As some of you may have noticed, there was no post last week. That was because I was busy following the events going on at WikiCredCon, a conference run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The conference is dedicated to issues of credibility : how do we ensure Wikipedia remains a credible source of information online? What should the Wikipedia community make of the issues that face other institutions and their credibility?

2025’s conference marked the first one held in six years, and the timing could not be more opportune. This past year, Wikipedia has become a major flashpoint within the larger culture war, as various politicians and think-tanks have come to put the project in their crosshairs. What originally started as simple accusations of political bias have now escalated into coordinated campaigns by right-wing think tanks to identify, dox, and target those who contribute to the site.

Of course, it’s not just Wikipedia though. There is a larger “ crisis of trust” facing our world: there is less and less consensus about where to go in order to get accurate, unbiased, and reliable information on various issues facing the world. As a society, there is a serious erosion in our readiness to trust experts, officials, and journalists.

In line with this, the conference focused on anchoring Wikipedia’s own situation within the context of these two larger questions:

1. How do we ensure credibility in an age dominated by misinformation and decreased trust in official sources?

2. How may the rise of AI-generated content impact the quality and verifiability of sources online?

What these questions both have in common is that they take a very big-picture approach to the discussion, and I believe that’s the right call. In situations like these, one might be tempted to hyperfocus on the issues specific to Wikipedia and its policies, but I actually don’t think the policies, how they get enforced, or how the website is governed is the main problem.

Overall, I think Wikipedia is rather credible and committed to good-faith presentations of the truth from what I’ve seen so far. The site has been attacked on grounds of being biased in its source selection, but the extent to which this is true is debatable. It has also been attacked on grounds of its susceptibility to coordinated influence attacks. While this is a real issue, part of it just comes with the territory and the site has shown willingness to crack down on the behavior when reported.

But even if we were to put all that aside and were to assume a world where the site was administered and governed perfectly, there’s still a subtler, but deeper problem at play.

The problem in question has to do with the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, making it by definition a tertiary source. This means that when writing an article, you typically have to rely on citing secondary sources. As per policy, you cannot just take raw data or observations, add it to the site, and then provide your own analysis right there. You have to first find a reliable source that has reported on the information in question and provided the analysis for you. This is because the purpose of Wikipedia is to simply compile and present information that already exists out there, not bring “new facts” into the world.

This policy of No Original Research helps with ensuring editors stay within the bounds of neutrality and verifiability, but there is a catch. Wikipedia can only ever be as good as the sources it has to rely on. If a fact hasn’t been reported on by an established news outlet, published in a reputable journal, or found in some other conventionally recognized source then Wikipedia can’t include it.

This means that whatever happens to the organizations that produce secondary sources (news stations, universities, government agencies, etc.), Wikipedia ends up feeling those effects downstream. There’s a codependent relationship: Wikipedia relies on these institutions for its sourcing and these institutions end up relying on Wikipedia to communicate that information to the masses.

Watching this conference unfold, it really gave me a sense for how deeply embedded Wikipedia is into the rest of this ecosystem. For every person from the WMF participating, there were also those representing libraries, universities, and news organizations explaining how the issues impact them.

This really carried over into the contents and nature of the discussion. While there were a couple instances of us getting into the weeds about ways in which we could change Wikipedia’s specific policies or issues specific to the site’s functioning, a large share of the discussion was about was going on outside of Wikipedia. If there was one, big, recurring word I would highlight as popping up a ton in these discussions it’s the word misinformation.

For what it’s worth, the discussions were quite good, the people there were great, and the various insights they brought to the table were incredibly valuable. But at the same time, there were moments where I was reminded of a separate event I once attended. A while back, a friend of mine invited me to watch a panel in which a handful of journalists and professors were discussing the issues facing the future of journalism — the sorts of questions also discussed at WikiCredCon.

I was curious about the subject and interested to hear what the panel would say, but I ended up leaving that panel feeling rather underwhelmed — and a bit alarmed. When it came to the problems facing the press, they mostly focused on the usual list of suspects: Fox News, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, etc. It really seemed like their autopsy of traditional journalism and the problems it was facing was less focused on what was going on inside journalism itself and more focused on criticizing the society that exists outside of journalism.

