Co-Founder Of Wikipedia Comes Out And Laments Site’s Increasing Bias
Albert Turkington
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During the first few years following its inception, Wikipedia was lauded by many netizens as a platform that greatly concentrated general knowledge and made it accessible to anyone with an internet connection. However, the objectivity of the site once assumed to be untouchable, has been called into question with increasing frequency as of late. Perhaps the most symbolic example of this decline in intellectual trust would be the recent remarks of one of Wikipedia’s own co-founders, Larry Sanger, who now believes that the site has gone from being a fountain of reliably objective and value-neutral information to “leftist propaganda.”
According to The Epoch Times, Sanger lamented to EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” that Wikipedia, turning 20 this year, had originally started on the basis of objective informational dissemination, but had started its leftist slant gradually around five years after inception and continues to lean more and more in the direction of “the news media” narrative rather than a non-partisan factual repository.
“Wikipedia made a real effort at neutrality for, I would say, its first five years or so,” said Sanger. “And then … it began a long, slow slide into what I would call leftist propaganda.”
One of Wikipedia’s defining characteristics is that it democratizes not just the dissemination of knowledge and who has access to it, but also in terms of the people who provide the information seen on the site. In fact, Wikipedia has over 125,000 active registered users who have made edits to a page in some form in the last 30 days, with over a thousand administrators who are tasked with restricting edits to a page when needed, blocking belligerent accounts, and much more.
In Sanger’s judgement, the past five years have seen a very noticeable increase in the rate at which Wikipedia has been changing from an objective site that everyone can trust to a biased outlet that is to be seen with suspicion like most others. Sanger explained to EpochTV that individuals and organizations “on the right” and those who are simply “even contrarian” will garner an article page on Wikipedia that “grossly misrepresents their achievements, often just leaves out important bits of their work, and misrepresents their motives.”
Case in point, the entry for Big League Politics itself which Wikipedia “casts them as conspiracy theorists, are far-right or whatever, when they and their friends and people who know them well would never describe them in that way.”
“More recently, they’ve gotten rid of almost all conservative news sources as sources for their articles,” he explained. “And so as the news media has shifted, and as the establishment, frankly, has shifted more to the left or to the left, the content of Wikipedia has followed suit.”
This bias has gotten to the point where, according to Sanger himself, even moderately conservative news outlets such as the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and Fox News’ political reporting have been removed from being considered acceptable original information sources in the reference section.
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