🧵How few anonymous accounts censor Wikipedia with regards to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and why you should supporting Wikipedia until this is resolved.
I love Wikipedia. It's a great place to start reading into new topics, to find relevant literature, to look things up.
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However, the page on the origin of SARS2 is highly misleading. I tried to improve it. And got censored. Here are some of the biggest problems, and why they are not getting resolved.
2/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_…
1) Wording/tone clearly not objective
A hypothesis based on very solid facts and observations becomes a an "idea". The term "conspiracy theory" comes up 36 times. The fact that quoted scientists believed a lab leak to be likely is completely ignored. Many editors are rude.
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2) The page fails to provide almost all relevant information regarding the evidence based on which many scientists believe SARS2 came from a lab. For those interested, here is a link to my talk:
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As one of the guiding principles of Wikipedia is to use common sense, I tried to improve the page.
As this is a "contentious topics" page, one cannot just change the article, but has to suggest improvements in the "talk" page.
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Unlike most editors on Wikipedia, I decided not to be anonymous and to be as transparent as possible.
The place to introduce yourself is your user page: which is also a wiki page others can comment on in the "Talk" section.
6/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vbru…
As the page quotes many newspaper articles and opinion pieces by scientists that we know are misleading, I commented on misleading statements and suggested to introduce a section on a preprint that found the most ancestral SARS2 genome in presence of lab cell line DNA.
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Despite trying to be as polite as possible without lying, I was threatened to be blocked. Some editors were very rude, while others supportive. In any way, all my suggestions just got removed, as were many other improvement suggestions or discussions on this Talk page.
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The page keeps quoting papers that were proven to be wrong such as Pekar et al. as "reliable sources".
And completely ignores massive COIs such a working on a 99.5% identical virus with WIV scientists in 2018 like Holmes did.
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➡️ @Wikipedia allows a few anonymous bully editors such as "TarnishedPath" or "Bon courage" to insult, to threaten, and most importantly to delete comments written by transparent expert bioengineers.
Thus, it should IMO not be financially supported until this gets resolved.
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"should stop supporting"
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