He Co-founded Wikipedia, Now He Says the Site Needs a Radical Change

Larry Sanger says the website has become biased against conservative and religious viewpoints, but sees a way to fix it.

Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia millions of people treat as an authoritative source of information, is systemically biased against conservative, religious, and other points of view, according to the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger.

Sanger, 57, who now heads the Knowledge Standards Foundation, believes Wikipedia can be salvaged either by a renewed emphasis on free speech within the organization or by a grassroots campaign to make diverse viewpoints heard.

Failing that, Sanger said, government intervention may be required to pierce the shell of anonymity that now protects Wikipedia’s editors from defamation lawsuits by public figures who believe the site portrays them unfairly.

In an Oct. 9 interview with Jan Jekielek, host of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” Sanger discussed Wikipedia’s derailing and what could get the site back on track.

Systemic Bias

Wikipedia, launched in 2001, was co-opted by a globalist, academic, secular progressive worldview in the early 2000s, Sanger said. He added that the viewpoint monopoly accelerated following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when many media outlets began to abandon the notion of impartiality.

 

Though the site is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia describes itself as a self-governing project and states “its policies and guidelines are intended to reflect the consensus of the community.”

Sanger said that eventually, the site’s original neutrality rules, which he authored, were rewritten to instead forbid “false balance.”

“Basically, it’s required now, even for the sake of neutrality, that they take a side when [they believe] one side is clearly wrong,” Sanger said. “Pretensions of objectivity are out the window.”

One way this is enforced is through a color-coded rating system that favors or bans certain sources, Sanger said.

“You simply may not cite as sources of Wikipedia articles anything that has been branded as right wing,” he said. “I don’t think that The Epoch Times, for example, is particularly right wing, but it is colored red on this list.”

Information from some “green” sources is taken as fact and repeated without attribution, Sanger said.

Sanger, who has long campaigned for a restoration of free speech and accountability on the platform, said many people continue to think of Wikipedia as neutral and accurate.

“Even now, people are still sort of waking up to the reality that Wikipedia does, on many pages … act as essentially propaganda,” he said.

As evidence, Sanger listed a host of public figures, including novelist Philip Roth, journalist John Seigenthaler Sr., and filmmaker Robby Starbuck, who complained to him that they were misrepresented on Wikipedia.

In 2022, Wikipedia deleted its page on U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette, a Republican, saying she was not a notable person. The page was later restored.

The same year, editors deleted an entry for Hunter Biden’s investment company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, saying it was not notable. An editor said keeping the page online could turn it into “a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.” That editor didn’t elaborate or provide any evidence.

Sanger likens the intellectual takeover of Wikipedia’s content to the “long march through the institutions,” a communist tactic of taking over a society by gaining control of essential institutions, including media, education, and government.

“Wikipedia is one of the institutions that the left marched through,” Sanger said.

He said the application of Wikipedia’s editorial rules has become a way to enforce ideological conformity and that some rules need to be revived and others abolished.

One problem is the platform’s policy of preferring secondary sources over primary or original sources. This is contrary to the approach of journalists and higher education institutions, who favor original sources, such as direct quotes from public figures, documents written by historical figures, and original research.

Wikipedia, by contrast, favors sources that have already interpreted original sources, such as magazines and newspapers.

“As a former academic, I find that to be absurd,” Sanger said.

He recalled an incident in which Roth told Sanger he asked Wikipedia to correct its page mentioning the origin story of a character in his book “The Human Stain.”

Though Roth told Wikipedia directly how he created the character, the site’s editors refused to update the page, preferring to rely on a speculative account published in The New York Times. Roth then wrote an article about the matter in The New Yorker, Sanger said, giving Wikipedia a secondary source for what the author had told them directly.

“There’s something really ridiculous about that,” Sanger said.

The anonymity of the majority of Wikipedia’s 62 most influential editors perpetuates the problem, Sanger said, noting it creates a situation in which no one is held responsible for the potential harm the site’s content may cause.

“Eighty-five percent of them are anonymous. So you can’t sue them,” Sanger said.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shields companies from lawsuits related to user-generated content, meaning the Wikimedia Foundation cannot be sued either.

Ideas for Reform

On his website, Sanger outlines a series of ideas for returning Wikipedia to its original stance on fairness and free speech. A handful of his ideas center on increasing transparency into site management, such as revealing who Wikipedia’s leaders are, allowing the public to rate articles, ending decision-making by consensus, and adopting a legislative process for determining editorial policy.

 

Wikipedia’s current policies effectively make Wikipedia insular and ideologically exclusive, according to Sanger, who believes determining policies in an open forum could expose the site to other viewpoints.

Sanger’s other suggestions focus on free speech, such as enabling competing articles on the same subject, abolishing source blacklists, reviving the original neutrality policy, and ending the indefinite blocking of some editors.

Sanger also calls on the site to repeal the “ignore all rules” policy, which he created in Wikipedia’s early days. The rule was intended to encourage editors who were nervous about amending articles to simply focus on the task at hand.

“That was since made into a rule that is used by insiders to exert control over the newbies. So it’s, again, entirely inverted,” Sanger said.

First, the Wikimedia Foundation could voluntarily end the ideological monopoly.

“Centrists and libertarians and Republicans and conservatives, religious people, religious Hindus and Jews and Christians, Falun Gong, they should all be able to participate,” Sanger said.

Failing that, Sanger said a public campaign seeking fairness might move the site to change.

“I’m going to set up a letter of protest,” Sanger said. “I’m going to try to circulate this to a lot of prominent people who have been wronged in various ways by Wikipedia.”

He invites others to contact the Wikimedia Foundation directly to make their feelings known.

As a last resort, Sanger said Congress could intervene by creating an exception to Section 230 that would enable a site to be taken down if it published defamatory material. A precedent exists, according to Sanger, who cited a 2018 law that created a similar exception for websites used to organize human trafficking.

“Even if the people who run the website aren’t doing the human trafficking, if it’s being organized on the website, they can still be sued,” Sanger said.

“Wikipedia really does need some reform,” Sanger said. Though he’s hopeful the site may adopt his proposals, he acknowledged it may not happen.

“They might find ways that are more palatable to them,” he added. “[If so,] I’d be all in favor of that.”

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