#75 Wikipedia · The Internet’s Biggest Gaslight

They told us Wikipedia was the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

What they didn’t tell us is how it edits you back.

In this episode of Think First, Jim Detjen pulls apart the myth of Wikipedia’s neutrality — exposing how “fringe” labels erase arguments, how intelligence agencies treat it like a propaganda shop, and why Tucker Carlson was left stunned when co-founder Larry Sanger admitted just how compromised the site has become.

This isn’t just about a website.

It’s about the funhouse mirror shaping classrooms, headlines, and even the AI models now writing your future.

Dry wit included. Gaslights spotted. Poetic truths exposed.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Funhouse Mirror Cold Open
• 1:20 Wikipedia’s Promise vs Reality
• 2:03 Case Studies: Mandel, Roth, Carlson
• 3:12 Neutrality Redefined and Blacklists
• 5:20 The Anonymous Power Structure
• 6:20 Intelligence Edits and WikiScanner
• 8:15 Gaslighting, Poetic Truth, and the Book
• 8:46 Transparency Without Accountability
• 10:00 AI Trains on a Tilted Mirror
• 11:05 Political Scrutiny and “Fringe”
• 13:15 War Pages, Coordinated Edits, and Bots
• 14:30 Wikipedia as Global Syllabus
• 16:00 Stakes, Reforms, and Final Challenge
• 19:00 Closing and Calls to Action

