Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, will be speaking at COSM 2024 (Friday, November 1, at 10:30 am) on why he felt forced to distance himself from his 2001 creation with entrepreneur Jimmy Wales.
It’s said to be the third most popular site on the internet, after YouTube and Facebook. So why isn’t he basking in glory?
Wikipedia was captured, he says, by special interests, something he tried hard — but ultimately failed — to avoid.
What happened?
The original policy of Wikipedia — the second of Five Pillars — was neutrality:
So does Wikipedia meet its own ideals of neutrality? Let’s find out. I already explored this question by looking for (and easily finding) bias in articles on important topics.
“Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever,” June 30, 2021
Many people may be unaware of the biases because they simply never hear information that is omitted both by mainstream media and by Wikipedia. Wales offers some examples, including biased coverage of scandals that U.S. President Joe Biden and members of his family were involved in:
An ideologically neutral resource would explain both sides fully and fairly, leaving the reader to make up his own mind. Is that what Wikipedia does? No. Wikipedia is clearly aligned with one side. You might maintain that it is the only legitimate side; but then, that is what many ideologues say of their own side. What you cannot seriously maintain is that Wikipedia’s treatment of the Biden scandals is neutral. It is grossly biased. More One-Sided Than Ever”
When forbidden sources are the only ones that will tell you something…
Wikipedia is “clearly aligned” with Joe Biden’s side but — here’s where it gets really interesting — it deprecates sources that would tell readers things that Biden’s side would doubtless prefer that readers didn’t know:
… the sources that provide mainstream coverage of conservative points of view, including Fox News, The New York Post, and the (U.K.) Daily Mail—as well as pretty much all of newer conservative news media sources, which are the only outlets doing any reporting on many important stories—have all been added to a list of sources “deprecated” for their coverage of political news. This is not a joke and not an exaggeration. Republican-favoring sources, even quite mainstream ones, simply may not be used on Wikipedia, not even to explain a Republican viewpoint. “More One-Sided Than Ever”
In the Conclusion, Sanger adds to that point,
A lot of mainstream news stories are broken only in Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—all of which are banned from use as sources by Wikipedia. Beyond that, many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette,The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly “radical”; they are still mainstream. So, how on earth can such viewpoints ever be given an airing on Wikipedia? Answer: often, they cannot, not if there are no “reliable sources” available to report about them.
In short, and with few exceptions, only globalist, progressive mainstream sources—and sources friendly to globalist progressivism—are permitted. “More One-Sided Than Ever”
Thus, you would not know from Wikipedia that there even is a large body of facts about the scandals, presented accurately — but presented only in the deprecated sources.
One-sided coverage of religion as well
Sanger encountered the same problem with Wikipedia coverage of religion. Is religion in decline in the United States?
In the section [about decline in religion] about the United States, the focus is (unsurprisingly) on mainline denominations, despite the fact that they are now among the smaller denominations; even as of ten years ago, taken together, the mainline Protestant denominations had fewer than half the adherents of evangelical and conservative Protestant denominations.” Only at the very end of the article do we learn that “‘intense religion’ including evangelicalism has persisted.” You will not learn, in this article, the name of the single largest Protestant denomination: the Southern Baptist Convention, with 16.2 million members. (The information can be found in the “Southern Baptist Convention” article.) You will also not learn that in an important segment, conservative church membership is actually growing: among others, nondenominational churches were booming as of 2014, and actually outnumbered even the Southern Baptists.
Basically, to hear Wikipedia tell it, Christianity is in decline, because mainline denominations are in decline, and the conservative denominations and churches are barely worth caring about. And I can just hear the response: “Well, yeah. Sounds about right.” But if you agree with the Wikipedia article’s approach, that does not mean it is neutral; the point is that it is clearly biased. “More One-Sided Than Ever”
Misleading by omission
Such an approach to religion is actually a straightforward case of misleading by omission. A person with no broad knowledge of the Christian landscape in the United States would be misled because a critical fact is left out: If non-mainline churches are actually growing, we may be looking at a cultural shift, not a decline.
When Sanger could not interest Wales in addressing such issues, he quietly deleted himself and pursued other projects. In his November 1 talk at COSM, he will discuss how we can preserve broad knowledge in a world faced with such huge sources of bias. In particular, through the Knowledge Standards Foundation, he is working on a decentralized network of encyclopedias worldwide: “You’ve heard of the blogosphere; now, we’re building an encyclosphere.”
Register here.
You may also wish to read: COSM: Wikipedia co-founder to speak on today’s knowledge risks. Larry Sanger is not a fan of the baked-in bias at Wikipedia today and wants to found an encyclosphere — like the blogosphere — instead. His watchword is “No small group of elites deserves the power to declare what is known for all of us.”