Wikipedia Is Badly Biased

The Uncyclopedia logo. Maybe more appropriate for Wikipedia itself now.

Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead.1 The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call “false balance.”2 The notion that we should avoid “false balance” is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science. Here are some examples from each of these subjects, which were easy to find, no hunting around. Many, many more could be given.

Wikipedia’s favorite president?

Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find. The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. Beyond that, a neutral article must fairly represent competing views on the figure by the major parties.

In other words—and this is the point crucial to evaluating an article’s neutrality—a neutral article is written not to take sides on issues of controversy. It does not matter whether one or both sides believe their point of view is totally factual and supported with incontrovertible proof. How many times, in politics and in many walks of life, have we seen controversies in which both sides can cite apparently rigorous studies, or chapter and verse, or original source material that, they claim, show their view is absolutely certain? In such cases, a neutral resource like Wikipedia is bound by policy not to take a side. Yet it does.

Political scandals are a good example where sources are carefully lined up on both sides. There were many controversies over “scandals” plaguing Obama’s presidency. But in fact, the only scandals that I could find in Wikipedia’s Obama article were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash. You might find this to be objectively correct, if you are a Democrat; but you cannot claim that this is a neutral treatment, considering that the other major U.S. party would, citing other ostensibly credible sources, treat the subject very differently. On such topics, neutrality in any sense worth the name essentially requires that readers not be able to detect the editors’ political alignment.

Not Wikipedia’s favorite president

Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the idea that the Donald Trump article is neutral is a joke. Just for example, there are 5,224 none-too-flattering words in the “Presidency” section. By contrast, the following “Public Profile” (which the Obama article entirely lacks), “Investigations,” and “Impeachment” sections are unrelentingly negative, and together add up to some 4,545 words—in other words, the controversy sections are almost as long as the sections about his presidency. Common words in the article are “false” and “falsely” (46 instances): Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are “false.” Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution. You might approve of Wikipedia describing Trump’s incorrect statements as “false,” very well; but then you must admit that you no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia. More to the point, Republican, Trump-supporting views are basically not represented at all in the article on Trump.

I leave the glowing Hillary Clinton article as an exercise for the reader.

On political topics it is easiest to argue for the profound benefits—even the moral necessity—of eliminating bias in reference works. As I argue in my 2015 essay, “Why Neutrality” (updated in Essays on Free Knowledge) we naturally desire neutrality on political and many other topics because we want to be left free to make up our own minds. Reference, news, and educational resources aimed at laying out a subject in general should give us the tools we need to rationally decide what we want to think. Only those who want to force the minds of others can be opposed to neutrality.

“Prior to prohibition, cannabis was available freely in a variety of forms,” says Wikipedia, helpfully.

Wikipedia can be counted on to cover not just political figures, but political issues as well from a liberal-left point of view. No conservative would write, in an abortion article, “When properly done, abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine,” a claim that is questionable on its face, considering what an invasive, psychologically distressing, and sometimes lengthy procedure it can be even when done according to modern medical practices. More to the point, abortion opponents consider the fetus to be a human being with rights; their view, that it is not safe for the baby, is utterly ignored. To pick another, random issue, drug legalization, dubbed drug liberalization by Wikipedia, has only a little information about any potential hazards of drug legalization policies; it mostly serves as a brief for legalization, followed by a catalog of drug policies worldwide. Or to take an up-to-the-minute issue, the LGBT adoption article includes several talking points in favor of LGBT adoption rights, but omits any arguments against. On all such issues, the point is that true neutrality, to be carefully distinguished from objectivity, requires that the article be written in a way that makes it impossible to determine the editors’ position on the important controversies the article touches on.

Gospel reliability is “uncertain,” Wikipedia says, neutrally.