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

It's late. You're sitting in front of your laptop. The glow of the screen is the only light in the room. And because you're human, because you're curious, you type your own name into Google. At the very top, above every article, every social media post, every resume, sits Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia of Record, the People's Encyclopedia, the Oracle of Truth. You click, and suddenly, there you are. Except it's not you. It's not your achievements, not your career, not the real story of your life. You scroll down, your chest tightens. The more you read, the less you recognize yourself. It's like standing in front of a funhouse mirror. The reflection is you, but it's stretched, bent, distorted. Which means, if the mirror lies, the lie becomes the truth. And that leaves us with one enormous question. What happens when the encyclopedia we trust to define reality starts gaslighting us? This is Think First, where we don't follow the script. We question it. Because in a world full of poetic truths and professional gaslighting, someone's gotta say the quiet part out loud. On paper, Wikipedia is one of humanity's proudest achievements. Launched in 2001, an encyclopedia written by everyone for everyone, neutral, transparent, open. Larry Sanger coined the name. Jimmy Wales put up the servers. And the promise was intoxicating. Knowledge for the digital age, accessible to all, governed by the sacred law of neutrality. Teachers told students, don't cite it, but you can use it. Journalists leaned on it to fact-check background. AI engineers scraped it to train their models. It quietly became the infrastructure of knowledge. But here's the rub: the dream isn't the reality. Bethany Mandel discovered this the hard way. She opened her Wikipedia page and found what she later called a curated collection of her worst moments. Not her work, not her career, not her motherhood, just every hostile attack glued together into her official biography. Philip Roth tried to correct his own page. Wikipedia insisted his novel, The Human Stain, was based on one professor. Roth wrote in and said, No, it wasn't. I wrote it. I know. And Wikipedia rejected him, because he wasn't a reliable enough source on himself. Tucker Carlson found the same thing. He pulled up his page and read it aloud. It didn't call him a journalist or a broadcaster, it called him a leading voice of white grievance politics. Think about that. The most quoted encyclopedia in the world, labeling people not with facts, but with editorial slurs. And it raises questions. Questions that ripple outward. Who really controls Wikipedia? Who decides which sources are reliable and which are blacklisted? Why do some narratives survive while others are scrubbed? And what happens when artificial intelligence, the next filter of all human knowledge, is trained on Wikipedia as its foundation. Because if Wikipedia gaslights, it doesn't just distort your perception of the present, it rewrites history itself. The founding story of Wikipedia is pure poetry. Two visionaries, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, set out to create the world's first open encyclopedia. No gatekeepers, no ivory tower, just humanity writing itself into history. And the sacred law, NPOV, neutral point of view. The rule was simple: represent all sides fairly. No bias, no spin. Present the facts and let the reader decide. It worked for a while, but then came the redefinition. The neutrality clause was rewritten, no longer all views. Now it became all significant views from reliable sources. Significant, reliable. Two words that look harmless, but hide a trapdoor. Because who decides what's significant? Who decides what's reliable? In practice, it meant establishment media outlets became the arbiters of truth. The New York Times? Reliable. The Washington Post? Reliable. CNN reliable. Mother Jones? Reliable. But Fox News? Not reliable. The New York Post? Not reliable. The Federalist, Daily Caller, Epic Times, absolutely not. Wikipedia calls it the Perennial Sources list. But let's be honest, it's a blacklist. Here's how it works. If the Washington Post calls you a conspiracy theorist, that's a reliable citation. But if a conservative outlet defends you, that's disallowed. So the article looks neutral, but the scaffolding is rigged. Your critics count. Your defenders don't. It's like refereeing a basketball game where one team's baskets count and the other team's don't. Different mask. Same puppet master. And the referees? They're not professors or journalists. They're not even named. They're the Power 62. The 62 most powerful administrators on Wikipedia. And, here's the kicker. 85% of them are anonymous. Imagine the Supreme Court in ski masks, handing down rulings under Reddit handles like CatDad420. This is the machinery of truth, and it runs behind the curtain. This is where the cracks begin to show. Bethany Mandel's biography reads like opposition research. Philip Roth gets rejected as an unreliable witness to his own life. Tucker Carlson gets rebranded by a hostile columnist. And those are just the public cases. Behind the scenes, it's even stranger. Back in 2006, a grad student created WikiScanner. It matched anonymous edits to IP addresses. And it found CIA headquarters in Langley editing Wikipedia articles. Picture it, fluorescent lit cubicles, government contractors in khakis and lanyards, scrolling, typing, adjusting entries on world leaders. Forget James Bond. Today's spies don't need Aston Martins, they just need broadband and edit permissions. Larry Sanger himself now warns Wikipedia is a gold mine for intelligence operations. And you know he's right. Because if you were running propaganda, where would you go? Straight to the Encyclopedia of Record. And once you start looking, you see it everywhere. Edit wars over climate change, COVID pages locked down to prevent dissent. Political biographies sculpted like campaign ads. And the same gaslight every time. The page looks neutral, but the bias is baked into the scaffolding. Before we dive back in, a quick word about the project that's bigger than this podcast. What if the biggest lies you've been told weren't lies at all? What if they were stories? Comforting stories, soothing myths, the kind of poetic truths that feel good, even when they're not true. That's the game. Politicians do it, media does it, institutions do it. They don't just lie, they distort. They gaslight you with shame, they cradle you with bedtime myths, and that gap between perception and reality is where we're losing the plot. That's why I wrote Distorted: How gaslighting and poetic truth bend our perception of reality. It's not another self-help book, it's a survival manual, a guide for spotting the tricks, dodging the spin, and refusing to outsource your thinking. Early access is open now. Find it at Barnes Noble, Amazon, and at gymdechen.com. And if you do grab a copy, here's my one ask: leave a review. Because the world isn't short on lies. It's drowning in distortions. Alright, back to the show. Now, defenders of Wikipedia push back. They say, it's open, it's transparent. Every edit is logged, every talk page is public. Anyone can contribute, that's the point. And technically, they're right. But here's the problem. Transparency without accountability is still manipulation. Yes, you can see the log, but the Power 62 decide which edits survive. Yes, you can comment on the talk page, but if your sources are on the blacklist, you're dismissed. It's like a transparent casino. You can watch every hand, but the house still wins. Here's the mental model. Call it the fun house mirror effect. The reflection looks real, it feels accurate, but it's bent by whoever polished the glass. Wikipedia reflects reality, but it reflects it through a warped lens, polished by establishment media, anonymous administrators, and sometimes intelligence agencies. The reflection isn't fake, it's distorted. Now, let's lift the curtain a little further. Because once you understand how the rules are written, you start to see how much else bends around them. Take AI. Large language models, the engines behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, are trained heavily on Wikipedia. So whatever bias slips into the encyclopedia slides straight into the machine. One recent study found LLMs actually misapply Wikipedia's neutrality rules. They can't always tell when the encyclopedia itself has been tilted, which means AI doesn't correct the distortion, it just polishes the bias and feeds it back to you. And here's the kicker. Researchers estimate about 5% of new Wikipedia pages are now AI-generated or AI-assisted. So the mirror isn't just bent, it's recursive. A distortion teaching machines how to distort, the snake eating its own tail. Meanwhile, Washington is circling. In August 2025, House Republicans launched a formal investigation into Wikipedia. They demanded logs, communications, even evidence of foreign influence, warning about organized efforts to manipulate U.S. public opinion. And earlier in the year, the U.S. attorney for DC questioned whether Wikimedia should even keep its nonprofit status, accusing it of enabling propaganda. So the same site, once hailed as the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, is now under federal scrutiny for narrative warfare. And then came the exchange that really landed. Larry Sanger explained how Wikipedia's rules let editors downplay ideas by calling them fringe. That's when Tucker Carlson cut him off.

