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.”
[Featured image via YouTube]
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Comments
Moves by Big Tech to censor new site in 3…2…1…
I never use Wikipeadia anymore because it is so blatantly biased and it has only gotten worse every year for the last five years. I tell my kids to avoid it.
It’s good Sanger is pushing back. America needs 1 million people like Sanger to restore free speech; logic and objective reasoning.
Sanger will certainly be considered a threat to Liberal Progressives who are determined to rewrite history. He better be ready to be called a racist and to be attacked in every way. And he will likely lose half the people he thought were friends.
infogalactic.com
A competitor already exists.
What is Infogalatic ? I checked it out. This is what I found.
It was founded by V. Day (his “pen name”) who felt Wikipedia was dominated “by the left-wing thought police who administer it.”
In Fall 2016, V. Day decided it was time to do something about the Wikipedia problem. He made a copy of the entire site and invited his followers to start rewriting all its pages. As a result many pages have a familiar look. “Wikipedia was the easiest and the most important of the social justice/Progressive social media giants to replace,” he said.
I took a look at infogalactic.com and looked under Socialism and Communism. I didn’t do an exhaustive reading but in reading Communism you would think Lenin and the boys were philosophical and economic theorists rather than the monsters they were.
It had that look of presenting the theory alone rather than the intent, theory and practice.
I would like to be wrong. Tell me what you see when you take a couple of topics.
The genocidal pre-game of socialism and communism is always down-played by a left that embraces the slaughter of millions to affect some kind of commie world order. Frankly, though, it doesn’t matter overmuch. Today’s left is happy to advocate the genocide of “wrong thinkers.” They honestly believe it’s nobel to kill people who don’t toe the party line.
They think they’ll write the history, but they won’t. Evil doesn’t win. Ever.
Seriously, you conflate the entirety of the left wing with wanting to commit genocide because ….
That’s a different question though, defining a political system is different from the historical analysis of it. This feels like a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation. Wikipedia isn’t going to categorise every aspect of socialism in one page. You’d have to follow the links to various other things like Stalin to get to the Great Terror for example.
There can’t be enough competition.
There are a zillion dictionaries, and are (or were) several hard copy encylopedias.
Wikipedia being the sole source of information for a generation of useful idiots is an obscenity.
Even if all you do is link together existing web encyclopedias and dictionaries, what do you do about twats like the guy who runs dictionary.com (I think), who keeps accommodatingly revising his official definitions within minutes of any Democrat publicly abusing a well-known word or phrase?
gospace,
Please see my comment to Ben Kent, who replied to you, and let me know your thoughts. Thanks.
There is a reason why Wikipedia performs so well by internet measures, and Google is yet again the one to thank. Search most topics, especially people and places, and the Wikipedia page is almost certainly going to be the top result after the ads. Even if not the top, within the top 2 or 3.
So the competitors will need to fight that at some point. Right now I use any number of other information sites including Britannica before every knowingly clicking to Wikipedia.
The fix is in. It takes effort to be on the Internet and avoid the poison.
Wikipedia is useful for for things where leftist propagandais not likely to be inserted into the information. Granted, that isn’t much, but relying on it for much else is as idiotic as the people who do.
As for research, Google is still an necessary evil (Bing stinks, as does Yahoo), but for anything political – or where information might be suppressed by Google for political purposes – try http://www.Yippy.com: you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Bing is not much different than Google. It’s getting used more, but still lags big. I use DuckDuckGo for a lot of search. Where Google and Bing results tend to line up similarly, DDG isn’t influenced by politics or payments. More organic.
And Startpage
“Wikipedia’s Socialism page announces: “The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century.””
Having been there for 2 winters at Aviastar. I can tell you their manufacturing capabilities are still in the 1950s.
Post a link I can upload to and I will send photographs of what a bathroom looks like in a world class aerospace manufacturing company looks like in Russia.
That quote is out of context the full quote is this:
“The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world’s first spacecraft and the first astronaut.”
Which is historically accurate
Part of its downfall was letting “the mob” edit the source however they wanted, with no moderation. Try making a correction to a left-slanted article. “Anyone can do it,” but your correction will be trashed and reversed almost before you can read it.
Now his new venture boasts “an old-fashioned, leaderless, ownerless network” that “will be immune from the leftist bias and propaganda.” Those two features go together like vanilla ice cream and 10W-30. Hope the gazillionaire has real gazillions.
Oh please, there is “moderation”. But when the “moderators” are just as biased as the ones that write the slanted/biased articles it’s sorta pointless to even try and correct anything. You’ll be instantly reverted and if you push the matter you’ll be accused of “edit warring” and be summarily banned from editing the article in question.
Mods, also known as the zampoliti
Oh please, wikipedia has never been neutral and the whole NPOV policy has been a joke since its founding. You simply have a core group of “administrators” and their favored “editors” that push biased viewpoint(s) on certain articles and then when a regular user comes along to edit out that bias they are piled on, their edits reverted, and are summarily banned from wikipedia for not abiding by some obscure “policy” that nobody really takes seriously in the first place if you have the audacity to argue your point. So the liberal bias remains in many articles of note and no way to correct the information.
Do you wonder why exactly many teachers outright ban any references to wikipedia in their student’s research papers?
But here we are with wikipedia polluting the search results of the major search engines as if they are a reliable source of information on the internet.
Sanger 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.
If freedom of editing is to be allowed, Mr. Sanger should take a serious look at Robert Conquest’s maxim, which runs something like “Any organization not avowedly right-wing will end up controlled by the left”. Precisely what happened to Wikipedia, which was already showing signs of leftist hijacking twenty years ago. Ford Foundation, etc. etc.