‘Nobody should trust Wikipedia’, warns its co-founder Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has said that nobody should trust the crowd-sourced online encyclopaedia as it is run by left-leaning volunteers. He said that the sire is no longer trustworthy as it does allow content that does not fit the agenda of leftists, and therefore people can’t get a complete view on the topics.

Sanger, who had co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales in 2001, said that the platform has betrayed its original mission by only reflecting the views of the ‘establishment.’ In an interview with LockdownTV, Sanger said that he agrees with the view that there are teams of Democratic party leaning editors who remove content that they don’t like.

Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia lost its neutral nature in 2009, before which editors from all ideologies will debate equally before deciding what should be published on the platform. He said that the recent issues from Covid to Biden, articles on everything on Wikipedia has become partisan, particularly supporting the Biden administration in such issues, and blacking out information that does now show the Democrats in positive colour.

The Wikipedia Co-founder gave examples of articles on Joe Biden and his Hunter Biden, where important details about them are completely missing. The article on the US President does not mention most of the criticisms against him, and it completely whitewashed the Ukraine scandal. Sanger said that the para on Ukraine in the page reads like a defence counsel’s brief. The concerned section in the page says “no evidence was produced of any wrongdoing by the Bidens”, and that “Trump and his allies falsely accused Biden” of involvement in Ukraine to protect Hunter Biden.

The Wikipedia page on Hunter Biden is even more shocking, as it does not mention anything about the content found in his laptop. The article does say no evidence of wrongdoing was found “after the seizure of a laptop purportedly belonging to Biden”, but does not mention other explosive content found in the laptop, which was left by Hunter at a computer repair shop and forgot to pick it later.

In October last year, The New York Post had published emails retrieved from the laptop, relating to Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and the links to his father. Twitter and Facebook, run by the same left-leaning propagandists, had blocked the News York Post article, preventing people from sharing it. Similarly, Wikipedia is also completely blocking out any information about the contents of the laptop.

Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia’s coverage of Covid-19 is also very biased, as they just reproduce the view of the World Economic Council or World Economic Forum, the World Health Organisation, the CDC and various other establishment mouthpieces like Anthony Fauci.

He also gave the example of Wikipedia articles on eastern medicine, which are biased as they basically call the ancient medicine systems quackery in dismissive, quite judgmental language.

Showing how biased Wikipedia has become, Larry said that major media houses like Daily Mail and Fox News are blacklisted by it. This means if something is covered by these published publications but not by the leftist media houses, that can’t be published on Wikipedia.

Larry said that Wikipedia has become just like any other left-leaning media house. ‘There are a lot of people who would be highly motivated to go in and make the article more politically neutral but they’re not allowed to,’ Sanger said. He added, ‘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.’

He informed that there are now big companies like Wiki PR that employ people to write on Wikipedia, but such writers and editors don’t reveal that they are associated with such companies. People are spending to money to make changes to Wikipedia articles because there’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say, he said.

Larry Sanger had left Wikipedia over differences with co-founder Jimmy Wales over how to run the website, and has since become a staunch critic of it for its left-leaning bias. Earlier he had said that Wikipedia has become a huge moral hazard, saying that it has turned into a ‘monocultural establishment organ of propaganda’.

Source : OpIndia