Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. There is evidence that many of the articles contain claims that do not account for a key factor that alters their veracity. For example, this article leads with the claim:
The Center for Biological Diversity is a nonprofit membership organization known for its work protecting endangered species through legal action, scientific petitions, creative media and grassroots activism.
It is now widely accepted that individualized attempts to protect endangered species were undone, and are being undone, by insufficient neonatal and child welfare policies designed to enable growth and which drive climate and other macro changes in our ecologies. The Center accepted and benefitted from these policies, as does the Wikimedia Foundation.
On any given day the Center for Biological Diversity made claims about creating benefits in terms of species protection, those claims were being undone as children entered the world under without entitlements to minimum levels of welfare, share equity in their democracies (equity, like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes) or entitlements to the legitimate political systems that derive from the share equity of their members.
Why Does it Matter?
To further values like biological diversity, or mercy for individual animals, entities would need to include those values in the first premise of who humans should be and become in terms of the creation of basic power relations, and entities undo the values if they do not include them. While including those values in the premise is not popular with funders or seemingly progressive media whose wealth derives from inequity, that does not change the reality of the impacts – including suffering and death – and the justice owed for those impacts.
An entity either starts with a measurably inclusive and thus liberating system that accounts for the birth, developmental and emancipatory positionality of its members, and relative costs and benefits, or they do not. There is no evidence the Center or Wikimedia Foundation do.
Not doing so risks millions of lives as well as trillions of dollars in climate reparations, and illegitimates political systems by treating subjects as means bound in inequity, rather than empowered ends from whom governance derives. If one wanted to decolonize wealth and the future, one would have to start from a position of not punching down on children and animals – and that requires a constitutive threshold.
Many involved in the Fair Start movement had to, in prior employments at nonprofits, governments, media corporations, and universities, omit crucial facts about inequitable growth impacts that were actually undoing the public benefits the organizations claimed to create, and as such helped illegally enrich mostly white children at deadly cost to millions of children of color – hiding massive liability and skewing the baseline for crucial climate reparations.
In one case a member of a prominent and wealthy family funding animal law projects insisted on omitting the role inequity and growth on their charitable impacts claims, knowing these omissions were hiding drivers doing more harm to animals than the funder’s work has done good. They feared how full-spectrum evaluations of claims, costs and benefits, around the climate and related crises, would impact the family’s wealth.
The Center and Wikimedia are hardly alone. Media, like the New York Times Co., routinely misreported the climate crisis in a way that exacerbated it, urging along with many animal protection organizations the sale of vegan products in growth-based economies that were doing more harm than the dietary change was doing good. They are accountable, and if reparations are not paid, the children of their leadership will inherit the debt for the deaths they enabled, when those children become adults.
Many supporters of the Fair Start Movement were urged by funders in their work with other nonprofits to ignore equity as a base value, and to focus downstream, creating false silos like environmentalism, animal protection, human rights and democracy, racial justice, etc. They left out crucial facts while claiming to create public benefit they knew was being undone by inequity in creation under a system liberals, conservatives and almost all shades of political affiliation use. This helped illegally enrich mostly white kids, the children of funders. at deadly cost to millions of black children. There is a way to mitigate the harm – prioritizing the self-determination of all future children, by all means effective.
TAKE ACTION: Urge the Center’s leadership as well as the leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation, to account for inequity when making or publishing claims of impact. Ask them if they think children deserve a fair start in life? No one should live in a fantasy world that ignores the largest drivers of change – the entry of children into the world; the base driver of harm. Also, urge them to back demands before the United Nations to preempt the failed policies that undo good work, described above, and that would disentitle the child-exploiting wealth driving that fantasy world.