This mentality quickly spilled over into their proposed solutions: there were proposals for treating journalism like a “public utility” that would be funded by the government and beholden to it. There were calls for legal action against misinformation and those who spread it. Walking out of that panel, you would be inclined to get the sense that misinformation was a political tool invented out of thin air and that distrust was entirely the product of provocateurs manipulating the public into giving up on reality. You would walk out of that panel thinking that the answer was for journalists to double down and for the rest of society to mobilize to their defense.

I bring this story up because the current discourse surrounding misinformation isn’t something that’s confined to conference rooms. The topic has genuinely come to dominate politics in recent years¹, only intensified by the increase in educational polarization across the electorate. While there’s always been a massive cultural divide² between the worlds of post-graduates and that of non-college voters, this can take a dangerously political dimension when this becomes the dividing line for our parties. Power struggles begin to emerge surrounding information, as an environment where a faction of “the informed” exists, “information” comes to be conflated with their personal politics.

This becomes clear when we look at the approaches taken to combatting misinformation. When the CDC was issuing guidance surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, they did so in an incredibly top-down fashion, heavily leaning on their status and expecting people to show them a great deal of trust.

Compare this to other initiatives to communicate science-backed policy to previously-skeptical populations — they took a careful, bottom-up approach and were far more successful.

The social scientists who study these issues might have counseled an approach like that employed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, using local messengers who had relationships with the communities in question and who could communicate in less intimidating ways.

But the U.S. did not do that with COVID-19. Instead, rapidly changing information came from only a few sources, usually at the national level and seemingly without much strategy. And as such, many places have seen widespread resistance to public health interventions, like wearing masks and getting the vaccine.

And it’s this verticality that can create an environment in which there’s incentive for officials to take their own credibility for granted:

• The White House was quick to crack down on Twitter users for misrepresenting the dangers of the vaccine, but CDC officials were just as quick to repeatedly misrepresent the effectiveness of the vaccine in their efforts to convince more people to take it.

• At the same time as states were defending the stay-at-home order applying to churches, 1000 health professionals published an open-letter calling to carve out an exception for social justice protests.

• Leading COVID origin scientists deliberately took matters into their own hands and (for politically motivated reasons) published misleading research regarding the possibility of a lab-leak.

  • Gold-standard newspapers and fact-checkers rushed to the defense of these institutions, dismissing and suppressing the story until official sources backpedaled and acknowledged the serious possibility of a lab leak.

  • The refusal to cover or acknowledge this would end up growing into a scandal which seriously damaged the credibility of various gold-standard newspapers and fact-checkers.

• While the development of the vaccine was a massive success, the rollout in states like CA and NY was subject to high levels of political manipulation and gamesmanship.

• Most egregiously of all, we now know the WHO collaborated with the Chinese government in order to orchestrate a cover-up of the pandemic’s existence in its early stages.

Even in cases where officials were operating in good faith, the extent to which guidance overstated confidence created room for embarassment with a rapidly changing and inconsistent set of guidelines coming out of the organization. Science is uncertain, even moreso when you’re dealing with a new kind of virus that has not been researched beforehand. The pandemic wasn’t just a matter of getting people to believe in the facts, it was also in large part a matter of figuring out what the facts even were in the first place. We ended up finding out that we were wrong about how the virus transmits and our strategies to counter it. We ended up finding out that we were wrong about the likelihood of new strains forming. We ended up finding out we were initially wrong about whether or not masks were needed. We misjudged the technological capacity needed to prepare a national vaccine rollout.

Coming to conclusions and gradually revising them until a larger picture forms is all part of the process. Given the CDC’s messaging and quickness to offer (and rescind) guidance, you wouldn’t think that’s supposed to be the case. But it makes sense when you consider that politics is much more likely to deal in certainties. Authorities command respect with confidence and are prone to feel a natural level of entitlement to that respect.

In a lot of these cases, the common pattern is using facts as a means to an end; controlling for a desired outcome first and then playing fast and loose with the truth to convince people to work towards that outcome. Credentials are treated as a substitute for rigor, “trusting the science” comes to be less about putting your faith in an open process of inquiry and debate, but more about trusting the goodwill of unilateral decisionmakers. But in doing so, there’s an implicit sense of seeing oneself as above the people you’re communicating to.

