A few years back there was a lot of jubilation among anticult critics when Wikipedia banned IP ranges associated with the Church of Scientology. At the time, the cult correctly argued that the Wikipedia articles about it were biased against them to the extreme and used this as justification for their actions. The anticult editors, for their part, justified their heavy bias against Scientology based on the cult’s past and current abuses, most of which get pretty short shrift, even in these post-Anonymous (2008) times. A lot of people on both sides were permanently banned.
Since then, Wikipedia is still one of the top websites in the world, but editorship has dropped off dramatically, leaving barely a handful of people editing articles on Scientology. Articles that get edited the most often are throwaway crap like celebutard gossip articles, Pokemon, Power Rangers, shit that we don’t give a rats ass about. A lot of people think Scientology lost the war, but they’re wrong. The cult was just biding its time and it’s learned to be very patient. Read articles about Scientology there. First, most of them aren’t even complete. Lots and lots of missing data. The article on the Sea Org is actually not too bad and one of the few we’ve read that actually sticks to the facts. None of the rest even come close to being that detailed in an accurate fashion. Second, the overreliance on tabloid sources has allowed those operating on behalf of or sympathetic to the cult to legitimately remove huge chunks of paragraphs and gut articles of any useful info. With over a dozen critical books on Scientology from credible non-tabloid sources like Russell Miller, Janet Reitman, Hugh Urban, and Lawrence Wright, really no excuse to use tabloid sources.
But even more insidiously, Scientologists like Brook Zimmatore and Fraser Kee Scott routinely use Wikipedia to promote their pet projects and clients, including Grant Cardone, Mila Furstova (recently commissioned to do packaging for Coldplay; she’s one of Scott’s Album Artists stable), Christy Lee Rogers (also part of Scott’s Album Artists stable), Jim Meskimen, Marion Ross, Kerri Kasem, Gottfried Helnwein (the biggest cult whale to continue denying being a Scientologist and paying huge sums to keep his online rep, including his Wikipedia article, free of almost all cult references), and many others. If we had time we’d post a nice long list of links demonstrating all of this, but we don’t; someday soon we’ll get to it, but it’s not a priority.
There are also a lot of people on Wikipedia, fans of bands like the Backstreet Boys, Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Coldplay (none of these are Scientologists, but work closely with high level Scientologists and help, knowingly or not, funnel massive amounts of cash into IAS slush fund coffers) who inadvertently help keep cult references off those articles or allow those article to be used to indirectly promote the cult. Scott does this routinely himself from an “anonymous” IP address (he has no life and still lives with his mum) by slyly spamming articles with Album Artists press releases, which are not only shameless self-promotion but a violation of Wikipedia policy. But you’ll see him and others like him get away with this shit. Album Artists, by the way, is a big source of income in the UK for the cult, and also sponsors at least 2 or 3 “charity” events a year, usually legit charities that get snookered into unknowingly raising money for the cult, most notoriously with past event “hosts” like Tamara Ecclestone and Lindsay Lohan.
The saying goes, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”. When it comes to manipulating and subverting Wikipedia to its own end, Scientology is winning. Shouldn’t be that way, because all you need are a few people, like the kind who flag cult posts on Craigslist, to keep watch over cult articles and cult-related articles and purge them of self-published sources stemming from the cult and its shamelessly self-promotional members (who are too ashamed to have the dread word “Scientology” on their articles, even though asshats like Meskimen flaunt their cult membership for all the world to see. Just not on Wikipedia)