Adventures in wikipedia bias.

For reasons that are beyond me I decided to look at the wikipedia page for Libertarianism: this page. I noticed that there is no mention of any criticism of Libertarianism nor a link to a page that does cover criticism. I thought this odd because I was sure the page for communism did have such a link, entirely reasonably, its important to know the flaws of every ideology. So I checked the communism page. Yes, theres a whole section dedicated to criticism AND links to other criticism pages.

Not a huge deal, afterall Communism isn't the most popular ideology and different wiki pages have different formats anyway. So I looked at the socialism page (it was linked at the top of the communism page and I'm lazy). Of course Socialism's failings also have their own little section. at this point I stopped and went in a different direction but we'll come back to that. Lets look at other ideologies' pages on wikipedia. Anarchism... no, theres certainly no section and a ctrl + f of the page doesn't turn up anything. Liberalism sort of has a criticism section but not really. Conservatism has no section or links. Fascism, perhaps unsurprisingly, does have a section one in need of expansion no less.

So from a brief sampling of ideology pages it seems the only pages to escape mention of criticism in their summary are Conservatism and Libertarianism. While I readily admit the Liberalism criticism isn't quite the same it is mightly convenient for right wingers only their articles don't directly mention criticism at all.

Anyway, back when I first discovered this I mentioned it to a friend and he jokingly suggested editing the page. I decided to first look at the talk page to see if this was an issue. At the top of the talk page is this:
and absolutely no mention of a criticism section on the talk page. So it seems that wikipedia is a site anyone can edit as long as it doesn't affect right wing interests.

However, while searching the archives of the libertarianism talk page I did find a link to the Criticism of libertarianism page so its nicely well hidden but it does have some good information:

Of particular interest to economists is the "New Zealand Experiment," which began in 1984 when Roger Douglas became Minister of Finance and began radically restructuring the country's economy to fit the libertarian model.[10] Over the next 15 years, New Zealand's economy and social capital faced a steady decline: the youth suicide rate grew sharply into one of the highest in the developed world;[11] the proliferation of food banks increased dramatically;[12] marked increases in violent and other crime were observed;[13] the number of New Zealanders estimated to be living in poverty grew by at least 35% between 1989 and 1992;[14] and health care has been especially hard-hit, leading to a significant deterioration in health standards among working and middle class people.[15] In addition, many of the promised economic benefits of the experiment never materialised.[16]

which is pretty darned damning. You can find it with the footnotes etc here