An edit war broke out on Wikipedia this week over the definition of “recession,” as the Biden administration and the corporate media take the unprecedented step of denying the U.S. is in recession even after two consecutive quarters of negative growth. More than 70 edits to the page about recessions were made before the site locked the entry preventing further changes. The edits successfully de-emphasize the broad consensus definition of recession — two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth — instead parroting the Biden Administration’s talking points.
Editors of the leftist-dominated online encyclopedia are pushing a definition of “recession” that is unusually broad and favors the Biden administration’s claims that no recession has occurred. This definition, from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), claims that a recession is a ” significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months.”
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (Rosdiana Ciaravolo /Getty)
What was until recently the broad consensus on the definition of a recession — two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth — remains at the top of the page, but editors have been attempting to remove it. This definition is also described as the United Kingdom’s definition.
Bruh pic.twitter.com/qpY4Nd10Ns
— Edvard 🌲 (@le_edvard) July 28, 2022
The article continues to note, further down the page in a section on the definition, that “in a 1975 New York Times article, economic statistician Julius Shiskin suggested several rules of thumb for defining a recession, one of which was ‘two down quarters of GDP.'”
In response to the edit war, senior Wikipedia editors have locked the page on recession, preventing users from making further snap edits to it. Articles that become the subject of contentious “edit wars” are often locked in this manner by Wikipedia administrators — but the lock comes after leftists successfully muddied the waters.
The new prominence of the NBER’s definition comes after the Biden administration began citing it in its arguments, backed by a sycophantic media, that the U.S. is not in recession.
Via Breitbart News:
White House advisers have repeatedly refused to define what a recession is, but they frequently cite the definition outlined by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The Republican National Committee also dug up old quotes from Biden’s other economic adviser.
In May, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia Rouse said during a CNN interview that “Typically, economists date a recession as being at least two quarters of negative growth, and other factors, which we have not seen at all.”
That NBER definition is now littered throughout the Wikipedia page on recessions.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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