Wikipedia Co-Founder Warns Website Is Compromised by Wealthy Elites to 'Shore Up Their Power,' Points to Glaring Omission on Biden Page
Yes, we’re aware — nobody is supposed to use Wikipedia as a source for serious citations. After all, the encyclopedia that everyone can edit often has glaring errors. But most of us, this writer included, believe it’s correct enough to sketch out the basic facts on a subject even if it can’t be used for real research.
Not so fast, says Larry Sanger. He says the encyclopedia gives a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.” Who’s he to say? Only one of the co-founders of Wikipedia.
Sanger — who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001 — said the site is compromised by “wealthy and powerful people.”
“You can trust it to give a reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything. Can you trust it always to give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” he told UnHerd’s Lockdown TV on Wednesday.
He pointed to one glaring omission from U.S. President Joe Biden’s article: Almost anything about the Ukraine scandal has been excised from it.
“The Biden article, if you look at it, has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him,” Sanger said.
“So if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you’re not going to get it from the article.
“What little can be found is extremely biased and reads like a defense counsel’s brief, really,” he added.
Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, said there was clear bias how conservative contributors and editors are treated, saying they’re “sternly warned if not kicked out” if they add their own take.
The sources they cite within the articles are cherry-picked by the site’s liberal establishment.
“You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues. It’s just banned now,” Sanger said.
“It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia,” he added.
While Wikipedia used to tout its policy of NPOV — neutral point of view — in all of its articles, Sanger has said those days have passed and Wikipedia is now a hive of liberal bias.
“There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard of journalistic ‘false balance,’ which 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 in a 2020 blog post, according to Fox News.
“Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find.”
During the interview Wednesday, he said that when it came to this sort of editing, “the word for it is propaganda when it’s systematic.”
“There is a reason why we want neutrality out of three different kinds of content out of journalism, reference content and textbooks, all three of them, we naturally expect them to be neutral,” Sanger said.
“And the reason for that is, when we are getting the news, when we are learning or when we are just trying to get some basic information at for background in understanding a topic — in those sorts of situations, we do not want to be led by the nose.”
“Basically, if you if you’re the sort of person who just wants to be told what your religion believes on the topic, who just wants to be told what your party thinks or what the dictator thinks, then you’re kind of in a bad situation, you’re not fully human in that case. In fact, in situations in which that happens, — well, the word for it is propaganda when it’s systematic. And that’s really what we’re dealing with on Wikipedia.”
“Wikipedia is known now by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world. So there’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say,” Sanger said.
He added that “if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”
And just to prove the point, here’s that part about Ukraine in the Joe Biden article: “In September 2019, it was reported that Trump had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Despite the allegations, no evidence was produced of any wrongdoing by the Bidens. The media widely interpreted this pressure to investigate the Bidens as trying to hurt Biden’s chances of winning the presidency, resulting in a political scandal and Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives.
“Beginning in 2019, Trump and his allies falsely accused Biden of getting the Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin fired because he was supposedly pursuing an investigation into Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden,” it continues.
“Biden was accused of withholding $1 billion in aid from Ukraine in this effort. In 2015, Biden pressured the Ukrainian parliament to remove Shokin because the United States, the European Union and other international organizations considered Shokin corrupt and ineffective, and in particular because Shokin was not assertively investigating Burisma. The withholding of the $1 billion in aid was part of this official policy.”
If you want to find out more about Biden and Ukraine, there’s a Wikipedia page for that. That might sound like a good thing, until you realize it’s called “Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory.” Also absent from Joe Biden’s Wikipedia is any mention of the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop which seem to indicate Biden père was far more stuck in to his son’s influence-peddling and shady business deals than he’s thus far admitted. In fact, the word “laptop” appears not a single time on the page.
If you want a “reliably establishment point of view” on Joe Biden, in other words, Wikipedia is a perfect place to start.
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