Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 with the intent of creating a community built side that would have a commitment to being neutral. On that front Sanger said, the site has failed in a major way.

“Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work,” he told Fox News.

Sanger cited an example of why the site is a shell of what it was intended to be as it pertains to self editing how biased some postings can be without a formal review process. “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved,” he said on the Fox report.

What started out as something that was widely regarded as a great idea started going off the rails in Sanger’s eyes early on.  He’s been publicly quoted being critical of the sight as far back as 2004.  In 2007 he to IT News that Wikipedia was “broken beyond repair.”  He pointed out numerous scandals at the website and serious management problems that led to “frequently unreliable content.” 

Since Wikipedia was supposed to be a site that contained reliable content, you can see how that would be a major issue for the credibility and long-term success of the site.

In 2020 Sanger called the site he helped create “badly biased,” and he used as an example how the site dealt with pages on Donald Trump and Barack Obama. He said the Wikipedia article on Trump is “unrelentingly negative,” while the Obama page “completely fails to mention many well-known scandals.”

Bottom line, Sanger thinks Wikipedia is too far gone to try to save, so he’s putting his efforts towards a new project called “Encyclosphere.”

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