Wikipedia is up to its usual shenanigans yet again. If one opens any Wikipedia article, there is a tear-jerking emotional plea for funds, begging Indians to donate money to keep the Wikimedia Foundation alive.
In the appeal where Wikipedia was begging for money, it made an interesting admission. In the age of AI, Wikipedia is at the heart of online information, powering everything from personal searches to AI technologies.
This admission is not new – in a sense – we all know already that the biased information on Wikipedia is tarnishing the information pool across the internet – including AI technologies. But this admission does serve as a reminder that we need to reinforce, repeatedly, that Wikipedia has a pronounced Left bias and that the information in its articles is anti-Hindu more often than not.
In one of the pages which detail the 2002 Sabarmati Express burning by Jihadi mobs, which claimed the lives of 59 Hindus including women and toddlers, the Wikipedia editors have declared that they consider Teesta Setalvad as a ‘reliable source’, not the Supreme Court of India. This is not a hyperbole, but an actual discussion on the ‘talk’ page of the Wikipedia article titled, “Godhra train burning”.
A brief about the bias in the Wikipedia page on ‘Godhra train burning’
When one searches “Godhra Train Burning”, the first result to show up is the Wikipedia article. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article itself reveals the utter bias of the page.
The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article says that the cause of the fire that burnt 59 Hindu pilgrims to death “remains disputed” even though multiple people have been convicted for burning the Sabarmati Express train in Godhra. Even Indian leftists have almost stopped claiming that it was an accident, but the Wiki article in the first paragraph says that “The cause of the fire remains disputed”.
The truth, however, is not “disputed”
On 27th February 2002, the Sabarmati Express was scheduled to reach Godhra station at about 3:30 am. On that day, the train was running four hours late. As such, it arrived at Godhra by 7:40 am.
8 minutes later, a mob of 2000 Islamists set 59 Hindus, including 25 women and 15 children, in the coach S6 of the train on fire in Godhra’s predominantly Muslim area – Signal Falia.
31 Islamists were found guilty of the Godhra massacre on February 22, 2011, by the trial court (with only 11 receiving the death penalty and 20 receiving life in prison), and all 31 convictions were affirmed by the Gujarat High Court in October 2017, resulting in everyone receiving a life sentence. Prior to that, based on the testimony of witnesses and survivors, it was obvious to anybody with even a modicum of intellectual integrity that Muslims had set the train on fire.
In February 2003, an accused person made a judicial confession in which he acknowledged that Godhra was a well-planned attack and that he had personally participated in it. A judicial confession is conclusive evidence. This proves that the Godhra carnage was a preplanned attack on the innocent Karsevaks.
In the March 2006 issue of Outlook, a report was published. This report includes the following two paragraphs:
Gayatri Panchal, a resident of Ahmedabad, who survived the incident on February 27, 2002, but lost both her parents in her reaction to the report has said, “The report of the Banerjee Commission is absolutely wrong. I have seen everything with my own eyes and barely escaped myself but lost both my parents.”
Panchal, who has three sisters, said the Banerjee Commission report was not correct as the fire could not have been accidental as no one was cooking in the S-6 coach and it was packed with passengers. “Mobs pelted stones at the coach for a long and then threw in burning rags and also poured some inflammable material so that the coach was on fire. I will maintain the same wherever I am called to depose on the matter,” Panchal said.
So, it is clear that, according to the eyewitness account, coach S-6 caught fire when Muslims drenched it in gasoline, set it ablaze, and circled the railway from all sides to prevent the Ramsewaks from leaving, according to the police’s obviously plausible statement.
Notably, the Banerjee Commission was appointed by Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and it had concluded that the fire started inside the coach. But the commission’s report was declared “unconstitutional, illegal and null and void” by the Gujarat High Court.
It becomes necessary to refer to the Nanavati-Mehta commission’s comments which cite the forensic science laboratory’s reports. The report denies all the possibilities and conspiracies raised by Muslims and liberal activists inventing multiple reasons for the coach being set ablaze.
These theories included ideas of an imaginary scuffle between Karsevaks and the local Muslim vendors, and an equally untrue incident of Hindus molesting a Muslim girl. Here is what the commission has concluded:
“From the evidence of all these witnesses and other material on record it becomes clear that except overcrowding in the train and occasional raising of slogans inside the train and on platforms of the intervening stations, the Ramsevaks had not done anything and no incident had happened earlier which could have led to the incident which later on happened at Godhra. In the absence of any evidence whatsoever indicating any incident on the way, the Commission has no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the suggestion made by JamiateUlma-E-Hind that a quarrel had taken place between Ramsevaks and vendors at Ujjain railway station is without any basis. Its journey from Ayodhya to Godhra was trouble-free.”
Regarding the fire and its origin, D V Talati had told the Nanavati-Mehta Commission,
“About 60 litres of inflammable liquid must have been used in burning that coach. The floor of the coach in some places was totally burnt. After explaining the difference between a fire in an open space and a fire in a confined place, he stated that the phenomenon of flashover can happen in a place that is small and completely closed. The size of S/6 was quite big. Its total area was 5000 sq. ft. Therefore, there was no possibility of a flashover in that coach unless the fire was big. The fire had not started from below the coach. The total quantity of liquid that was required for burning the coach could not have been thrown from outside, nor the fire which took place in S/6 could have been caused only by the burning rags thrown in it. As there was more damage in the eastern part of the coach, he had come to the conclusion that the fire had originated in the eastern part of that coach.”
