And of course, that will be the perception when you start using AI like Apple Intelligence or Google Gemini. But regardless of where you go to ask for information, that tool will actually likely get most of its data from the main source people rely on on the Internet and also the main source of search engines and even AI. And that is Wikipedia. Now, I want my followers to be educated. I don’t want any of you to accept data given to you by some technology source without applying critical thinking. So the question is if Wikipedia is the outsized source of all information and even the main source of decision making in AI systems, can you trust this source? Can you trust Wikipedia? If you’re wondering what this has to do with privacy topics, you will actually find that it has a lot to do with my topics.

If you want to find out surveillance techniques used against you on your phone, for example, will you find the real answer? If so, can you dump sources like Rob Braxman and just rely on Wikipedia? If you want to be a critical and independent thinker and not be reliant on spoon-fed information, then you need to stay right there. Wikipedia is going in importance with the growth of AI. The problem with the AI learning methodology is that it is initially fed a lot of information to develop its knowledge base. Early AI models were able to do that with wide-ranging sources of information, other sources, which included Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and so on.

Today, the information used for creating AI models come mostly from Wikipedia and published peer-reviewed papers from academia. The problem is that sources like X, Reddit, and YouTube did not want their data to be extracted by AI bots for free. But currently, there is no limitation on Wikipedia, so as a general rule, depending on how detailed the information about a topic is on Wikipedia, then you will notice that it is better covered by AI models. There are exceptions. Some AI models are able to gather information from a permitted source. For example, Grok from XAI, which is owned by Elon Musk, is of course granted permission to access X beyond just Wikipedia.

Google Gemini can access YouTube. But the general availability of Wikipedia means that search engines and AI models will always include the data from Wikipedia as the primary source. The main premise of Wikipedia is that it is an open source platform, and anyone can edit any content on it. Now, you might think this is dangerous as anyone having free reign to modify any content on Wikipedia must mean that at any time there’s going to be a lot of inaccurate information on it. So we’ll explain Wikipedia’s defense of their editing infrastructure and see if this truly works to give us good information.

Based on their descriptions, Wikipedia is made of hierarchies of editors. The main premise is that Wikipedia’s editing is done by consensus. There are anonymous editors that do not identify themselves. Then there are named editors that openly put their names on the edits, and many of these people are extremely heavy users within their area of expertise. For example, there could be people whose interest is in basketball, and they may know if someone posts a particular stat on the sport that may not ring true. If some newbie posts something and these experts don’t agree, then they will have more of a reputation and will be able to knock out the post of the newbie.

There are actually also automated bots that monitor the content of Wikipedia for certain topics so that general mass editing, for example, like massive deletions and insertions, are immediately removed and can then prevent trolls from doing long-term damage. Finally, there are editors with admin rights that are trusted by the management of Wikipedia, and these editors have the supreme power, so to speak, to decide the final outcome of edits to content. That is the general infrastructure involved with editing, and if you listen to one of the co-founders that currently is still involved in the Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales, you will likely see him praise how well Wikipedia is doing.

The other co-founder, Larry Sanger, would tell you the opposite and would tell you that Wikipedia has gone astray. He also adamantly states that Wikipedia is now very biased. Powers in Wikipedia The reality is that the main gatekeepers of Wikipedia, which are the powerful editors of their respective domains, are empowered by consensus from their own communities of editors, and they have a lot of editorial control in what goes on Wikipedia. For example, supposedly they have come up with rules that content posted on Wikipedia must always imply a neutral stance. While this is apparent in the style of writing you often see, I will tell you right now that depending on the topic, the content is far from neutral.

Depending on the subject matter, there are a lot of biases in the content and a lot of it may not even correlate with the news. There will likely not be any argument on factual pieces of information, like when someone died, for example, or dates when certain historical events occurred. But when it comes to interpretation of what actually happened, particularly with current events, then likely there will be disagreement among the viewers of the content, which would likely represent the split in viewpoints politically. I’ll get into more specifics on this later, but the main issue you will discover is that the very infrastructure of the editing process is subject to abuse, and this means that you, as a critical thinker, cannot accept that Wikipedia information is accurate or relevant.

