Wikipedia co-founder says site has liberal bias — here’s his plan to fix that

Does Wikipedia have a left-leaning bias? Its co-founder, Larry Sanger, believes it does

citing a blacklist of conservative outlets that are not allowed to be used as sources on the site

Sanger wants Wikipedia to improve its neutrality and have greater transparency and developed a nine-point plan he hopes administrators and editors at the encyclopedia

will follow. Why do you think Wikipedia needs reforms? Wikipedia has got a lot of problems that

It's accumulated over the years. And this is for a number of reasons

But I think the main root reason why it has as many problems is that it has no way to legitimize policy proposals and big new changes

So it ends up being institutionally conservative. It simply lacks any method of major reform

Sanger wrote nine suggestions that he hopes Wikipedia's current leadership will adopt

They include enabling competing articles, abolishing the blacklist, reviving the original neutrality policy, allowing articles to be raided, and ending indefinite blocking

He also wants Wikipedia to reveal who its current leaders are. Consider joining Wikipedia at some point in the next few months and making your voice heard there

You do have a right to edit there. And I think Wikipedia needs fresh blood from a wide variety of ideological and religious and other perspectives

national perspectives for example right now Wikipedia is very much a sort of echo chamber

I find and they won't like me saying this but they should

because I'm simply encouraging people to participate and to get behind the proposals

that I've put out there I think that really would make the world

better by making Wikipedia better. Wikipedia has a list of reliable sources that can be used for

entries. The sources are given one of five ratings, generally reliable, no consensus

generally unreliable, deprecated, and blacklisted. Fox News is listed as unreliable, which means it shouldn't be used, while MSNBC is considered generally reliable

Do you think that's a good system, or do you think that system needs to be changed entirely

Because I see that there could be a difference between thinking that's an acceptable system that's not executed properly. You see what I mean

I think it's a pretty bad system, generally speaking. My view is that sometimes facts only appear or are reported only in sources that are currently disallowed on Wikipedia

maybe the source decided to speak only to that publication. And in that case, if that person doesn't speak to any other publication that is allowed on Wikipedia

then that information is never going to appear on Wikipedia. So the way it has to work, I think, is all sources are allowed, but we can still make a selection of the most credible or the best sources

And we can have a debate about which those are. Controversial views need to be appropriately attributed to the people who own them

And that also goes with opinions about the sources themselves. You can see that AdFontis has this media bias chart, and it's got two separate ways in which it grades news outlets, one based on their partisanship and also based on their reliability

And as you can see, some of the outlets on the right that you described, like Newsmax, the New York Post, have equal reliability to like MSNBC, the New York Republican and Mother Jones

But none of them are within that green box, which would hit the right balance of both not being partisan and having neutral news and also being very reliable

So I want to just push back on this idea that certain outlets should be allowed and wonder perhaps maybe the standards should be stricter

No, I think most of the information that can be found about what's going on in the world is reported in sources that are outside of the box

That's not a problem. I think we can learn a lot from biased sources I Speaking as a sort of conservatarian myself

I think it's possible to learn things from the New York Times

I wouldn't simply take its word for it if it were the only source

or if I hadn't checked it out on controversial issues

but there's a lot of things that I might trust it on. And if it's among multiple sources that

are reporting a certain thing, well, it's fact-checking tradition is pretty strong. So I

would say, I suppose the New York Times is okay, but it doesn't belong in the green box

It's very far left. When do you believe Wikipedia was most neutral and best fulfilling its mission

And when do you believe it started moving to the left? And how do you think that happened

Best fulfilling its mission and being most neutral are distinct things. I would say it was most

neutral in its first three years or so, but it actually fulfilled its mission better in later

years, maybe between 2005 and 2010, then it was already starting to be biased

I remember complaining about that a bit at the time. Nevertheless, it wasn't nearly as bad as it is now, and it had expanded into just an

absolutely enormous resource. so there never was a time that I'd want to go back to

where it was just the way I would like it to be

I think in terms of the qualities of the community I actually like how

things were in the very first year there were a lot of decent people around that

there was a lot of give and take and And people were not so full of themselves and busily negotiating the rules

So now, as to the question when things really changed in the sense of becoming more biased, I would actually break it down into a few different periods

So first of all, the left really started descending in what I would call a noticeable way, even in the second half of 2001. Not a lot of people, but there were some people who were very clearly on the left

And then they didn't really crowd out And here, when I speak of the left here

I'm not just talking about people who might happen to vote for the Democratic Party

That's not what I mean I mean people who are serious full-time or at least part-time activists

And who generally tend to be on the far left So there were a number of those people toward the end of 2001, and a lot more started showing up in the following year

And before that long, they really dominated what was going on so that by 2008, 2010, the board of trustees was pretty much dominated by such people

And it's been that way ever since. But here we're just talking about the people who are like on the board of trustees and actually, in general, the community simply became more radicalized as essentially the political discourse on the left became more radicalized

So there was a big change, I would say, during the Bush years, especially over the Iraq war

And then there was an even bigger change, of course, due to Trump's election

So that's when really, when they became, I think, extremely radical. And that was reflected in the choice of sources

