HJ explains why he has begun to get active as an Infogalactic editor:
The other day I was interested for no particular reason in the founding of Oxford University, and looked it up on IG. The content was the original material pulled from Wikipedia. To my astonishment, or maybe I was naive, there was no mention of the crucial role of the Church in laying the foundations of the university system. Here’s what it said:
“Teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when a university came into being. It grew quickly in 1167 when English students returned from the University of Paris. The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to such scholars in 1188 and the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived in 1190.”
So apparently those were the highlights of the one-hundred-year period that began with a handful of monks and ended up setting the world standard for institutions of higher learning. Fortunately, there was an entire section on the history of women’s blahblah, in which I was informed that “Oxford and Cambridge were widely perceived to be bastions of male privilege.” Until they were converged, of course.
Needless to say, this cannot stand, so I jumped in and made some edits. Much more can and will be done. If anyone out there is wondering what the point of Infogalactic is and why it’s important to get involved, hopefully this example will demonstrate why Wikipedia needs to be disrupted. It’s biased, and SJWs have smeared their feces all over the place as a form of territorial display. And yet to many people Wikipedia is an impressive and reliable source. We will do better.
Someday it may be possible to view IG content from the perspective of a Christ-hating SJW sperg. When that day comes, I suggest we call that perspective “Wikipedia.”
People often ask me why this Infogalactic page doesn’t have X or why that Infogalactic page has Y. To everyone, my answer is the same: because you haven’t fixed it.
I am not the reality police. The Techstars are not occupying themselves with trying to fix all of the egregious errors and propaganda that litters Wikipedia, and which Infogalactic has inherited by virtue of its nature as a dynamic fork. What we’re doing, rather, is giving the truth-oriented community the ability to fix these things themselves, for their own benefit, on their own time. With 7 million pages to date, that’s all the dev team can reasonably expect to do.
So get involved. Do one edit per day. Join the Burn Unit. Start using IG News and IG Tech for your headlines. Get a group of five editors together and launch your own IG Francais or IG Finance or IG FPS. All of these things are possible, but all of them require action, not mere intentions. And, in doing so, help Infogalactic continue to grow into the replacement for Wikipedia that it is designed to be.
We have a long, long way to go, obviously, seeing as Wikipedia is currently 5 and 6. But we are considerably closer than we were six months ago.