But just to emphasize this point, those in academia do not accept content from Wikipedia as valid sources for writing papers, for example. Certainly you cannot trust Wikipedia for making medical decisions in contrast to accepted medical sources like Medline or PDR. The Physician’s Drug Reference. So even for information based on just factual information alone, it can’t really be relied on. I wanted to point out these examples since this is really key to know. Some independent study was made on drug information on Wikipedia and plenty of errors were found. So relying on it for life and death decisions is obviously problematic.

The problem I will state again just on the accuracy side is that this is the main source of data for AI. While it is not the only source, the convenience and availability of information from Wikipedia will mean that AI knowledge will be biased towards whatever data is shown on it. While I’m not a political channel, this is important to understand because you’ll have to apply your own critical thinking to see if information you see based on current events and current political figures are accurate. For example, would you use information you find on Wikipedia about a candidate to influence your vote? Again, trying to stay away from political influencing here from my end, let me just tell you a very suspicious editing policy on Wikipedia.

When it comes to current events, someone cannot just post any particular content on Wikipedia without it being verified by truthful sources. Depending on your political bent, you can review what’s said, for example, about the Hunter Biden laptop case and see if that reporting sounds neutral to you. The problem is that accuracy of information is decided on by the editors based on a published rule of official truthful sources. The list of mainstream media allowed sources are mainly CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, and so on. The list of sources not allowed as proof of veracity are sources like Fox News.

So right here, I have a problem. While I would never claim to anyone that Fox News is completely unbiased, neither would I be able to, with a straight face, claim that CNN is a factual source. In fact, all these outlets openly admitted to suppressing information on the Hunter Biden laptop or Biden’s mental status. Thus, stated clearly from Wikipedia’s own documentation, the only valid sources of truth is based on known left-biased mainstream media sources. I don’t understand this at all. When just from viewership numbers alone, it is apparently clear that more people watch Fox News than any of those other outlets, yet they are excluded as a source.

And I’m not implying that Fox News be the only valid source either. I’m saying that there should be a balance of sources. That’s the most sensible approach. I suppose if you’re politically on the left, then this would sound correct to you. But as someone more on the middle, I find this very strange. Just to give you a specific example, we all know the official statements made about COVID from the CDC. And I have to be careful here because of censorship from YouTube. But I advise you to read the whole article on COVID on Wikipedia.

Any reasonable person with knowledge of current events know that the CIA itself released some evaluations of the potential source of COVID, and it does not coincide with the current content on Wikipedia. Also, we are quite aware of officially acknowledged side effects experienced by many, but you will not find it mentioned on Wikipedia. There’s more, but clearly the line of explanations on Wikipedia exclude non-mainstream but valid knowledge. Snowden. I’ve often referenced the Wikipedia content related to Edward Snowden since many details related to privacy and mass surveillance were actually revealed by Snowden.

And it was important for me to check back every so often to update my knowledge. What I’ve seen recently is a change on how the Snowden information is presented. While the original articles about Snowden seemed to have a more libertarian bent in the past, I’ve noticed that a lot more content has been added lately, and the bias seems blatantly anti-Snowden. Since this is something I’ve looked at frequently over the last 10 years, it is surprising to see. Well, I’m not surprised when I actually reveal the next level of facts related to the Wikipedia infrastructure.

But though the imagery relating to Snowden in the article points at Snowden in a much more negative light, there are some interesting facts also shown, which is intriguing. For example, a couple of years back, I remember seeing that participation in the NSA prison program was a paid service, which by the way was not mentioned many, many years ago. This was just added recently. Meaning the NSA paid big tech money to access their private data. But the most recent data on Wikipedia actually now states more specifically that the NSA actually paid billions to big tech companies like Google, Yahoo, and Apple for clandestine access to private data, including directly scanning emails.

The risky part of trusting Wikipedia is that it goes deeper than some of the observations I made about political figures and anti-establishment personas and anti-establishment ideas. Not only do certain editors have significant control over what gets posted on Wikipedia, the bigger risk is that someone with resources can have significant control over those editors. Larry Sanger, one of the original founding members of Wikipedia, acknowledged that early on in the process, they already knew that postings on the site were detected and known to come from three-letter agencies, specifically the CIA.

