There’s nothing neutral about Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek ran an article attacking Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, for engaging in a friendly Twitter exchange with me about the coronavirus pandemic. According to the article, I was a ‘eugenics advocate’. How could the apparently respectable industrial designer sully himself in this way? Didn’t he realise I was Britain’s answer to Dr Mengele?

The claim that I’m a ‘eugenics advocate’ isn’t true, obviously. It’s based on a deliberate misreading of an article I wrote in which I said that if it ever becomes possible for couples to cherry-pick embryos in a genetics lab according to which ones are likely to have the highest IQ, that technology should be made available for free on the NHS because otherwise it will enable the rich to give their children an even greater competitive advantage. If ‘eugenics’ is forced sterilisation, what I was proposing was the opposite — free IVF for the poor. But that hasn’t stopped numerous left-wing journalists claiming I’m some kind of neo-Nazi, including Polly Toynbee, who wrote in 2018: ‘With his views on eugenics, why does Toby Young still have a job in education?’ Shortly afterwards, I didn’t.

I’ve tried to set the record straight, but it’s a smear that just won’t die because it sits right at the top of my Wikipedia page. For lazy journalists, Wikipedia is the only thing they read when ‘researching’ an article. And why not? If they’re going to rely on one source, it might as well be the world’s largest encyclopaedia. It prides itself on its ‘neutral point of view’, which it defines as attempting to present ideas and facts ‘fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias’. It’s one of the websites scientists access the most and, according to an article in the Atlantic, 50 per cent of doctors use it regularly.