Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is alleging that the online encyclopedia has a left-leaning bias and “a lot of problems,” and recently released a nine-point plan to fix it. In an interview with Straight Arrow News, Sanger said he hopes the organization’s current leadership will adopt his plan to get back to the original mission of neutrality.
“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,” Sanger told SAN. “I think Wikipedia needs fresh blood from a wide variety of ideological and religious and other perspectives, national perspectives.”
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Sanger’s nine-point plan includes:
- End decision-making by “consensus,” which he describes as an institutional fiction, given that the culture has largely become an echo chamber.
- Enable competing articles.
- Abolish source blacklists.
- Revive the original neutrality policy.
- Repeal “ignore all rules,” a rule he said he created as a joke in 2001, which is now taken seriously.
- Let the public rate articles.
- End indefinite blocking.
- Adopt a legislative process.
- Reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are, many of whom are currently anonymous.
“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,” Sanger told SAN. “I think they really would make the world better by making Wikipedia better.”
What’s the source?
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 “black listed.” Those listed as “generally unreliable,” “deprecated” and “black listed” can’t be used as sources, with few exceptions.
Sanger called out the list, noting that outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, and Newsmax are designated as “generally unreliable” or “black listed,” while liberal outlets like Mother Jones, MSNBC and The New Republic are listed as reliable.
According to the Ad Fontes media bias chart, those outlets are all equally partisan, albeit on different sides of the aisle, and have about equal reliability ratings.
“It’s a pretty bad system, generally speaking,” Sanger said. “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.”
Sanger said they should include controversial opinions on Wikipedia as long as they are properly attributed, so it’s clear who owns them.
“Sometimes facts only appear or are reported only in sources that are currently disallowed on Wikipedia,” Sanger explained. “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.”
SAN asked Sanger if, instead of allowing more sources that are deemed less reliable by media watchdogs, they should make the standards stricter and ban more outlets that have a lower reliability rating.
“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,” Sanger said.
Who is working on the articles?
Wikipedia has approximately 260,000 volunteers who make edits to its entries each month. Sanger said there is a peer review process that he created that still works well. When a person makes an edit to a Wikipedia article, everyone else who has ever edited that article can review it.
But in many cases, the editors are not known to the public.
“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,” Sanger explained. “So we don’t know who they are.”
The House Oversight Committee opened an investigation into allegations that Wikipedia has purposefully manipulated articles. Sanger said he won’t second-guess Congress, but said the idea that it is getting involved in oversight of an independent encyclopedia makes him “nervous.”
