Name: How Wikipedia Turned Into an ‘Engine of Defamation’ | Co-Founder Larry Sanger
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T17:29:48.000Z
Description: Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and coined the name “Wikipedia’ in 2001. He established many of Wikipedia’s founding policies, including the original neutrality guidelines, before he left in 2002.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and coined the name “Wikipedia’ in 2001. He established many of Wikipedia’s founding policies, including the original neutrality guidelines, before he left in 2002.

Since then, he has become a vocal critic of Wikipedia’s growing ideological bias, particularly on politically charged issues.

Sanger says certain outlets are favored as sources while others are blacklisted, creating systemic distortion and exclusion of dissenting views.

Most of Wikipedia’s top editors are anonymous, which means that people have no legal recourse for lies or inaccuracies about them that may be published on Wikipedia’s pages.

In this episode, Sanger breaks down what went wrong with Wikipedia and how it can be reformed.

Sanger has put forward nine theses for reform, including enabling competing articles, restoring original neutrality policies, convening an editorial assembly, and creating transparent rating systems for entries.

But what is the likelihood it will happen? Can—and should—Congress do something about it? And could Elon Musk’s Grokipedia offer a more balanced alternative?

Editor’s Note: The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Larry Sanger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It’s good to be back. I’ve been following Wikipedia for a long time, you know, longer than 20 years, in fact, which is when I really started with the Epoch Times. And I’ve watched our entry at The Epoch Times change dramatically over those years. At the beginning, it was actually quite reasonable and thoughtful, and I thought it was well-edited. And I was a big backer, frankly, of Wikipedia. I loved the idea, right?

But then, especially as we started to grow, especially as we started to become more influential, I mean, the term, pack of lies, comes to mind. It just turned into this gross distortion, and it created this huge problem for us, which is when, you know, potential readers find out about The Epoch Times, they’ll go to Wikipedia and they’ll read this terrible distortion of reality and might not actually, you know, subscribe when normally if they just, you know, didn’t have that problem, let’s say, it would be something perfectly reasonable for them to look at. So I want to get at, I don’t want to focus on The Epoch Times specifically, but I suspect it’s not just us, okay? Well, what happened?

It’s definitely not just you. I’ve talked to a half a dozen other media sources over the last couple of weeks, and most of them have complaints of your sort. I’m an advisor of BitChute, the video platform, and they have complaints. Any sort of media platform or public figure, for that matter, that has a reputation that affects their reach and influence in the world is going to be basically bad-mouthed by Wikipedia, pretty predictably, I would say.

So why? It’s a good question. There are a lot of different reasons why. What I’ve always said is that Wikipedia is one of the institutions that the left marched through. We talked about the march through the institutions, and I think that definitely happened. It was already happening in 2001 in the first year. But I think another more perhaps illuminating and timely aspect of the question is, well, isn’t there something big that has happened since Trump came into office the first time?

The answer is the mainstream media in general, and I lump Wikipedia in with it, really kind of went off the deep end. It took what was originally just the Fox News format and then the MSNBC format, and that was adopted by everyone, you know. And as a result, Wikipedia just aped that. And because in those new formats journalists’ pretensions of objectivity are out the window, that essentially is what happened with Wikipedia as well. Wikipedia’s neutrality policy says, or at least used to say, that on issues of controversy, it should be impossible to tell what position the authors of the article hold.

That’s no longer the case in practice, for sure. And the policy page called, neutral point of view, has been, in subtle ways, rewritten so that it forbids what’s called false balance, which just means basically it’s required now, even for the sake of neutrality, that they take a side when one side is clearly wrong in somebody’s opinion.

That doesn’t sound like neutrality.

No.

It’s sort of like an inversion of the word, in fact, what you’re just describing, right?

It is.

So you described this as the march through the institutions, but when did you— you mentioned back in 2001 you were already seeing some kind of issue— but when did this all really become a problem? Because I mean, there are some pages on Wikipedia that I’ve seen within the last couple of years. I really don’t go there that often anymore because of this exact issue.

But there are some pages I remember at least a couple of years ago, which were pretty neutral, but they were pages that were of no particular political import from the perspective of the gas people, as you describe them, right, globalist, academic, secular, progressive [GASP]. This is what you describe as the viewpoint of Wikipedia today. If it doesn’t have to do with that very much, or it’s not particularly influential, it might be neutral, might be left alone. But anything that does have political import from these perspectives, would you say that’s accurate?

For sure.

And quickly back to my question, when did you really start to see this shift from neutrality into something much more politicized? When was it that that became a big issue for you?

To be quite honest, I was noticing shifts practically from the beginning. It didn’t become really obvious to everyone until I think maybe the last five years. But I was noticing Wikipedia taking definite stands, for example, on global warming. I thought that was surprising and not in keeping with the neutrality policy as early as, I think, 2005 or 2006, when it was taking what was at that time called a scientific point of view. I’m not saying the scientific point of view is bad. I think it’s good. It’s just that it’s not neutral. And what is mainstream science may not actually be the truth, as the history of science shows.