When the question of bias was brought up on the “talk” page of the Wikipedia article, the senior editor of Wikipedia defended the glaring bias.
When someone pointed out that the article was biased and that the court of India, with ample evidence, had convicted people for acts of arson, Vanamonda93, a notorious and prolific Wikipedia editor claimed that the Wikipedia policy required them to maintain a “neutral point of view” – which means summarising information from “reliable sources” – and not what the courts say.
Essentially, Wikipedia, as a matter of policy, only collates information from Left media sources and does not even consider the court of India to be an authority after tens of Islamists were convicted for the attack.
The Wikipedia article mentions that the trial court convicted 31 Muslims for the burning, which was upheld by the High Court. However, the article still mentions that “Scholars remain sceptical about the claims of arson”.
In one of the references, the Wikipedia article says, “Several other independent commentators also concluded that the fire itself was almost certainly an accident, saying that the initial cause of the conflagration was never conclusively determined.[21][22] Historian Ainslie Thomas Embree stated that the official story of the attack on the train—that it was organized and carried out by people under orders from Pakistan—was entirely baseless.[23] Scholar Martha Nussbaum has also challenged this narrative, stating that several inquiries have found that the conflagration was the result of an accident rather than a planned conspiracy.[24]”.
In this regard, another discussion took place on the “Talk” page of the article. One editor had removed the reference and Vanamonde93 had reinstated it.
The reason first given to the editor by Vanamonde93 was that the removal of the reference to Martha Nussbaum and her conspiracy theory was not “neutral”.
The discussion thereafter about the reference to Nussbaum was dismissive, bullying and disingenuous.
The editor who had removed the reference tagged Vanamonde93 said that the case of the Godhra train burning had been decided by the court and the perpetrators convicted and sentenced, therefore, the main peg of the article should be the conviction and what the courts said about the case.
Vanamonde93 essentially says that Wikipedia guidelines demand that less weightage be given to police investigations and court judgements and more weight be given to observations by “experts”. The other editor then points out that nowhere does the guideline say what vanamonde93 is claiming and that “context matters” demands that the investigation is the main context of the article. Vanamonde93 then accuses the editor of being obtuse and shuts him down.
The editor then gives further context. The editor points out that the article by this “expert” only says that a large amount of inflammable was used and therefore, she does not actually endorse the “accident theory”.
After that, Vanamonde93 and others bully the editor to declare that the reference will stay and that he has no right to second guess an academic.
In another conversation, there were questions raised about the quality of resources and the sentence that said that the causes of the fire are still disputed or that they have not been proven.
The individual raising this question says that the reference for the doubts raised is from 2013 and in 2016, the police had identified and arrested the mastermind, therefore, the grey area created in this article should be removed.
Vanamonde93 again refuses, saying that the police are not a reliable source.
Repeatedly, Vanamonde93 refuses to acknowledge the court verdict saying that “it means very little”.
The Wikipedia article quotes the Concerned Citizens Tribunal report which ruled that concluded that the fire was an accident. This ‘Tribunal’ was a private group convened by Teesta Setalvad, who had tutored Gujarat riot witnesses to give false statements.
The article further quotes historians and scholars to claim the fire was an accident. But the fact is that whether it was fire or accident is a matter of forensic examination, not the subject of the opinion of ‘scholars’. But for Wikipedia, ‘opinions of scholars’ are more important than scientifically proven lab tests and court verdicts after years of trials after detailed police investigations.
This shows how Wikipedia is actively involved in rewriting history even about current events, and continuing the practice of leftist historians of distorting history using their own opinions and narratives instead of evidence.
Wikipedia is known for its bias towards non-left news portals, journalists and public figures in India. The so-called “encyclopaedia” that heavily depends on user-generated content is pro-Left and the top editors that oversee the content about India often remove content that goes against their ideology. OpIndia has repeatedly explained how Wikipedia is biased and how it has been weaponised by its left-leaning editors for propaganda.
Although in theory, anyone can edit Wikipedia articles, in practice, any edit that does not align with the leftist narrative is promptly removed by editors with more powers, and many times non-left editors are banned from the platform.
In 2021, Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger categorically warned the public not to trust the platform. Said that nobody should trust the crowd-sourced online encyclopaedia as it is run by left-leaning volunteers. He said that the site is no longer trustworthy as it does allow content that does not fit the agenda of leftists, and therefore people can’t get a complete view on the topics.
Sanger, who had co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales in 2001, said that the platform has betrayed its original mission by only reflecting the views of the ‘establishment.’ In an interview with LockdownTV, Sanger said that he agrees with the view that there are teams of Democratic party-leaning editors who remove content that they don’t like.
With Wikipedia begging Indians to pay them as little as Rs 25 if they can “to keep Wikipedia alive”, it is important to remember that Wikipedia actively espouses editors who make edits which are anti-India and anti-Hindu in nature.
