after all, back when Gerard was just a tech nerd and Eich a force in building out the software infrastructure he relied on. But in 2008, Eich donated against gay marriage. After another user added mention of that donation to the Wikipedia page in 2012, Gerard guarded it repeatedly against deletion. In March 2014, when Mozilla appointed Eich its CEO, Gerard’s social circles erupted in fury. Eich stepped down quickly. Immediately, Gerard entered the talk page and the article to ensure Eich’s opposition to gay marriage became central to his Wikipedia narrative. In the first few months of 2014, Gerard edited Eich’s article nineteen times, fleshing out details about the controversy and removing older external links more focused on Eich’s technical work. Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript. After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.
Eich, though, was not the topic that consumed Gerard’s thoughts and conversations on a near-daily basis around the internet. No, starting in 2014, that honor belonged to LessWrong and everything that descended from it...
Sandifer had been busy during her time away from Wikipedia, writing an essay collection titled Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Five of the self-published book’s six essays (about ants, TERFS, Trump, the Austrian School, and Peter Thiel) were forgotten the day they were written. The sixth is Gerard’s masterwork. Sandifer starts the essay with quick critical overviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land, then goes on a sprawling journey from William Blake to John Milton, with stops at Fanon, Debord, Butler, and Coates. This review describes the experience well. I can only describe it as leftist free association based on the prompt “Say whatever comes to mind, inspired by David Gerard’s obsession with Roko’s Basilisk and neoreaction combined with your own love of leftist theory.”...
Hold on, you might be thinking. Surely you’re not saying he got around Wikipedia’s ban on citing his original research by feeding all his obsessions to his old friend before citing his friend.
No, of course not. That would be crass.
They got another friend to review the book when it came out, and he cited that...
For almost eight years, his masterwork has survived: a section in an article about his hated former haunt, run by a man he had feuded with for years, sourced to his friend’s interpretation of his friend’s interpretation of his pet ideas.
Finally, Gerard had found the most Reliable Source of all: himself.
Today, effective altruists tend to think of Émile Torres when they think of their most committed malicious critic. Before there was an Émile Torres, though, there was David Gerard...
Of all Gerard’s feuds, this one bothers me the most. Despite my wide-ranging disagreements with their philosophy and my public criticism of aspects of their organizational structure, I have long felt that individuals within the movement are uncommonly virtuous, more serious about doing good and more earnest than the lion’s share of their critics. They deserve scrutiny, but they consistently respond in good faith to that scrutiny.
In this case, a couple of effective altruists took RationalWiki at its word that its users would respect constructive attempts to improve it, and set about making suggestions a few months later. One tried to present more of an EA perspective in the article. Gerard reverted it. Kelsey Piper, then a prodigious young writer, made another attempt. Another user reverted it. The EAs had not quite understood the name of the game, had stumbled into a snark website aiming to work politely alongside people who mostly just wanted to poke fun at them. They did not return...
Gerard got his start fighting scientologists and started out at RationalWiki mocking witches and 9/11 truthers. No matter his opponent, he saw reality the same way: he was the Respectable Mainstream Consensus accurately scrutinizing flimsy fringe movements, they were fringe advocates who just wanted to dodge scrutiny. When he ran into a movement whose members were happy to face scrutiny and who were willing to come into his space trying to resolve differences in good faith, he found that his true love was simple mockery...
Back in 2009, Wikipedia stripped Gerard of his power to see user IP addresses because he revealed private information about a man he didn’t like. In 2013, Gerard fought for the right to immediately change a trans woman’s article title to her preferred name as a matter of basic respect, then reacted with outrage when Wikipedia punished his friend for revealing private information about a man Gerard didn’t like. And in 2020, Gerard finally had the chance to combine his passions: he could reveal the private name of a man he loathed. He jumped at it...
Gerard’s old rival Cade Metz was writing an article about Scott [Alexander] in the New York Times, he was going to use Scott’s real name, and Scott would prefer he didn’t. Scott cited patient care and personal safety as reasons to be circumspect about his name, pointing out that he had received death threats and faced dissatisfied blog readers calling his workplace, and noting that like many psychiatrists, he preferred to be a blank slate to his patients in his out-of-work life and to avoid causing any drama for his hospital.
