Wikipedia has in recent years drifted away from neutrality and slid into “leftist propaganda,” according to its co-founder Larry Sanger.
“Wikipedia made a real effort at neutrality for, I would say, its first five years or so,” said Sanger. “And then … it began a long, slow slide into what I would call leftist propaganda.”
Sanger told EpochTV that particularly in the past five years, any individual who is “on the right,” or “even contrarian,” often finds themselves with an article on Wikipedia that “grossly misrepresents their achievements, often just leaves out important bits of their work, and misrepresents their motives.”
Wikipedia “casts them as conspiracy theorists, are far right or whatever, when they and their friends and people who know them well would never describe them in that way,” Sanger said.
Sanger criticized Wikipedia, suggesting that it has recently moved to “follow the news media.”
“More recently, they’ve gotten rid of almost all conservative news sources as sources for their articles,” he explained. “And so as the news media has shifted, and as the establishment, frankly, has shifted more to the left or to the left, the content of Wikipedia has followed suit.”
He previously noted that Wikipedia has banned Fox News’s political reporting, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail from being used as sources.
Sanger said he is now working on creating a new decentralized network, a “superset of all encyclopedias.”
“We’re going to be putting all of the encyclopedic content and the world in a single network. That’s an extremely compelling vision,” he said.
He first announced in March that he was working on developing technical standards that could strip power over social media from giant companies and give users more control over the content they produce and see.
Sanger created Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001, but left the project the following year and has subsequently criticized the website.
Wikipedia officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