SPEAKER_02: 11:42

Well, the inclusion of the term fringe tells me right away that you're a freaking liar. The liar, if you use that word. Because it's a word like terrorism and so many words, racism, that we can't really define and don't care really to define. Like what does that mean? And if the whole policy turns on the word, then it's fair to demand a precise explanation of what it means, but we never get one. What is fringe? They can't tell you fringe is what I don't like. Fringe is hate speech.

SPEAKER_00: 12:09

Yes, yes. Or it's simply a new view that is going to become dominant in 10 years or something. Happens all the time.

SPEAKER_02: 12:15

Galileo, fringe character.

SPEAKER_00: 12:16

Happens all the time in the history of ideas.

SPEAKER_02: 12:19

No. Right. So that's so obvious. Even a child understands that. Right. Right. The key is the definition. And if you can't come up with a definition, then we have to take the word out because it it can only abet lying.

SPEAKER_01: 12:34

And if you think that's bad, listen to this. Sanger recalls a moment back in 2006 when a tool called WikiScanner went live. It tracked where edits were coming from. And the results were shocking.

SPEAKER_00: 12:50

Yes, it it wasn't until like, I think it was 2006, 2007, Virgil Griffiths did master's research. He came up with a tool called WikiScanner that enabled people to look up um the IP addresses of people who had done edits. Um and like who had edited which articles. And so they were able to find all a whole bunch of edits uh coming from Langley.

SPEAKER_02: 13:25

Oh, I didn't even know that.

SPEAKER_00: 13:27

No, it's true.

SPEAKER_02: 13:28

Not not to brag. I could just tell by reading it. Like because I know what that is, right?

SPEAKER_00: 13:32

So I I since have learned differently and learned much better. Um, I I don't have the the background that you have, um uh, but uh it's it's also very clear to me what we are told about the way that intelligence works now is that um, of course, there's the old-fashioned cloak and dagger um spying going on, but uh a large part of the remit of intelligence today is to manipulate public opinion in various ways. And uh Wikipedia is like just a gold mine for the intelligence agencies of the world because uh it's like a one-stop shop. You know, you can just like type in the things that you want people to believe, I suppose. Now, how that works, like which agencies are involved, how how the heck should I know?

SPEAKER_02: 14:24

Well, you can tell by reading it. You can tell instantly by reading it some of what's going on. I mean, you never know the whole story, of course, but it's super obvious to me, some of the players in this, very obvious, and they're the big ones, of course. So, um, but I my question, and everything you've said makes sense. My question, however, is like, how is this allowed? So if you're not allowed to edit Wikipedia for pay on behalf of, say, a PR agency, how are you allowed to do it on behalf of an intelligence agency?

