Wikipedia was a good idea, once upon a time, long, long ago.
Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is.
— Larry Sanger
It is now a nest of centralised intelligence, corporate agendas, and wokeness, according to co-founder Larry Sanger.
He adds that it actively suppresses and censors non-mainstream information and sources, and that over 80% of those controlling it are anonymous—a situation he describes as problematic.
In his conversation with me, Larry spoke about how Wikipedia has moved away from its original goal of open contribution, which has led to 'left-leaning' bias and a lack of neutrality.
We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
— William Casey, CIA Director (1981-1987)
He pointed out that transparency is gone.
To fix this, he suggested allowing competing articles on controversial topics and introducing public ratings to increase accountability.
As I pointed out in the episode, I no longer use Wikipedia for anything.
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Talking points
- Larry Sanger helped create Wikipedia but is now critical of how it has developed.
- He believes Wikipedia has become biased and influenced by certain ideologies.
- Anonymity and control by institutions have harmed the reliability of articles.
- Larry proposes reforms like allowing multiple versions of articles to exist.
- He suggests using a rating system to judge article quality and reliability.
- He sees potential for AI to help improve Wikipedia in the future.
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
— Noam Chomsky, linguist and philosopher