The problem isn’t just that this leads to tone-deaf or condescending messaging, it’s that it can lead to more clouded decisionmaking on part of our leaders, who themselves now have high levels of distrust in the American people and their ability to recognize what is happening on the ground.

And for the majority of people, extending trust to an institution which doesn’t trust you isn’t exactly easy. The lockdowns recommended by experts wiped out countless small businesses, had catastrophic impacts on youth literacy, enabled an uptick in domestic violence, and left an unprecedented share of the population socially isolated. While the laptop classes may have had an easier time with the transition, for many people these were major sacrifices asked of them in the name of the “common good”.

Irrespective of the efficacy or necessity of the lockdowns in containing spread, the fact is for a lot of people there were serious trade-offs — trade-offs that we’re only taking seriously now, years after the fact. And to be a person going through this, watching each time an organization was caught flexing truths or a politician found to be violating the very restrictions they instituted, it’s a major slap in the face. When even our leaders don’t seem to be taking their own words seriously, why should the commoners?³

I might go as far as to venture this hot take: the average person generally has a pretty good intuitive sensor for BS ⁴. They can tell when they’ve been lied to about a war, they can tell when the economy is worse off than the government says it is, and they can tell when a president is less mentally fit than the White House lets on.

Am I saying that the average skeptic intellectually can elucidate and cite everything I’ve listed above? Not necessarily, but what really stands at the center of their conviction is a broader sentiment. They may articulate it in ways that come off as stupid or conspiratorial, latching onto the language provided to them by alternative outlets, but at the emotional core is an intuitive recognition that something is wrong. The layers on top of that are superficial.

Like take for example, the hesitancy in black communities towards trusting the vaccine. This distrust might sound irrational until you realize it’s rooted in good reason — even as recently as the ‘90s, the medical establishment across the Western world was pushing drugs like Norplant onto these populations towards what were functionally eugenic ends.

Which, while the rest of the country may look back on the ‘90s as a time of high institutional trust, that trust was tied to the expectation of continued prosperity. The neoliberal consensus promised that free trade, open borders, and technocratic marketization were “evidence-backed” and could not fail.

As I mentioned during my prior post on US-China relations, the free trade prescriptions of organizations like the IMF and WB have destroyed the economies of countless developing nations and communities dependent on domestic manufacturing. As these institutions continue to double down on the same prescriptions even through recessions and migration crises, credibility begins to erode. Even international law loses its weight when time and time again it becomes clear that organizations such as the ICJ operate on entirely arbitrary and unenforcable grounds.

Even looking at the modern-day journalism, the internet has provided not just provided competition, but also new ways for outlets to try and pull a fast one. Outlets like the NYT have been known to employ “stealth editing”, silently redacting embarassing mistakes they made without leaving any sort of note. This was most notoriously employed in the case of the 1619 Project, a high-profile journalistic attempt to document the history of slavery — only for its historical accuracy to be called into question. In addition, the increased pace of click-driven models have encouraged outlets to wholesale lift stories from smaller journalists, in some cases without proper attribution. BuzzFeed was incredibly notorious for this back in the day.

In academia, 2020 marked a highwater in reported campus free-speech violations, as per FIRE. Documented in the well-known Harpers’ Letter is a high-level view of the sort of environment that was starting to dominate these spaces:

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

This is not a problem we can just educate our way out of. We lament the ways in which trust has declined over the decades, but it’s not that our population has somehow become stupider or less educated over time. We maintained institutional trust even in eras where a substantial proportion of the population was illiterate or ones where conspiracy theories about Satanic daycare cults abounded. We worry about the impact of AI, but it wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have photo/video/audio technology to rely on as evidence. How did we manage to trust what we were being told back then? The real problem isn’t education or knowledge, but social cohesion.

Not only is it infeasible to expect every person to be a media-literate researcher, but thinking that way also once again assumes an overly verticalized model of truth. Truth isn’t just the bullet points institutions dispense to the public on their fact-sheets, truth is also what we see with our own two eyes. In all of the above cases, experts might’ve been blindsided by the ways in which they got it wrong, but people had an intuitive sense something wasn’t adding up. And even more intuitively, they understood the ways in which they personally were being impacted, even where the media and federal agencies weren’t telling them.