SPEAKER_00: 14:59

That's a good question. I actually um asked Elon Musk and president um and the president to to uh you know um use Doge or other government resources to uh investigate what um United States employees uh were actually um editing Wikipedia and you know perhaps um stop that. Um I don't know, maybe maybe we shouldn't. Maybe there's reasons, uh legitimate reasons for for government employees to to do this, but uh at least Elon Musk did retweet that um and uh got a lot of support. So um Did anyone do anything about it?

SPEAKER_01: 15:48

Think about that. The co-founder of Wikipedia just said, yes, the CIA was editing entries, and no, nobody really stopped them. Forget James Bond. Today's spies don't need Aston Martin's or Martinis, just broadband and a login. And the battlefield? It's global. The Anti-Defamation League revealed more than 30 Wikipedia editors colluded to inject anti-Israel narratives. Other reports showed 14 editors banned during battles over Gaza coverage. Pages weren't just being updated, they were being weaponized, rewritten in real time to tilt perception of a war. And while humans fight it out, bots are learning the game too. Research shows automated systems can now slip in edits so subtle they bypass detection. Think about that. A shadow army of Wikipedia bots rewriting history footnote by footnote while everyone else argues about commas. So, let's be honest. Wikipedia isn't just a mirror, it's a factory floor, a fun house production line where edits, blacklists, bots, and backroom battles mass-produce reality for the rest of us. And once you see that, the stakes don't just feel academic, they feel existential. And just before we head into the close, there's one more piece of this puzzle you should see. Because Wikipedia doesn't just live on the web, it's the world's default curriculum. If a journalist wants a quick fact, they check Wikipedia. If a student needs a biography, they check Wikipedia. If a game show contestant's cramming for Jeopardy, you guessed it. Wikipedia. Which means if Wikipedia calls something fringe, your teacher won't assign it, your search engine will bury it, and your friends will look at you sideways if you bring it up at dinner. So when we say Wikipedia tilts reality, we don't just mean online, we mean the living room, the classroom, even the pop quiz. It's not an encyclopedia, it's a syllabus for the whole planet. And if you think I'm exaggerating, remember this. Wikipedia has over 6 billion monthly views. That's more traffic than Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok combined, all feeding a single perception of reality. So ask yourself: if the encyclopedia is the upstream river, what happens when the river runs crooked? So, what does this mean for you? It means Wikipedia isn't just an encyclopedia, it's a battlefield. It's where narratives are fought, it's where reputations are made and broken, it's where poetic truth gets dressed up as fact. And because Wikipedia sits at the root of the knowledge pipeline, bias there is bias everywhere. AI models train on it, Google Answers lean on it, classrooms cite it, journalists repeat it. This is why Congress is probing the Wikimedia Foundation. It's why Larry Sanger left the project, it's why he published his nine theses for reform, abolish the blacklist, and fake consensus, allow competing articles and demand transparency. It's radical. But when the encyclopedia gaslights, radical is the only option. And this is why I wrote Distorted, how gaslighting and poetic truth bend our perception of reality. Because this isn't just about Wikipedia, it's about every system that claims neutrality, but operates as a funhouse mirror. So the next time you click on Wikipedia, remember, you're not just reading facts, you're reading an edit more. You're reading what survived the blacklist, you're reading a funhouse mirror. Wikipedia doesn't just gaslight, it proofreads the lie until it looks true. You don't need all the answers, but you should question the ones you're handed, because sometimes the encyclopedia doesn't just edit history, it edits reality, one footnote at a time. Until next time, stay skeptical, stay curious, and always think first. Want more? The full six-step framework we use is at gaslight360.com. You can also dive into the deeper story, the bio, the podcast, and the mission at jimdechen.com. And if you like this one, tag it. Save it. Share it.