Summary: In a recent interview, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, called the present state of Wikipedia a “huge moral hazard”. Sanger also said that the website has started the process to centralise the internet. Though Wikipedia claims that it gives a neutral point of view, in reality, they have a point of view, he said. He then alleged that tech giants are trying to control the narrative and it is really important to decentralize the internet.He further alleged that Wikipedia has become more opinionated and partisan.
To address these concerns, Sanger is rolling out a new initiative called ‘Encyclosphere’, a global network of encyclopedias, which will set standards for encyclopedia articles. Through ‘Encyclosphere’, Sanger is trying to create a decentralised network which will provide an equal platform for all to express knowledge.
Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has called the present state of Wikipedia a “huge moral hazard”. Sanger is credited as the co-founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and is also claimed to have coined the name and having written much of its original governing policy. Sanger has worked on other online educational websites such as Nupedia, Citizendium, and Everipedia.
In his recent interview with Tanujay Saha, the PhD candidate at the Princeton University, Sanger said that the website has started the process to centralise the internet. Wikipedia claims that it gives a neutral point of view, but in reality, they have a point of view. He has made it clear that tech giants are trying to control the narrative and it is really important to decentralize the internet.He further alleged that Wikipedia has become more opinionated and partisan.
“It is one among the most popular anonymous websites and anonymous persons can be easily corrupted by the government and criminal enterprises”, he said. He also said that credible sources are becoming narrower in Wikipedia. Since 2002, Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia’s accuracy.[44] In December 2004, he wrote an article for the website Kuro5hin, in which he stated Wikipedia is not perceived as credible among librarians, teachers, and academics because it does not have a formal review process and is “anti-elitist”. In 2019, Sanger had said that
“Wikipedia is a broken system”. In his interview to a online portal, Sanger explained that since its early days, “Wikipedia itself had special challenges” and “One was simply to teach everyone who arrived at the wiki, which was basically a blank bulletin board that could have become whatever we wanted it to become, that we intended to build an encyclopedia. A lot of people didn’t seem to know what that meant, or maybe they just didn’t care,” he said. “Another hurdle was to figure out how to rein in the bad actors so that they did not ruin the project for everyone else. Unfortunately, we never did come up with a good solution for that one,” Sanger added. Consequently, “Wikipedia is a broken system as a result,” he said.
In May this year, Sanger penned a blog post declaring that the site is “badly biased,” “no longer has an effective neutrality policy” and clearly favors lefty politics. Sanger in his post wrote that it has long forgotten its original policy of aiming to present information from a neutral point of view, and nowadays the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia “can be counted on” to cover politics with a liberal point of view.
Pointing to the Wikipedia page about Barack Obama, Sanger wrote that the former President’s page “completely fails to mention many well-known scandals” such as Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal and the so-called “Fast and Furious” operation. Comparing the page with Donald Trump, he writes, “A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good,” he wrote. “The article is almost a total whitewash. Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the idea that the Donald Trump article is neutral is a joke.”
Sanger writes that anyone who approves of Wikipedia’s sensoring of Trump’s statements “must admit” they no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia. He further lists Hillary Clinton, abortion, drug legalization, religion and LGBT adoption as other topics covered with a Left-liberal bias.
After quoting other biased pages, he concludes that it is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy). “At the very least they should admit that they have redefined the term in a way that makes it utterly incompatible with its original notion of neutrality, which is the ordinary and common one. To address these concerns, Sanger is rolling out a new initiative called ‘Encyclosphere’, a global network of encyclopedias, which will set standards for encyclopedia articles. Through ‘Encyclosphere’, Sanger is trying to create a decentralised network which will provide an equal platform for all to express knowledge.
Bhagyashree Gupta 
Balaji Subramanian 
Dr. Niranjan B Poojar