Wikipedia Co-founder SLAMS site’s far-left bias, its ‘neutrality long gone,’ ‘it’s is a joke’

Wikipedia is a far-left propaganda resource and has been for years. We have long known, and railed to no avail. Wikipedia is a joke and no one with a measure of integrity and/or scholarship goes near it.

Wikipedia is but one cog in an immense propaganda machine inundating the body politic with lies and disinformation – like all totalitarianism regimes.

• He said: ‘The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone’
• Sanger said he is now working on a new ‘Encyclosphere’ project but said he has hope Wikipedia could be ‘fixed’
• His own Wikipedia page documents a long history of criticism against the site he co-founded 

Co-founder says Wikipedia’s neutrality ‘long gone,’ cites leftist bias

“And then when the rest of the media and tech became insanely far left, Wikipedia naturally went along with the trend,” he tweeted.

By: Dave Boyer – Washington Examiner, February 21, 2021:

The Fox analysis cited the two main pages for “Socialism” and “Communism” that span 28,000 words but lack any 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.

In a blog post, Mr. Sanger said examples of bias on Wikipedia “have become embarrassingly easy to find,” pointing to the entries for former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

“The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal — or, of course, the developing ‘Obamagate’ story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump,” Mr. Sanger posted in May 2020. “A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good.”

He said the entry about Mr. Trump shows that Wikipedia’s neutrality “is a joke.”

“Just for example, there are 5,224 none-too-flattering words in the ‘Presidency’ section,” he wrote. “By contrast, the following ‘Public Profile’ (which the Obama article entirely lacks), ‘Investigations,’ and ‘Impeachment’ sections are unrelentingly negative, and together add up to some 4,545 words — in other words, the controversy sections are almost as long as the sections about his presidency.”

He said Wikipedia frequently asserts “in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are ‘false.’ Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution.”

The Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement that Wikipedia “is a living, breathing project, and is always evolving just as our shared understanding of a topic does.” It said the foundation does not directly control the content on the site, which is written by volunteer editors.

The spokesperson also pointed to a Harvard study that “shows how the more people edit an article, the more neutral it becomes,” Fox News reported.

Daily Mail:

His own Wikipedia page documents a long history of criticism against the site he co-founded.

Sanger’s woes with the company were first revealed in 2004 when he wrote an article for the website Kuro5hin.

Sanger’s article claimed that Wikipedia, which calls itself ‘the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,’ is not perceived as credible by librarians and academics because it lacks a formal review process and is ‘anti-elitist.’

In 2007, Sanger criticized Wikipedia again after the launch of Citizendium, another wiki-based encyclopedia he created to address the ‘flaws’ with Wikipedia.

Sanger said Wikipedia was ‘broken beyond repair’ and had ‘a whole series of scandals’ from ‘serious management problems’ to ‘frequently unreliable content,’ according to IT News.

The techie again distanced himself from Wikipedia in September 2009 when he claimed: ‘I thought that the project would never have the amount of credibility it could have if it were not somehow more open and welcoming to experts.’

‘The other problem was the community had essentially been taken over by trolls to a great extent. That was a real problem, and Jimmy Wales absolutely refused to do anything about it,’ Sanger told Internet Revolution.

Sanger sent a letter to the FBI in April 2010 claiming that Wikimedia Commons was hosting child pornography, according to a BBC article.

‘I think Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn’t lead to mob rule,’ Sanger said in an interview with Vice in November 2015.

‘People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.’

In the Vice interview, Sanger equated the alleged trolls that took over the platform with modern-day social justice warriors.

He again called Wikipedia ‘a broken system’ in a May 2019 interview with 150Sec, his page noted. He said the leaders did not ‘come up with a good solution’ ‘to stop bad actors from ruining the project.

Sanger described Wikipedia as ‘badly biased’ in a May 2020 blog post in which he claimed the site no longer had an effective neutrality policy.

‘The notion that we should avoid “false balance” is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science,’ he wrote.

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