Finally, Gerard had the opportunity of his dreams: to supply the Paper of Record with a decade of exhaustive notes about everything he hated about Scott Alexander...
He quickly got to work fending off critical responses to the NYT article on Scott’s Wikipedia page. After someone pointed out a long list of critical responses from The Hill, Reason, Quillette, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, journalist Cathy Young, and others, Gerard shrugged: “Zero of those are [Reliable Sources], so we can’t use them.”
Policy, you see. Hands were tied.
This time, though, people were paying attention, and Gerard had a problem: While you can get away with a great deal when people aren’t looking, Wikipedia does not actually want to be known as the site where people spend decades compiling dossiers against their personal enemies.
Gerard defended himself gamely for a while when people escalated the dispute up the Wikipedia bureaucracy...
When someone pointed out that Wikipedia explicitly prohibited the sort of edits Gerard was doing, noting that “an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual—whether on- or off-wiki—or who is an avowed rival of that individual, should not edit that person's biography or other material about that person, given the potential conflict of interest,” Gerard shot back with “It's more of a no-evidencer. Supply on-wiki diffs that you consider show this, and how.” He knew the policy, of course—he helped write the policy! It was an elaborate sort of game he invited people into: You know this, I know you know it, but do you have the patience to outlast me on it?
This time around, though, some people weren’t buying. Someone set up a vote: Should Gerard be banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander? After seven years of tendentious edits, Gerard was finally facing scrutiny...
After seven years, someone finally saw what was going on.
The ban passed.
To the best of my knowledge, David Gerard never responded. He simply shrugged and carried on eliminating Unreliable Sources...
I find Gerard much more sympathetic than I had expected going in, and had I met the version of him that showed up on LessWrong, I suspect I would have gotten along with him quite well. As Gerard says, no one is a villain in their own mind.
His story, in the end, is an ironic tragedy. He started out in love with the internet and its potential, eager to volunteer untold hours to its idealized mission to spread reason and knowledge for free, outside the often arbitrary and capricious bounds of official institutions and that’s the spirit in which he came to Wikipedia. He wrote lucidly about the importance of human-focused process and the dangers of rigid reliance on “Reliable Sources” that he knew were nothing but.
But at some point—perhaps the Manning debacle, perhaps yet earlier—he, obsessed with his vision of basilisks, set out to become one: to kill everything he touched on Wikipedia, using every trick he had warned against in a no-holds-barred struggle against everyone and everything he hated. He judged Reliable Sources based on whether they shared his viewpoint, and when that wasn’t enough, he built the Reliable Sources himself. He made sweeping changes to the site with wildly insufficient explanations, then guarded them with decades of built-up knowledge of how to frustrate opponents and wear them down. He demonstrated step-by-step that he was correct: Wikipedia’s processes really were insufficient to deal with a sufficiently motivated bad-faith actor with friends willing to cover for him, and each time the site slapped him down he simply found another way to pursue his bitter mission.
On many topics, I love Wikipedia—its spirit of collaboration and sharing, its accessibility, the passionate editors who have built so much that I value. But—well, Gerard has been a Wikipedia administrator almost from its beginning. He was a spokesman for many years. He has played a pivotal role in its policy for years and has spent the last half-decade doing everything in his power to shape even the sources people are allowed to use in order to wrest the site into his image. On any heated issue, then, the site lives under the shadow of Gerard’s deadly gaze. The idea of a democratic, leaderless group has calcified into one where an old guard determined to weaponize process act as de facto leaders of everything they can bludgeon others away from.
It’s a shame for the website and for those of us who use and appreciate it, but once more, Gerard has the right of it: “It’s difficult to think of a worse (appropriate) punishment […] than continuing to be someone who would think this was a worthwhile way to spend their life.”
But hey, don’t take my word for it.
After all, I am not a Reliable Source."
