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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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In case you were suggesting your post was deleted, it wasn't; it was archived, as is standard practice on talk pages with lots of activity.

I wasn't suggesting that. I'm aware it was archived. But a bunch of later complaints by others were not; they were removed outright.

(NB: I believe I've seen that essay cited in a ban comment; I know it says it's not policy, but it's highly-questionable whether this is true.)

Regarding the lab leak hypothesis, the consensus in the mainstream media early on during the pandemic was that it was baseless, so that's what Wikipedia reported.

So, what I mean by "lab-leak purge" is not that WP didn't support the lab leak hypothesis. It's that WP categorised it as "misinformation" - which is an extremely-strong term, implying not just unlikelihood but certitude against. A bunch of people tried to push back on this overconfidence, and a very large number of them (though not me) got banned for it due to the perceived urgency. That bad blood (including from the ban evasion and canvassing attempts that followed) made it much harder to fix WP's bias problem, because it made the admins start considering ideological heresy to be evidence of bad faith (as this issue largely split along partisan lines).