Citing Wikipedia’s Leftist Bias and “Propaganda,” Site’s Co-Founder Launching Competing Free-Speech Site
“The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone”
Long understood to be a an unreliable resource by serious academics, journalists, and bloggers, Wikipedia has more recently gained a broader reputation for leftwing bias.
Indeed, one of its co-founders notes that Wikipedia entries on socialism and communism are little more than propaganda and that he is launching a competing free-speech encyclopedia site.
Once considered a somewhat viable place to get a rudimentary handle on a topic, Wikipedia has arguably become a repository of “left-wing advocacy essays.” This change does not sit well with one of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger.
Big tech has faced repeated accusations of bias and censorship, but one platform has escaped much scrutiny: Wikipedia.
The online encyclopedia, which claims “anyone can edit”, is the 13th most popular website in the world, according to Alexa’s web rankings. Google gives it special placement in search results.
But critics – including Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger – tell Fox News that many Wikipedia pages have become merely left-wing advocacy essays.
“The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone,” co-founder Larry Sanger said.
“Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work,” he added.
One of the major areas in which this drift into leftist propaganda is most noticeable is in the site’s treatment of socialism and communism.
Fox News continues:
Wikipedia pages related to socialism and communism contain stark examples.
The two main pages for “Socialism” and “Communism” span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.
“The omission of large-scale mass murder, slave labor, and man-made famines is negligent and deeply misleading,” economics professor Bryan Caplan, who has studied the history of communism, told Fox News.
The pages include plenty of history, Caplan noted, and are not confined to just philosophical claims. But the history focuses on flattering claims.
Wikipedia’s Socialism page announces: “The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century.”
It ignores a man-made famine in which Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin commandeered the food from regions like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, leaving millions to starve to death even as the Soviet Union exported grain to foreign countries.
One might think these are important aspects to note of an ideology that has failed—or is failing—horribly everywhere it is imposed. Wikipedia, however, does not mention the genocidal implications inherent in any system of socialism or communism.
Sanger is having none of it and is launching a competing encyclopedia site that he says will be immune from the leftist bias and propaganda he sees as having taken over Wikipedia.
A co-founder of Wikipedia is launching a competing website as a free-speech-friendly alternative to what he views as the increasingly monolithic left-wing bias of his former organization.
Last May, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote an op-ed on his personal website titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” claiming that Wikipedia’s neutrality policy — known as “NPOV,” or neutral point of view — “is dead.”
Now, when schoolchildren visit the Wikipedia website to look up answers to questions about the meaning of socialism, “they’re going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject,” Sanger told “Just the News AM” television program. “And that’s really problematic. That’s not education. That’s propaganda.”
. . . . Sanger told Just the News that his new, forthcoming project, called “Encyclosphere,” is a decentralized network of the world’s encyclopedias, what he called “an old-fashioned, leaderless, ownerless network, like the blogosphere.”
Sanger said just as there are no administrators in the blogosphere, “in the same way, I want to create a protocol that very loosely ties all the encyclopedias online together.”
In a video posted to Twitter, Sanger announced the Encyclosphere, calling it “a free, giant, global knowledge commons without any central control.”
Tweet URLSanger said his Encyclosphere would be able to avoid an anti-free speech tilt “because freedom is built into the architecture, just as it is built into DNS (the web’s basic domain name system) and, again, into the blogosphere. Different competing apps can restrict access to an extent, and governments can restrict access, but the network will never restrict access.”
Sanger said his team has already done an encyclopedia meta-search project, started codifying standards, and talked to various encyclopedias. But for now, his first step is to start with “a free, long-term, graduate-level seminar” he said will be announced soon.
Sanger said he “casually asked on Twitter, and a gazillionaire offered us money” for Encyclosphere. “Going forward, though, we’ll be asking for donations in connection with the seminar,” he said.
“Frankly, we’ve already had tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of volunteer work done by some high-powered volunteers, and I’m sure that will continue,” Sanger said. “This is a long-term difficult project, and we want to do it right.”
While the left is caught up in their cancel culture, blacklisting, silencing of wrongthink madness, there are people pushing back, people with track records in successful internet ventures.
I don’t think we want an ideologically “segregated” internet in which the left and right are forging their own bubble world paths, but that does seem to be the result of the left attempting to force its narrative on us all by attempting to silence voices that don’t sing the leftist tune of the day.
Projects like Sanger’s attempt to bridge that divide by not treating center-right and libertarian thought as “misinformation.”
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