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Wikipedia has a serious problem. For over a year, I’ve reported on how the most sensitive topics on the site have been captured by ideological editors and special interests.
If Wikipedia were just a regular website, this wouldn’t be very concerning. The reality, however, is that Wikipedia has become the “essential infrastructure” of online knowledge, piping information sourced from the mainstream media into every major downstream digital platform, from Google to ChatGPT to even Alexa and Siri. I sat down for an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who recently released his “Nine Theses,” a series of essays identifying major issues that characterize what I call the “Wikipedia Crisis.”
Below is a transcript of a portion of the interview.
ASHLEY RINDSBERG: Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. Thank you for joining me. I want to start out by asking you to give an overview of the “Nine Theses” and a sense of why you chose that title.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. (Getty Images)
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LARRY SANGER: I’ve been a critic of Wikipedia since 2004 or so, but I’ve never come out with a thoroughgoing plan for reform. But recently, a friend of mine persuaded me — and I thought it through carefully myself — that I have the sort of platform that would enable me to develop a reform proposal.
RINDSBERG: Let me just quote you from the first essay, titled, “End decision-making by consensus,” where you say, “On Wikipedia, an article that is completely one-sided and quite controversial is often declared…to represent the community ‘consensus.’ If this sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. The plain fact is that Wikipedian consensus is no consensus at all.” Can you elaborate?
SANGER: The reason why we adopted this language of “consensus” is that the original Wikis [website anyone could contribute to] used a method of decision-making that they called consensus building. Initially, there was just a discussion on a Wiki page, and it was like any threaded discussion. And then someone else would beat the conversation into a narrative form that actually really read something like an encyclopedia article. It was an attempt to capture all the nuances of the represented positions that used to be in the conversation.
RINDSBERG: That’s something we’ve seen on controversial social, cultural or political topics like gender and trans issues, where there’s going to be an overriding narrative that is preemptively deemed the “consensus” position by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia bills itself as the “Free Encyclopedia.” (Wikipedia)
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SANGER: Wikipedia simply represents as the consensus position whatever the most powerful people on the platform say is the case. If it really represents a consensus of anything, it is the consensus of everyone who thinks in the approved way, which is a very narrow sort of consensus, like a scientific consensus. The way that Wikipedia seemed to think of scientific consensus is simply an average of the views that can be found in very few journals and excludes the views of a lot of, you might call them dissenting scientists, as if they didn’t even exist. It is very problematic, and it is the reverse of a consensus.
RINDSBERG: In the second thesis, you write, “Neutrality is impossible to practice if editors refuse to compromise. And Wikipedia is now led by such uncompromising editors. As a result, a favored perspective has emerged – the narrow perspective of the Western ruling class, one that is Globalist, Academic, Secular and Progressive (GASP).” Give us more insight into why “GASP” is such a problem.
SANGER: It’s a problem for the very simple reason that it’s a very narrow subset of humanity in other countries, even other countries that have a lot of liberal representation. There are approaches to the subject matter that are simply left out because they aren’t found in Western universities. It is increasingly hard to find conservatives’ perspectives, even stated critically on Wikipedia. You can find conservative figures bad-mouthed on Wikipedia, actually libeled. Nevertheless, if you look for detailed characterizations of their positions and why they are held, that’s actually going to be hard to find on Wikipedia.
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RINDSBERG: This brings us to the third essay, which is “Abolish source blacklists.” I think most people have no idea that this is the case that Wikipedia basically operates as a wrapper for the mainstream media because of a single list of “reliable sources.” Most of the green-coded reliable sources are basically the cadre of news and opinion outlets that form the mainstream media. How did the list come into being? Where does it derive its legitimacy from?
SANGER: In 2005, somebody started codifying the policy on what they call “reliable sources” and started writing a number of different rules about what should be used in terms of sources. In 2018, an editor called MrX made a color-coded list of lots of different news sources, and it just grew. Green means a source can be generally cited in Wikipedia’s own voice as a source of statements of fact. Yellow generally meant it could [possibly] be used unless [there is] something better. And then there’s gray, which has a special status where you cannot even link to the site at all.
RINDSBERG: So you have something like OpIndia, which is generally barred from being used as a source on Wikipedia. However, Chinese state-owned outlet China Daily is coded yellow for sometimes reliable. And Al Jazeera, which is effectively controlled by the Qatari government, is green. It’s generally reliable. And that’s OK if you want to make that decision, but I don’t understand how you can square these three different categorizations.
UKRAINE – 2021/10/31: In this photo illustration a Wikipedia logo is seen on a smartphone screen with a flag of China in the background. (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images))
SANGER: Right. It’s very clear looking at that [Reliable Sources] page that the Wikipedia editors have declared a favored point of view. It’s definitely no longer a neutral point of view. I mean, they take strong stands against Hindus and Christians as it happens. And of course, against ethnic Jews when they’re defending Israel.
RINDSBERG: Let’s go skip down to who actually runs Wikipedia. I would say 99% of people who use Wikipedia have no idea that this is the case, but there are certain elite users or power users who exert a huge influence on not just the website, but on information today. Can you expand who these people are?
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SANGER: A lot of people who don’t know anything about Wikipedia just sort of assume that it is a for-profit edited encyclopedia. It’s written by volunteers, but like any online volunteer website, it’s possible to be anonymous. In the early days, there was nothing like a bureaucracy. There is the Arbitration Committee, which has 15 members. Then there are the Bureaucrats, who are the super administrators who can make admins out of ordinary accounts. And then there’s the CheckUsers, who have the ability to check the user’s IP address and are very powerful. Altogether there are 62 such accounts, and out of all of those, only nine reveal their real names. So 85% of these most powerful accounts, the Power 62, as I call them, 85% are anonymous. I mean, that’s crazy. How is that possible?
RINDSBERG: With the importance of this issue, now we have a Congressional investigation, and people like myself as a journalist looking into this, why would Wikipedia not take more significant action?
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SANGER: I hope they will finally take significant action now. I really do hope that they will address the problems that we’re talking about here. If the rank-and-file Wikipedia editors don’t do anything about the problems, then I actually think it is incumbent upon the supposed adults in the room, the Wikimedia Foundation, to step in.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation for comment.
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