Traditionally, human beings have lived and developed within highly localized communities. The brain is naturally wired to understand and operate on knowledge within this context. We learn as we do things and tangibly interact with what is in front of us, and the things we observe exist not to uncover some abstract universal truth but to inform our decisions on a practical level. We come to sympathize with and understand the perspectives of other people when they are face-to-face with us and live within our communities.

And traditionally, this reflected in our media environment. Local communities had their own papers which reported on information readily verifiable within the community. And because these are local papers, the politics surrounding their coverage was also a lot more localized.

At its core, the essence of politics is more about daily life than it is about political science. There is no Platonic ideal when it comes to governance, but there are practical ends. Yet, our system is designed in a way that runs completely counter to this. Every single lever and arm whereby we interact with our society has become intensely nationalized. Business concentrates under the umbrella of a handful of multinational corporations, national and online media has driven local coverage to the brink of extinction, the tradition of voluntary associations has been supplanted by the welfare state, and countless previously-separate institutions find themselves integrated into the political party apparatus.

Law schools, churches, and even local nonprofits have fallen victim to this as they begin to sound increasingly the same, advocate for the same issues, and go out of their way to defend each other. Even among the press, there’s ongoing philosophical debates about whether or not their role is to report on events or to advocate for causes.

This has two effects: one, it takes focus away from local issues and two, it centralizes political power. In an environment where only a handful of authorities are setting the agenda in terms of facts, issues, and policy, abusing that power for political gamesmanship becomes increasingly attractive. Maintaining pure neutrality in the midst of these political tugs-of-war is an incredibly tall ask (the history of Wikipedia is one massive testament to this), but one that only gets all-the-more relevant whenever you’re expected to speak for the whole country.

When there is a movement to capture every single institution and direct them towards a singular omnicause, this erodes the pluralistic character of democracy. Opposition, with no outlet to express itself, turns to disillusion and nihilism⁵.

This is not sustainable. The parasocial nature of modern politics has incubated a genuine schizophrenia within the population. Trust is an emotion, it should be reserved for those you have a genuinely close connection with, not a talking head that pops up on your television screen. The more people have to rely on getting their information in highly mediated ways, the less they’ll be inclined judge what’s right in front of them. The more communities have to rely on petitioning faceless national parties to protect them, the more helpless they will feel in being able to secure their own existence.

The situation facing institutional journalism as an industry seems very bleak, as paid models struggle to compete with social media and advertiser-models struggle to break even. More and more Americans get their news from Facebook and TikTok than traditional outlets. Political parties have taken note and have flirted with a future in which they directly launder their talking points to influencers, potentially leaving traditional outlets without the access and press releases they’ve long relied on.

But even as the journalists I listen to sound the alarm, I don’t share their apocalypticism regarding what this means for knowledge. Researchers and engaged consumers are finding ways to route around and find new sources. Substack has formed its own media ecosystem of independent journalists, but one in which readers have to verify-by-writer as opposed to by editorial policy. Publications are often topic-specific and gain a reputation by word-of-mouth in niche intellectual communities. Social media has opened a venue for independent investigative journalists such as Steve Burke and Tyler McVicker to build a reputation for breaking stories in fields (tech and games journalism) where mainstream print outlets at the time had the reputation of simply regurgitating press releases.

But even among the masses, narrative can only distance itself so far before consequences start snapping us back to reality. The flood of slop information is produced online is recent, and at the exponential pace at which it’s already growing, is this something we can really expect to consume infinitely? Just as people’s everyday intuitions acted as a bulwark against institutional gaslighting, anyone who hopes “flooding the zone” will give them a permanent ticket to consequence-free governance may end up being sorely mistaken.

The very habits that the literati used to scoff at in people might be exactly what needs to be cultivated in order to defend truth. Because when a collapse comes, we’re going to need to remember how to start back from zero in building up chains of trust.

If we can shift the way we conduct politics, and allow people to use information for themselves — rather than having information be used on them — that is how we can finally give facts room to breathe, free from the shadow of policy.