Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia who has many a time in the past gone on the record to talk about the bias of the online encyclopaedia, has in a recent interview with Tanujay Saha, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, spoke on how Wikipedia has become a “huge moral hazard”.
The co-founder of the online encyclopedia, who is no longer involved with Wikipedia, said that the website had started to take part in centralization of the internet. Its articles claimed to have a neutral point of view. However, contrary to the claims, the articles published on Wikipedia have a definite point of view. He claimed that Tech giants have started to take control over the discourse and started acting as the editorial controllers instead of being neutral carriers of information, making decentralization of the internet important.
Wikipedia has become a huge moral hazard. It is amongst the top 10 websites run by anonymous people with no accountability. They have become extremely opinionated and partisan. The anonymous people can easily be corrupted by governments, organisations and criminal enterprises, opined Sanger.
He further added that Wikipedia justifies its neutrality requirement by saying that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by credible sources but Sanger said that the range of credible sources is becoming narrower each day.
Wikipedia has started taking cues from media leaders, Sanger opined, adding that the internet communities tend to be internally conservative and repel any opposition which causes a huge polarization, which in turn causes an informational bias. The academia, he said has become much more leftist, especially in the field of humanity and social sciences. For this reason, when they write on topics outside their expertise, the writings become dogmatic.
Wikipedia discourages primary sources as they need interpretation and wants the authors to use secondary sources which tend to summarize the information in a way that is more credible. Hence, instead of being a broad and open-minded platform, it is turning into a monocultural establishment organ of propaganda, said the co-founder.
Larry Sanger informed that he is launching Encyclosphere, a global network of encyclopedias, which will be setting the standards for encyclopedia articles. The masterclass starts in January 2021 which would focus mainly on how and why launching decentralized networks have become important. Speaking on how, through his initiative, he was attempting to build a totally decentralized network which would provide everyone with an equal voice in expressing knowledge and in rating those expressions of knowledge, Larry Sanger appealed the viewers to join his initiative at encyclosphere.org
Larry Sanger’s interview with Tanujay Saha can be viewed here.
Larry Sanger explains the leftist bias of the online encyclopedia
It is pertinent to note here that after OpIndia’s extensive coverage of the inherent bias of the platform, we also interviewed the co-founder of Wikipedia, who explained in detail why the platform is a cause lost to Left’s propaganda. He had gone on the record to talk about the bias of the online encyclopedia. Sanger had written that it has long forgotten its original policy of aiming to present information from a neutral point of view, and nowadays the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia “can be counted on” to cover politics with a “liberal point of view”.
The co-founder reveals Wikipedia’s foray into child pornography
For the uninitiated, it was none other than Larry Sanger who had also made an appalling revelation about Wikipedia’s foray into child pornography. Sanger had sent a letter to the FBI, the United States’ premier investigative agency, requesting them to probe into the organisation’s violation of federal obscenity laws. He highlighted two Wikimedia Commons categories that he believed had breached the country’s obscenity laws.