So it was just a couple of years after Trump was in office

I don want to interrupt you but you talked about the community the Wikipedia community and how it changed over time And I find that very interesting So I saw the statistic nearly 260 volunteer editors contribute to Wikipedia every month

Do you have any insight into who exactly they are and how that process works

They're able, of course, to be anonymous. So that has been the rule since the founding of

Wikipedia and in this it follows much of the rest of the internet. So we don't know who they are in

that sense. We can make some generalizations about what kinds of people edit. They aren't all

lefties. And indeed, there's a lot of people who edit Wikipedia on topics that have nothing to do

with politics, of course. You know, of course, a lot of people edit Wikipedia on topics about music

and pop culture and, you know, apolitical history topics and geography and on such topics

it can be quite good. Because I know you know Stephen Pruitt, who is the single biggest editor

Over the years, I believe he's made more than 6 million edits to 33,000 articles

No matter what the numbers are, they're astronomical. So what do you think of one single person having that much influence or impact

Well, he has every right to do it under the system. That's how the system is set up

Doesn't bother me if that's what you're asking. I think there's nothing really wrong with somebody being able to do that

If he is, however, a front for an operation, that's another matter. But I'm not accusing him of being one

I think he might run a lot of bots, and that might be one of the main reasons why he has as many edits

But I actually don't know. The House Oversight Committee started an investigation into what they call, this is their words

organized efforts undertaken in violation of Wikipedia platform rules to influence U.S. public opinion on important and sensitive topics by manipulating Wikipedia articles

The chairman, James Comer, wrote a letter to Wikimedia Foundation's CEO requesting documents and information, and they are saying that some volunteer editors have been caught violating platform policies, and they're curious to hear about the CEO's efforts to thwart that

I wonder what you think of congressional involvement in Wikipedia. It's sad that it's necessary, but at this point, I wouldn't second guess Congress if they think that it is necessary

It never makes me happy when Congress has to get involved overseeing any part of the Internet

It's extremely important that the Internet be free. and even if it is a Republican Congress

it makes me nervous and it should make us all nervous. That said, I do think the issues

that they are taking up in that subcommittee hearing is those issues are very important

and they have, let's just say that the Wigimedia Foundation, in my opinion, has not done the best job of staying

on top of all of the problems that are going on on the platform. And I don't know why that is. And

I think it'll be interesting to see if Congress is able to shed any light on that

Let me just go back to the 260,000 volunteers real quick, just because I think it's fascinating insight to hear from you about how the process works. Once one of those volunteers makes an edit, is there a check and balance system in place to make sure that what they wrote is accurate

Not as such. The edit is immediately available to others to look at, and they will. Generally, the way it works is if you have made edits to an article, then unless you tell it otherwise, it will add it to your watched article list

And then so if somebody else edits an article that you have edited, you'll be alerted

And then you'll go and look over the edits that other people have made and be a sort of informal peer review system in that way

And in a lot of ways, it works well. If I didn think so I wouldn have started the thing So it is quite amazing that wikis work as well as they do And you know we actually do

have this process to thank. And of course, the human beings that have have followed it to for

a lot of the ease of access to information that that we enjoy today. It's just that, unfortunately

that has been greatly, well, let's just say it hasn't gone well in recent years

And then finally, let me cover one more topic with you. You point out in your article that

Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia, but it seems like Elon Musk wants to change that. He recently

called for people to join XAI to help build Grokipedia, which he says is going to be an

open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia. How do you feel about Elon Musk trying to build a competitor

Well, I hope he does a good job. I'm happy about it. I think that's great

The more encyclopedias in the world there are, the happier I am, I suppose, unless they're

extremely irresponsible. I do worry, however, that Grokpedia or whatever it's going to be called

will reflect the same sort of biases that Wikipedia has and that the Grok chatbot LLM

has reflected. So in the last year or so, the Grok, actually shortly after it rolled out

it started drifting to the left. And in the last six months

if you ask it a question on anything remotely political, anything having to do with the culture war

it answers from a left-wing perspective. It's pretty annoying unless you actually support that

What do you make of the use of AI to build something like this? I've anticipated it for quite a while

For over a couple of years, I've been thinking about what's going to happen

And I do think that AI can be used to write a decent encyclopedia article

I've done it myself. I've observed others using it to add articles to encyclopedias

So I know it can be done and it can be done reasonably well

You said when I asked you this original question about Grokopedia and XAI, you said, I hope he does it right

What is your advice to make sure he does it right? Well, there are these prompts that are in the background when you make a query to a chatbot

So you type in your prompt, but then it's wrapped essentially by another prompt

and then the whole thing is submitted to the LLM, to the system

And it's possible to edit that wrapping so that it elicits a more fair and balanced sort of response

I would like to see that in Grok and I would like to see that reflected in Grokpedia

But I'm not sure that we're going to see that. I think Elon Musk and his people know that, of course, it's possible to edit those background prompts

I forget what they're called, but they clearly are not. They have not

Let's just put it this way. They have to know that the system as it exists now has the sort of biased result

Therefore, I think they must intend it. And if they intend it, that means that they're probably going to come up with a similarly biased encyclopedia

I hope not. I hope I'm wrong. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time

I'm Ray Bogan for Straight Arrow News. For more reporting straight from our nation's capital, download the SAN app