Wikipedia cofounder seeks to unmask its deep state, strip legal immunity if it resists reform

Across the Atlantic, Wikipedia has contemplated going dark in the U.K. rather than comply with the Online Safety Act, which could force it to strip the anonymity underlying its volunteer model for creating and editing entries.

On this side of the pond, the 24-year-old crowd-sourced encyclopedia is facing a Reformation-style campaign by its disillusioned cofounder Larry Sanger to strip the anonymity of only its most powerful editors and break their grip on narrative control.

The crown jewel of the Wikimedia Foundation is losing its sheen in the face of Sanger's "nine theses," promoted by nascent Wikipedia competitors including X owner Elon Musk, and the stories of dissenting editors and article subjects who claim Wikipedia's elite suppressed their work and locked or scrubbed articles to prevent challenges to its orthodoxy.

The House Oversight Committee recently opened a probe of alleged coordination by Wikipedia editors to skew U.S. public opinion on sensitive topics by manipulating articles. 

This spring, then-interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Ed Martin accused its parent of violating nonprofit obligations by peddling disinformation aimed at Americans, a month after the conservative Media Research Center documented it trashing President Trump's Cabinet nominees and censoring their Wikipedia pages.

'Good-faith dialogue' or Section 230 immunity at risk

Wikipedia now represents the "GASP point of view" of globalists, academics, secularists and progressives and shuts out others, Sanger told Just the News, No Noise this week, a change to the neutrality Sanger gave the platform when pitching it to cofounder Jimmy Wales as a replacement for their prototype Nupedia.

But after its traffic took off and content started showing up at the top of Google search results, "elements of the left descended" on Wikipedia in line with its "traditional walks through the institutions," said Sanger, who has dinged the platform as a socialism fanboy.

"There are still people on the center and even conservatives on Wikipedia, but they have to be quiet because otherwise they will be blocked by the current crop of administrators," he said, blaming the anonymous "Power 62" accounts, which allegedly comprise 85% of the "most influential" accounts on the platform.

Having previously called for recourse for victims of Wikipedia defamation, Sanger now wants to shine a light on its deep state, uncloaking editorial leaders while leaving anonymity open to the "rank-and-file" contributors who make edits, he told Just the News, No Noise.

The platform's political bias is merely a "syndrome of mismanaged and missed opportunities," for which he seeks "good-faith dialogue" with Wikipedia.

"We ought to give it the college try at least one last time," Sanger said, calling himself "the poorest founder of a top-10 website" by global traffic. If "little people" like him show up en masse to edit, "they can't go back on that, and as long as you behave yourselves, there's nothing stopping us from going in."

If Wikipedia rejects his "commonsense proposals," which are not "particularly, actually conservative," it shows the platform is beyond reform, he said.

After Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called Wikipedia "brazen propaganda" in sharing Sanger's viral interview with Tucker Carlson, Sanger proposed statutory removal of the Wikimedia Foundation's Section 230 immunity shield should the foundation ignore him.

Carlson himself claimed "activists and intel agencies" had turned Wikipedia into "the most comprehensive propaganda op in human history." 

The interview spurred Musk to announce xAI is building "Grokipedia," which will be publicly available "with no limits on use," and then Botipedia to announce an AI product "6,000 times bigger than Wikipedia," currently limited to users "with emails from education, organizations, and corporations." It's currently in beta 0.5.

Sanger touted Botipedia and its founder, Philip Parker, an American economist, as "very smart and committed to strict facts and fairness."

The Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to queries for its response to Sanger's proposal, the nascent competition from Musk and others, and the House Oversight probe.

MSNBC is trustworthy, New York Post is not?

Sanger launched a "blogosphere"-like competitor, Encyclosphere, four years ago in response to Wikipedia's alleged capture by the "woke" left, and has repeatedly called it out for systemic bias and acting as "thought police." His conversion to Christianity from "skeptical philosopher" in the past year sharpened Sanger's critique.

"No one has ever made a thorough-going proposal about how Wikipedia could be reformed" before his nine theses, Sanger told Just the News, No Noise.

The first is to "end decision-making by 'consensus,'" an "institutional fiction" that "hides legitimate dissent under a false veneer of unanimity," dominated by "ideologues and paid lackeys" who "declare themselves to be the voice of the consensus."

Wikipedia should enable "multiple, competing articles written within explicitly declared frameworks" that each aim for neutrality, to challenge the GASP worldview that excludes "other common views [that] are marginalized, misrepresented, or excluded entirely."

It should junk the unofficial but widely followed "source blacklists," such as the "perennial sources" list that frowns on the New York Post and Fox News while touting MSNBC and the U.K. progressive newspaper The Guardian, and return to the original neutrality policy rather than erase "alternative" viewpoints "in favor of hegemonic Establishment views."

Wikipedia also picks and chooses which activists are reliable as a whole or by subject, ruling out the Anti-Defamation League on the "Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and related antisemitism" but endorsing it for "hate groups and extremism in the U.S." It has rapid-fire editing squads that help solidify gender transitions of public figures such as Eliot Page.

The platform's treatment of YouTube competitor BitChute, a "free speech video platform" Sanger advises, is a good example of its bias, Sanger said. BitChute representatives have unsuccessfully tried to "persuade those squatting on [its Wikipedia] article to allow libertarian and conservative perspectives about it."

Sanger calls for ditching his early "joke" rule – "ignore all rules" – which now protects "insiders from accountability," and requiring full names from the most powerful users, dubbed "CheckUsers,” “Bureaucrats,” and Arbitration Committee members, given that "Wikipedia’s influence far exceeds that of major newspapers" yet refuses their transparency.

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray years ago documented a mysterious editor of dubious humanity, "Philip Cross," who made nearly 134,000 edits across 14 years and didn't take a day off for nearly five years.

Wikipedia should develop an "open source AI rating system" so others who are "provably human, unique, and come from outside of the editor community" can rate articles, and end its "indefinite blocks" that often "enforce ideological conformity and protect petty fiefdoms" and drive away good editors, Sanger says.

One of them, a self-identified MAGA patriot and Latter-day Saints elder, said he was banned for "truth-telling" after creating more than 800 Wikipedia articles with more than 35,000 edits.

Finally, Sanger proposed creating an "editorial legislature" to make the bold reforms ignored by the foundation, which should "convene a constitutional convention to create an editorial charter and assembly" that would implement changes like the nine theses.

Battling 'Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers' to educate about Einstein in Arabic

The theses and Sanger's interviews prompted a rash of complaints on X about how Wikipedia treats disfavored contributors and frames hot-button issues.

Ideas Beyond Borders cofounder Melissa Chen recounted her team's years of translating English-language pages for Arabic Wikipedia, including for Jewish scientist Albert Einstein and the Holocaust, while battling the "Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers" who controlled it. Sanger shared claims of Wikipedia's systemic bias against India and Hindus.

Wikipedia editors also tried to delete the page devoted to Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska's fatal stabbing on Charlotte, N.C, transit. Its heading described her murder as "killing" while calling George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police "murder." The defendant in the Zarutska case has been charged with murder but has yet to stand trial. 

Sanger's hope is to make Wikipedia a "better citizen of the world," but his long-term strategy for designing better institutions is to insist teachers stop talking about knowledge as something "relative," he told Just the News, No Noise.

Most scientists and "responsible adults" outside of "radical centers of power" accept the idea of "objective truth that can be found through careful investigation" but it's missing from schools, he said. "Ultimately it is gonna have to be a philosophical change" of recognizing Truth with a capital T, rather than changing "a few policies" on one platform.