(LifeSiteNews) — The co-founder of Wikipedia has said that the popular online encyclopedia is “obviously biased” towards left-wing and establishment views and is heavily influenced by the U.S. intelligence services.
“The rank and file ‘Wikipedians,’ they take their cues not from … Wikipedia’s original neutrality policy or anything like that,” Larry Sanger said in an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald. “They take their cues from, basically, CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times and whatever those outlets feel comfortable saying.”
“One also has to remember that they have declared like 80% of the major sources of news on the right to be unreliable. Officially. It’s in their policy at this point,” he continued, adding that this “really colors the articles and what the editors allow the articles to say.”
Sanger went on to say that the left and the political establishment “deliberately seek out to take control” and that they “have their own agenda.”
The Wikipedia co-founder described the role that the CIA and the FBI have been playing in editing Wikipedia articles.
“It’s clear that between 2005 and 2015… Wikipedia moved on the establishment’s radar,” Sanger stated, adding that it was discovered in 2008 that “the CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia.”
“And [do you] think they stopped doing that back then? No.”
“And we know that that intelligence now—a great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online. And where, if not on websites like Wikipedia?”
“They pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with. Or they just develop their own talent within the community, learning the Wikipedia game, and then, you know, push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger said.
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Sanger recalled that around 2008, Wikipedia adopted a “scientistic point of view,” meaning that “on any sort of controversial issues in science, the establishment view on that topic was pushed very heavily.”
The Wikipedia co-founder named global warming and “articles about certain drugs” as examples and said that articles on Eastern and holistic medicine “were so obviously biased.”
He went on to blast Wikipedia’s credibility, saying that “no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has been as biased as Wikipedia has been.”
Greenwald highlighted the Ukraine-Biden scandal, which Wikipedia calls the “Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory,” and anything related to the COVID crisis as examples of Wikipedia’s clear bias.
“Obviously people can disagree in terms of what the evidence demonstrates,” Greenwald said regarding the Hunter and Joe Biden in Ukraine scandal. “But [it’s obviously biased] to just simply declare outright at the start that ‘it’s replete with lies. It’s a conspiracy theory. It’s only designed to undermine Joe Biden.’”
“Especially the debate over the COVID pandemic, which simply takes the side of the establishment and Dr. Fauci in a way that not even they would express with such certainty.”
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Sanger furthermore emphasized the role that the tech giant Google plays in promoting biased Wikipedia articles.
“What I do know is that Google has donated millions of dollars to Wikipedia over the years,” he said. “Google has, much more importantly, pushed Wikipedia articles. And insofar as people who are in Google or advising Google, investing in Google, want the public to believe certain things. As long as Wikipedia is saying those things, then those articles are going to tend to be pushed to the top.”
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Elon Musk chimed in to comment on the issue of Wikipedia’s bias as well. “This is a major problem,” Musk wrote in response to a clip of Glenn Greenwald’s show. “Also, it seems that the real purpose of many legacy media orgs is simply to provide ‘official media citations’ that support a politically biased Wiki page.”
Sanger, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, co-founded Wikipedia alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001. Sanger had multiple internal disputes early on and was laid off by the company in 2002. Over the years, Sanger has become increasingly critical of the direction the platform had taken. In 2012, he warned about the amount of pornography on the website. In 2021, Sanger launched a free speech alternative to Wikipedia called “Encyclosphere” in an attempt to combat the left-wing “propaganda” that Wikipedia promotes.
Encyclosphere now offers two websites called Encyclosearch and Encycloreader that search 35 different encyclopedias, including Wikipedia and its conservative alternative Conservapedia, the openly left-wing RationalWiki, and other more topic-specific encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains.