We're on a mission

A note from the founder.

The world is in trouble. The far-left and the far-right are battling for every inch of intellectual turf. Online trolls, digital demons, and Internet goblins lurk under our most vital information bridges. Media is everything, everywhere, all the time. And yet the information that feeds the Media Ubiquity has been corrupted—and, now, it’s corrupting us.

This summer, I decided to take a leap. Everything was fine. Everything was great. I was working as a writer for one of the most vibrant politics/culture/tech news sites today (h/t

Pirate Wires

). I was breaking stories that spurred legislative action and prompted major social media platforms to change policies. Elon Musk was re-posting my work. So was the President of the United States.

But I knew there was a bigger mission to pursue, one that would require total dedication.

For nearly a year, I’d been reporting on Wikipedia, a site whose evolution I’d followed for decades. Wikipedia had always seemed to me (and probably to you) a strange hybrid: part marvel of human collaboration, part Internet goofball. But it was undeniably influential.

Over the past eight years, however, Wikipedia transformed itself into much more than that. This began in 2016, when the world was tipped upside down. A reality TV star won the presidency. This was not supposed to happen. For the liberal establishment (emphasis on lower-case-“l” liberal) this was a kind of political and cultural armageddon. It was a step beyond crisis. Something had to be done.

Hillary Clinton decided to do it. Just weeks after losing the election, the former presidential hopeful declared a “fake news epidemic” in front of Congress. The implication was clear—voters would not, could not, have made that choice had they had access to reliable information. They had been lied to—Russia, the Kremlin, Trump, secret meetings, “kompromat,” dossiers, etc. Our information pipeline had been hijacked.

In response, this network of government, NGOs, tech companies, and global bodies deployed the greatest information lockdown America has ever known. Ruling preemptively what was accurate and what was misinformation or disinformation, and enforcing these edicts through institutional and corporate capture, legal remedies, and social pressure, the liberal establishment gained root access to our social order. A knowledge coup was pulled off in history’s most powerful democracy.

One principle great propagandists know intuitively is this: if you erase, you must replace. If you tell people what they can’t read, you must tell them what they can. If you deny a source, or a whole cross-section of sources, you must provide replacements.

For the liberal establishment, Wikipedia was the obvious candidate to serve as that replacement source. It was the source of reliability, the “ground truth.” It wasn’t the only source—of course, the mainstream media sits upstream of it—but it served as a vital link.

Right at the time the liberal order was attempting to reconstitute itself to meet the exigencies of the Age of Trump, Wikimedia Foundation (which owns and operates Wikipedia) was undergoing its own revolution. It, too, had just gone through a leadership crisis, resulting in the resignation of its executive director. It needed a new path forward. And, with the help of a number of senior Hillary Clinton staffers and aides (much more on that coming soon), it found one.

Wikipedia would become the “essential infrastructure” of the new information order. It would be the wiring that could join the reporting of the mainstream media to the information grid of the social Internet. By enlisting the major social media platforms to cooperate (which they did with alacrity), the liberal establishment could ensure approved information would be piped into the open Internet, which, in many ways, became a closed circuit.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be telling the story of this paradigm shift in information. We’ll uncover the truth behind Wikipedia’s wonderfully inventive, but nevertheless highly misleading, origin story. We’ll unpack the ways Wikipedia has led us astray on the most important issues of our day. And we’ll shine a light on how the site really works—the mechanisms that turn the wheels of the biggest, and possibly most important, information repository of the digital age.

NPOV is about bringing you the Neutral Point Of View on information platforms shaping our future. We’re sifting through noise to bring you signal. We’re telling stories that haven’t been told.

Join the conversation—comment, post, respond. Make your voice heard. It’s time for us to start talking about the #WikipediaCrisis.

–Ashley Rindsberg

Founder, Editor & Chief Investigative Officer

NPOV Media