I recently had to explain that someone edited the Wikipedia entry on Woodrow Wilson to falsely claim that the very man who called for a return of the KKK, restarted the KKK as President, and led its rise to humanitarian disasters across America… was somehow “personally opposed to the KKK”.

Click image to enlarge:

That’s crazy talk.

It would be like saying General Grant was personally opposed to destroying the KKK. Wrong. Grant destroyed it. Wilson restarted it. Those are facts.

A totally false sentence about Woodrow Wilson entered into a Wikipedia post makes literally no sense, is obviously counter-factual, yet there it is… without any citation or reference at all.

It’s like someone from the KKK dropped in and thought it would be really funny for people to read “water in the ocean isn’t wet [citation needed]”.

The cost to disrupt and confuse with these attacks on weakly-anti-racist (also known as racist) systems is very low, the cost to defend (without proper anti-racist measures for prevention of racism) is high.

I presented something about this problem way back in 2016 at KiwiconX

I’m finding this class of attack all over Wikipedia. Here’s another example from the very racist history of voucher schools, fraudulently trying to minimize their impact and use by white insecurity hate groups in America.

Click image to enlarge and see the crazy counter-factual statement that “all modern voucher programs prohibit racial discrimination” with [citation needed] right next to it:

That is just so factually wrong it’s amazing. Anyone apparently can get garbage to stick immediately on Wikipedia with a very tedious and long process to get it removed or corrected.

Actual analysis of failure to prohibit discrimination in modern voucher programs would be more like the following:

• 2016: “Dollars to Discriminate: The (Un)intended Consequences of School Vouchers… legislators appear to have neglected to construct policies that safeguard student access and ensure that public funds do not support discriminatory practices…”
• 2017: The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers
• 2017: “Studies on charter schools in Indianapolis, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas, among other places, show that charter schools can lead to greater racial stratification.”
• 2017: “…as private school voucher programs grow to scale – statewide and even nationally in other countries – they can actually increase segregation…”
• 2020: “Century Foundation also proved that voucher programs across the country benefit the most advantaged students … continue the long-residual effects of racism.”
• 2020: School Vouchers – An Enduring Racist Practice

Wikipedia clearly has widespread integrity issues, weak editing/deployment pipeline process and quality is very low.

Voucher systems not only perpetuate a history of racism, they were intentionally racist and continue to be a tool of racists. When desegregation was ordered, some racists thought the clever trick to continue racism would be to shut all the public schools down and hand out vouchers instead.

In 1958, courts mandated that white-only schools in nine Virginia areas — including the town of Charlottesville — admit black students. Rather than comply and allow the black students, the public schools in Charlottesville and elsewhere in Virginia closed. Some of these public schools in Virginia remained closed for five years, and when they reopened, they were nearly all black students. The white students had relocated to private schools with “segregation grants” to pay tuition.

It’s that simple. Anyone bringing up vouchers who doesn’t start from the position of explaining how racism will be prevented in a well-documented system of racism… is just being racist and perpetuating racism.

And it’s very much the same line of reasoning behind tipping culture — racism used for perpetuation of slavery.