That is one of the main reasons why a good encyclopedia will canvas all of the different views on a subject. Now, I said back in 2010 or 2012 that the sort of bias that Wikipedia shows is very similar to that of the New York Times or BBC, very sort of establishment center-Left. But I noticed shortly after Trump came into office that, again, as the mainstream media became sort of explicitly biased, so did Wikipedia. And it became, if anything, worse, perhaps especially after January 6.

So I ended up writing a series of blog posts about Wikipedia’s bias, which I was surprised that it did this, actually. So three blog posts in 2020, 2021, and I think 2023, in which I basically gave a lot of examples. And apparently, this was news to people. I was surprised that it was news. I thought everybody knew this. And even now, people are still sort of waking up to the reality that Wikipedia does, on many pages, not all of them, but on many pages act as essentially propaganda.

You know, in a very similar way, it’s very interesting, so, I mean, basically, you lump Wikipedia in with legacy news sources that have this, you know, whatever perspective the legacy news sources have, which is often a very similar perspective across, you know, a whole range of issues. Wikipedia just fits neatly in there and maybe in a more extreme way. That’s what you’re saying.

Yes. Well, it reflects those sources because basically by policy on Wikipedia, editors are supposed to cite secondary sources, what they call secondary sources. So not books, not tweets, but summations thereof, especially from the news media. Wikipedia now has a page, a list of what they call perennial sources, and it functions as a blacklist. And according to this list, you simply may not cite, may not use as sources of Wikipedia articles anything that has been branded as Right-wing.

So there’s a color coding of different media sources. The New York Times, of course, is green, which means you can cite The New York Times. In fact, you don’t even have to say that the source is from The New York Times in the text of the article. You can just speak in Wikipedia’s own voice and then use The New York Times as a footnote.

As if it were a fact.

That is deeply disturbing. But yes, please continue.

Right. Anything that is colored yellow, which means essentially caution, and red, which means it’s a no-go, you may not cite this for any purposes except perhaps characterizing facts about the source. Those things, if you actually attempt to use such sources, that actually might be grounds for your being dismissed from the project. That’s how strongly they feel about it.

And just explain to me a little bit what you mean about this march through the institutions.

As I recall, one of the Left-wing theorists explicitly stated as a goal that we, those on the left, attempting to effect revolutionary change, need to execute a march through the institutions, as Marx, if I’m not mistaken, and essentially capture education, government, of course, but especially education, the media, churches, and so forth. So each of these institutions has been, to a greater or lesser extent, systematically, carefully, and strategically infiltrated by the Left.  Well, Wikipedia is one of those, insofar as Wikipedia represents what we are all expected to believe, at least from an establishment point of view. It is one of the controlling, I guess you could say, one of the controlling institutions of modern civilization. I’m sorry to say.

Something that just comes to my mind is a Wikipedia entry about Philip Roth and some of his writing. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with this example.

I can tell the story.

Okay, please do.

Sure. So Philip Roth, a famous American novelist, wrote The Human Stain. And he actually contacted me and was complaining, as a number of famous people have done over the years, and basically bemoaning the fact that he had weighed in on the Wikipedia article and said, I am Philip Roth, and the origin story of this particular character from The Human Stain is such-and-such. I forget the precise details.

He was a friend of his in any event, and not what was speculated by the New York Times at some previous date. So he was correcting the record, and he was an authoritative person to do so. So in the end, what he ended up doing was he ended up writing an article for, I think it was the New Yorker. I think it was the New Yorker.

Or the Spectator. I can’t remember, but maybe it’s the New Yorker.

Maybe. And that, in which he told the story, and he also talked about the problems with Wikipedia, and that could then be used by Wikipedia as a source. So there’s something really ridiculous about that.

But the bottom line is they went with the New York Times characterization and not the actual primary sources. I mean, that’s the kicker here, isn’t it?

Yes. I’m not personally sure of the details in that case, but yes, this is very much on brand for Wikipedia now. Wikipedia has a tendency to emphasize secondary sources over primary sources, which, as a former academic, I find to be absurd. If you’re in the business of writing an encyclopedia article summing up knowledge, then you ought to be able to do so from primary sources yourself and just deal with the problems of interpretation that come up. But they essentially offload those problems to the editors of secondary sources.

And that just illustrates a broader problem, which is a kind of fetish that they have about very nitpicky applications of their own specialized rules and in ways that are ultimately unreasonable. So it has become a very sort of irrational bureaucracy in that regard. A lot of people have complained about this problem.

So in the past when we spoke, it seemed to me like you believed that Wikipedia cannot be reformed. But now you have come up with nine theses, which you, nailing to the virtual door of Wikipedia, I suppose, suggest to me that you think it might still be reformed. Tell me about that.

I think it’s possible. I think that the reform would not come from the people who like the system, obviously. It would require an influx of people who agree with the theses. But that’s possible. You know, thousands of people who hear about this, especially as part of this campaign that I have started, might actually descend upon Wikipedia and, you know, get some cred in the Wikipedia system. They have every right to do so. It is an open project. It is not limited to the Left in any way, shape, or form.

