Philosophers From The United States

"The bias that they (Wikipedia) now reflect, is that of the Globalist Left. Of the Establishment, with a capital E."

"One thing that i would recommend, go to Everipedia, edit the article about the Delhi riots: that would be really interesting if you do that, once it is developed give me a link to it and I would be curious to see how the article differs from the Wikipedia article."

"The best thing we can do basically is to supply alternatives and make them better and better and better."

"I like and admire Larry very much. I actually think his role in the early days of Wikipedia is under-appreciated."

"If you are an admin, or if you just have a lot of pull because you are popular because you have a lot of views and stroke the right backs, if you are in the in-crowd then you have a lot more authority in the system. It is mob rule and it has been since I left. Although it was become more organised in many ways. There is a veneer of rather strict bureaucracy – a set of rules and functions applied in an arbitrary way. You can detect a pattern, but it’s a political pattern. Not a principled pattern."

"There is no rule of law in wikipedia... but the way that the policies are applied is absolutely arbitrary."

"They have no class."

"They seem not to realize that it is possible to dispute what the facts are, as if they were in all cases absolutely obvious."

"I actually think that the mechanisms just of people acting like jerks and driving off decent people who want a neutral reference, that's enough to explain the bias"

"False balance... according to which on some topics the facts are known and if you actually try to let people make up their own minds by themselves by presenting one side and then another side in a balanced fashion then you are committing the sin of false balance, and wikipedia has absolutely abandoned the neutrality policy by endorsing that journalistic canard."

"I wish they spend it in more sensible ways like they could be adding ... a feedback system for the public that does not require the public to actually interact with these insane wikipedians, that would be a start."

"Basically, the Left tends to invade open institutions, it's been their modus-operandi for the last hundred years. Basically, invading open institutions and subverting them, dominating them, and freezing out anyone who dissents their views. I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious 10 years ago, now it's just embarrassing... Now there is an official view about pretty much everything..."

"It's harder to find a page where there *isn't* some glaringly obvious bias."

"Jimmy Wales is right. We did originally adopt the neutrality policy to foster "a culture of thoughtful diplomatic honesty." In other words, the way to keep the peace among a radically diverse set of contributors is not to declare winners and losers. But that is only one reason we adopted the policy. There was another key reason: as I have explained, no one has a right to make up your mind for you, especially in an open, global project."

"A lot of mainstream news stories are broken only in Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—all of which are banned from use as sources by Wikipedia. Beyond that, many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly "radical"; they are still mainstream."

"There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length. Man makes plans, and God laughs."

"I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Wikipedia, you're still at it."

"I have learned that the people probably angriest at Wikipedia are Hindus... I am happy to point out the obvious, namely, that Wikipedia is biased... What you *would* accomplish, however, is to persuasively expose the anti-Hindu bias on Wikipedia."

"It's become both opaque and centralized, centralized in the sense that the authority to participate in Wikipedia has been greatly restricted. You can be completely anonymous and even be a top-ranked Wikipedia user with administrator rights. So, they could be working for various corporations, various government spy agencies, maybe for criminal organizations."

"Compare how Britannica and Wikipedia introduce the traditional system of Indian medicine called Ayerveda. Britannica is respectful. Wikipedia has no fewer than four dismissive epithets in the first paragraph: "quackery," "pseudoscientific," "protoscience," and "unscientific."... Not long ago, this article would have been regarded as a deep offense against multiculturalism. ... It is not the role of an encyclopedia to tell people what to think or to cast aspersions on entire cultures. ... Wikipedia should make *no* claims on its own behalf about what is (effective) medicine; that is not the role of an encyclopedia. It can repeat research on that though. ... You assume that you can detect what "modern medicine," or other scientific or scholarly work, really is, i.e., whether it actually passes muster of the scientific method. ... If the systems of peer review is screwed up, you can't. Nor if medical research is tainted by filthy lucre from Big Pharma. The world is considerably more complicated than the silly children at Wikipedia think it is. Britannica at least understands that much."

"Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia."

"It's mob rule and it has been basically since I left."

"Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years. Uh, ;-)"

"Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month. In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles."

"I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong."

"If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that specialized subject. Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi."

"A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated."

"Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)."

"...and for human beings on this planet it isn't wisdom that guides, it's wants."

"A prisoner mentality is anything that blames anything outside of you for the pain you have."

"You are going to have to struggle with something that you have never struggled with before. I am talking to you about it now. I am talking to you about the fact that your whole life to date has been in an effort to control what you see as being finite. The whole of life for human beings, predicated on the idea that one must acquire power in order to overpower conditions that will not give them what they say they need in order to have a fixed sense of security and well-being."

"We are not here to learn to play, we are here to play to learn."

"It's impossible to discover who you really are if you limit what you are willing to find out about yourself to only what you want to know."

"Real compassion lies within our ability to remember that an angry, vengeful or hateful person is usually just someone who can no longer bear the weary weight of his or her own carefully concealed despair."

"Do you know what a good life is? A good life is a life in which you never have to think about yourself again. You know why? Because you can't think about yourself without producing fear."

"There is no natural place inside of a human being for negative states. None. So if you're negative, frightened, worried, anxious, fearful, it's because you have bought into the work of the image, who shows you what it needs to show you so that you can be the person who now has to hate your condition."

"An unattended mind is the breeding ground of self defeat."

"Consciously giving up the last word is a secret prayer because the you that wants the last word isn't really you at all...it's that dark spirit of one-upmanship, that dark spirit of combativeness."

"No man is powerful as long as power is his need."

"What we find in life is based on where we put our attention. When we focus on the small worlds our thoughts create, we miss out on the beauty and possibilities we are meant to enjoy."

"Every wall that I run in to is what I have yet to understand about myself and this life, and there is no other wall, none."

"Our Real Self is a ceaseless, ever-changing, and vital expression of eternal energies, even though this timeless nature remains veiled from us because of our present level of consciousness."

"We are the subject of all that we have yet to realize, and the object of all that we have realized."

"Why do you want the approval of others who don't even approve of themselves?"

"Saying "yes" for fear of saying "no" is a recipe for resentment."

"Whatever forms your resentments may take, they wreck only you, not the one you resent."

"Nothing in the universe can hold down that rare individual who clearly realizes that he or she dosen't know what's in the way of his or her happiness, but who is willing to find out."

"God himself has made it possible for you to live without the dark place and the pains that rush out and flood out and take you over. Your choice of wanting to see and work is essential to you if you want to get rid of your feeling of emptiness, of futility. You've lied to yourself and said, 'I know what to do to get rid of the pain.' You've never gotten rid of the pain and that's evidence of self-deceit. You have to stop playing cruel tricks on yourself. So stop. Now."

"Trying to command life without studying one's own mind is like trying to play the piano without studying music."

"You are not really bothered by what others think of you. You are bothered by what you think of yourself."