In the past, they did officially recognize that some post originated from the CIA based on IP addresses, and even from politicians pushing their side of an issue. Nowadays, Wikipedia actually has a tracking mechanism for a poster based on IP address. So trolls are identified based on rogue posts and then their IP address are recorded. That’s how they discovered sources of posts in the past. This should be enough to dissuade the occasional troll. Now, this has progressed to Wikipedia identifying VPNs and basically having a bit of a surveillance infrastructure to see the patterns of the people posting.

However, it should be obvious that an organization with power, such as a three-letter agency with over $50 billion in funding, should be able to get around flimsy security based on IP addresses. If the CIA cannot figure out how to evade Wikipedia censorship via IP addresses, they can hire me and I’ll teach them how to do it. But I don’t think they need my help. Well, a dozen years ago, Larry Sanger already knew that Wikipedia has fully embedded CIA resources entangled in the editing process. There are recent revelations that suggest that an entire floor at Langley is dedicated to Wikipedia alone.

Meaning the reality is that any organization with enough resources can likely overwhelm any countering editorial consensus if the organization does not like the content. This means that Wikipedia is very vulnerable to state players with the intent of controlling the writing of history like a US or a China, Russia or Iran. It could also mean that very large companies like Apple, for example, could have enough paid editors to ensure that content related to them are scrubbed. Just to test, I just did a search on Wikipedia asking if an iPhone is spying on you.

Of course, I have several viral videos on this topic and if you look at the descriptions of the spyware supposedly found on phones, there is zero content indicating that Apple or Google itself is doing any spying, even though some of that has been used as evidence in court. This I know to be completely false, but I have no editorial power to influence this on Wikipedia and I don’t know who they classify as an expert source on this as this kind of content will not appear on CNN. I haven’t specifically noticed any pro-China sentiment, by the way.

I looked at the descriptions of the Tiananmen Square massacre which is a heavily censored topic in China and it may be that the CIA editors got the edge here in pushing the story as many of us saw it in real time. Now, what is the conclusion from all this? Definitely, Wikipedia is not a true neutral source as we expected from old publications like the Encyclopedia Britannica of old. This is a platform that is subject to manipulation. And I noticed that history can change on it as I discussed about the changing story on Snowden.

So understand that Wikipedia content, if changed, can be part of a psi-up operation that can actually influence much of future technologies. And depending on who’s in control of these deep state players that actually manage the Wikipedia editors at three-letter agencies, content can of course change again. While editors are identified by usernames and IP addresses, obviously if the editors are actually government employees then new people can take over old identities and retain the old reputations and power. Wikipedia reminds me of the Ministry of Information in the book 1984. Over time with enough control from unlimited funding could some actually change history.

In the book 1984, history was changed so significantly that the current population actually forgot who their original enemy was. My assessment is that any information you get from any source nowadays, particularly AI, will be based heavily on Wikipedia. Thus, Wikipedia has very long-term effects on society and pop culture. That to me makes it very dangerous and clearly makes it a target for influence. Sure, you can likely trust Wikipedia to give you true dates, times, but do not rely on it for scientific data and certainly not on any interpretation of a current event nor to judge any person.

This also means you must extend this doubt to the AI that sources its information heavily from Wikipedia which currently includes all AI models. Folks, as many of you know, this channel does not have sponsors. Instead, we rely completely on community support to keep us going. Hopefully we give you enough information that you find value. Some of you support us on Patreon, Locals, and YouTube memberships. And though I don’t publicly acknowledge you for privacy reasons, you are very appreciated. Thank you. For most of our support, we instead strive to provide products and services that help you in your privacy journey.

Our newest product is the Brax III Privacy Fund. This is a community project involving several companies and is sold on BraxTech.net. This is an important tool in the privacy battle as it is immune from things like location tracking from big tech. We have other products and services that can be found on our privacy social media site Braxme. We have Brax Virtual Phone that gives you inexpensive, no KYC phone numbers for better anonymity. We have Braxmail which offers unlimited aliases and many domains to create different email identities. We have Bytes VPN which protects your IP addresses from being harvested by data brokers.

Join us on Braxme and meet the way over 100,000 users who discuss privacy issues daily. Thank you for watching and see you next time. [tr:trw].

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