So, and in addition, of course, the supposed adults in the room, the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, have certain obligations, I think, that they can execute and impose their high-level decisions on the Wikipedia community. For example, just for example, they could declare that there will be an editorial assembly that actually formalizes the adoption of rules instead of doing what they have done, which is very anarchical and not entirely legitimate, according to many observers.

And not as transparent, I think. That’s also what you’re saying, right?

Well, because the participants in Wikipedia are mostly anonymous. You don’t know how many accounts are controlled by a single individual or a single organization that pretends to be essentially organic, but it’s not. I think there’s a lot of astroturfing going on on Wikipedia, a lot of money that is being plowed into it through PR firms especially.

And it’s just, but it’s hard to even assess that because aside from the outcomes.

If you want any chance of reforming Wikipedia, then it’s absolutely necessary to have some sort of body that has been legitimized that can actually meet face-to-face and debate on behalf of the participants in Wikipedia. Obviously, the people on Wikipedia can continue to debate in their usual way, but again, it’s sort of a black box what’s really going on because if there’s a lot of stuff that’s being organized behind the scenes, it is not all transparent. But a face-to-face assembly would have a kind of legitimacy that the current proceedings do not, and would also make it possible then for more ambitious sorts of reforms, needed reforms, that simply could not be made under the current ways of proceeding.

So transparency is central. I think this has been a theme of the last however many years, that with the lack of transparency around decision making, rationale, a lot of bad things can happen. A lot of bad policy can be instituted. One of the things that I think your second thesis is to enable competing articles. And I like that. That’s a great one, right?

Because at least you can have another perspective, which hopefully would be as easily findable. Because that’s the other part, right? It’s one thing if one article is shown as the be-all and end-all, and then there’s a little tiny footnote with a second competing article. But that would actually be something that would be quite helpful in itself.

Right. People can look on<a href="http://larrysanger.org"> LarrySanger.org</a>. There’s a link to the nine theses there. So we’re talking about Theses 2, Enable Competing Articles. And there’s a long essay to go with each of these. So the idea is that articles would be, anyone could start an article on a topic that already has an article. It’d be a competing article, but it wouldn’t immediately go live. It would be in a draft namespace, which many different people could look at.

Articles would be moved to the main namespace when they meet objective criteria. Perhaps, as I explained in another of the theses, number seven, they would be promoted when they are rated in a certain way, whether by AI or by public rating or some other objective things like number of edits and number of contributors and things like that.

And then the idea is the author would determine who works on the article. Generally speaking, we might encourage people to allow anyone who wants to, except perhaps people from a list that the original article starter would want left off because they were causing problems. And essentially, if you want an article to be truly competitive, if it’s just another completely open article, then that new article could be squatted on by the same old people, if you see what I’m saying. The idea is that each article would be started with its own framework.

So right now, as we were saying before, Wikipedia has what I describe as GASP. This isn’t necessarily bad. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying that it is a framework. So that’s globalist, academic, that’s fine, secular, and progressive. And the combination of these things marks out Wikipedia’s operative editorial framework as being very narrow.

Essentially, the narrow approach of Western elitists, essentially, and leaving everybody else out. So there are many other frameworks that one could work with them, like just an unbiased American political framework would openly invite both Republicans and Democrats to work together using explicitly stating that it’s possible to use sources from what are characterized as the far-Right and the far-Left, maybe not the absolutely insane ones, but right, we’ll have some standards and the Overton window would be opened deliberately pretty wide and that’s an example of a framework you state that out front, and you say if you want to contribute to the article, then you’re going follow these basic ground rules.

Wikipedia could do this. This is the proposal. I think it’s not likely that they will, but they could. And the fascinating thing to me, to just contemplate, is that if this were available, I can imagine people starting frameworks explaining things from the Chinese Communist point of view, the Indian Hindu point of view, the French intellectual point of view, and a million others.

Well, so a few things would happen. One is Wikipedia would grow quite a bit, right? And second, you could explore these different viewpoints overtly as opposed to being sort of stuck in the only framework which is allowed.

Yes, I would say there’s a difference here between framework and what Wikipedia calls a point of view, though, in the way that I’m using the word. I want to say that Wikipedia strives by its own lights to be neutral. I don’t think it does a very good job. It could do a lot better, but it does strive to be neutral by its own lights. And I would say that that would be true or should be true of all of the other frameworks. In other words, you don’t have a blank check, an open license to share whatever biases you like in the article. Not at all, right?

So one of the things that means, for example, is that if a point is controversial, the views expressed in the article have to be attributed to their owners, and there has to be some acknowledgment that there are others who disagree. But even within those sorts of broad neutrality guidelines, it’s still possible for different, call them, takes on neutrality from different points of view. Again, a British national writing about gun control, but by his lights, neutrally, will sound very different from an American national.

So this makes a ton of sense to me, right? You’re always striving for neutrality, but you accept that we all inherently have some sort of inherent biases, some particular viewpoints on the world, and that’s going to inform how we actually do things. But all the while striving for neutrality. That’s different than saying we’re going to create something biased.

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