Larry Sanger

In an interview Thursday for Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger stated he was embarrassed about helping found the site given its increasing left-wing bias. Noting it helps shape the understanding many Americans have of the world, Carlson asked Sanger what could be done to fix the problems on Wikipedia, but Sanger doubted it was possible to fix the site from the inside. He instead argued for creating alternative sources, noting his most recent effort: the Encyclosphere.

Conservative media have been subject to an ongoing purge on Wikipedia since Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential election. Originally, this only banned their use for factual claims with continued use permitted for citing opinions, but a policy change early last year significantly curtailed even this exemption without any discussion supporting the change, in defiance of normal practice. The change was made by Guy Chapman, a Wikipedia administrator notorious for political bias who has played a pivotal role in the sourcing purge.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger published a blog post last week analyzing the site’s left-wing bias. Examining articles about Donald Trump’s impeachments, the Black Lives Matter protests and riots, Joe Biden’s scandals, and the 2020 election, Sanger argued Wikipedia’s coverage is so extremely left-wing that it constitutes propaganda. He partly blamed an ongoing purge of conservative news sources on Wikipedia which includes Breitbart News. Sanger warned these developments made Wikipedia “a kind of thought police” and “an opponent of vigorous democracy.”

A Washington Post article published this week criticizes bias in political science articles on Wikipedia. However, rather than attacking the left-wing bias afflicting political articles, the author argues instead the problem is articles not citing enough female authors and academics. The author, Samuel Baltz, boasted of trying to fix this “bias” by expanding coverage of women in political articles, while otherwise celebrating Wikipedia’s “political and ideological neutrality” in its coverage.

Multiple academic studies and critical analyses of Wikipedia have pointed towards the site’s left-wing bias. The findings include its content being more left-leaning than Encyclopedia Britannica and left-leaning editors being more active and partisan than right-leaning editors. Left-wing outlets have been found to be the top-cited sources and represent most citations on articles about American politicians, and right-leaning editors have at the same time been found to be six times more likely to face sanctions.

In a piece for British magazine the Critic, American academics analyzed evidence of left-wing bias on Wikipedia. Noting research into Wikipedia’s left-wing bias and its increasing bans of conservative media, the authors point to a greater sign of bias: the enforcement of site policies on major political topics by administrators with special privileges on the site. They find in their analysis that editors favoring right-leaning views were six times more likely to be sanctioned than those favoring left-leaning views.

In a decision last month by Wikipedia’s community, statements in “userboxes” on editor profile pages were no longer allowed if they expressed or implied opposition to gay marriage. Breitbart’s coverage of the decision prompted Christian media and organizations, as well as family groups, to condemn Wikipedia for censoring the views of traditional marriage supporters.

Facebook is testing a new feature that integrates Wikipedia pages in Facebook search results. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger admitted in May that the popular open collaboration encyclopedia is riddled with leftist bias.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, last Wednesday joined the chorus of companies organizations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement following the police-involved death of George Floyd. In its announcement, the Foundation stated there was “no neutral stance” on racial justice. They further committed to making Wikipedia and other Foundation-owned sites more “inclusive” through measures such as a  “universal code of conduct” the Foundation Board recently demanded.

Even as the criticism of Wikipedia’s left-wing political bias intensifies, including from the site’s co-founder Larry Sanger, the major tech platforms continue to use the online encyclopedia in their services and rely on it as a model for addressing “fake news” concerns. Rather than improving their services, the integration of Wikipedia into Big Tech platforms has, instead, made them disseminate false or biased information.

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, published a blog post this month declaring that the online encyclopedia’s “neutral point of view” policy is “dead” due to the rampant left-wing bias of the site. Noting the article on President Donald Trump, Sanger contrasted its extensive coverage of presidential scandals with the largely scandal-free article on former President Barack Obama.