What about articles on religious topics? The first article I thought to look at had some pretty egregious instances of bias: the Jesus article. It simply asserts, again in its own voice, that “the quest for the historical Jesus has yielded major uncertainty on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how closely the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus.” In another place, the article simply asserts, “the gospels are not independent nor consistent records of Jesus’ life.” A great many Christians would take issue with such statements, which means they are not neutral for that reason alone. In other words, the very fact that many Christians, including many deeply educated conservative seminarians, believe in the historical reliability of the Gospels, and that they are wholly consistent, means that the article is biased if it simply asserts, without attribution or qualification, that this is a matter of “major uncertainty.” Now, it would be accurate and neutral to say it is widely disputed, but being “disputed” and being “uncertain” are very different concepts. It is in fact a controversial view that the historical accuracy of the Gospels is uncertain; others disagree, holding that, upon analysis, it is not a matter of significant uncertainty. In other respects, the article can be fairly described as a “liberal” academic discussion of Jesus, focusing especially on assorted difficulties and controversies, while failing to explain traditional, orthodox, or fundamentalist views of those issues. So it might be “liberal academic,” but it ignores conservative academic and traditional views. Therefore, what it is not is neutral, not in the original sense we defined for Wikipedia.

Of course, similarly tendentious claims can be found in other articles on religious topics, as when the Christ (title) article claims,

Although the original followers of Jesus believed Jesus to be the Jewish messiah, e.g. in the Confession of Peter, Jesus was usually referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth” or “Jesus, son of Joseph”.[11] Jesus came to be called “Jesus Christ” (meaning “Jesus the Khristós”, i.e. “Jesus the Messiah” or “Jesus the Anointed”) by later Christians, who believe that his crucifixion and resurrection fulfill the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.

This article weirdly claims, or implies, a thing that no serious Biblical scholar of any sort would claim, viz., that Jesus was not given the title “Christ” by the original Apostles in the New Testament. The Wikipedia article itself later contradicts that claim, so perhaps the editors of the above paragraph simply meant the two conjoined words “Jesus Christ,” and that Jesus was rarely referred to with those two conjoined words in the New Testament. But this is false, too: the two words are found together in that form throughout the New Testament.

But the effect of the above-quoted paragraph is to cast doubt that the title “Christ” was used much at all by the original Apostles and disciples. That would be silly if so. These supposed “later Christians” who used “Christ” would have to include the Apostles Peter (Jesus’ first apostle), Paul (converted a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion), and Jude (Jesus’ brother), who were the authors of the bulk of the epistles of the New Testament. The word “Christ” can, of course, be found frequently in the epistles, including very early epistles, thought to be the first texts written about Jesus.3 Of course, those are not exactly “later Christians.” If the claim is simply that the word “Christ” does not appear at all or much in the Gospels, that is false, as a simple text search uncovers dozens of instances in all four Gospels,4 and about 550 instances in the entire New Testament. If it is used somewhat less in the Gospels, that would be a reflection of the fact that the authors of the Gospels were, argumentatively, using the Hebrew word “Messiah” to persuade Jewish readers that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish messiah. But the word means much the same as the Greek title “Christ”: the anointed one, God’s chosen. So, in any event, the basic claim here is simply false. He is called “Jesus Christ” (Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ) in the very first verse of the New Testament (Matthew 1:1) and in the first verse of the gospel sometimes thought to be the first-written, Mark (1:1), as well.5

Or if the claim were that Jesus was not understood to be the Messiah or Christ in his own lifetime before being crucified, we need not quibble about that (though it is easy enough to cite the gospel claims that Peter believed him to be the Christ; see, e.g., Mark 8:29). The book of Acts and the epistles make it abundantly clear that the Apostles, setting up the earliest churches, thought Jesus was the Messiah—indeed, the Son of God.

Clearly, Wikipedia’s claims are tendentious if not false, and represent a point of view that many if not most Christians would rightly dispute.

It may seem more problematic to speak of the bias of scientific articles, because many people do not want to see “unscientific” views covered in encyclopedia articles. If such articles are “biased in favor of science,” some people naturally find that to be a feature, not a bug. The problem, though, is that scientists sometimes do not agree on which theories are and are not scientific. This point is perfectly obvious to anyone who actually follows any lively scientific debate at all closely. On such issues, the “scientific point of view” and the “objective point of view” according to the Establishment might be very much opposed to neutrality. So when certain people seem unified on a certain view of a scientific controversy, then that is the view that is taken for granted as the Establishment one, and often aggressively asserted, by Wikipedia.

Neutral information, representing a scientific consensus with no dissent, I’m sure.

The global warming and MMR vaccine articles are examples; I hardly need to dive into these pages, since it is quite enough to say that they endorse definite positions that scientific minorities reject. Another example is how Wikipedia treats various topics in alternative medicine—often dismissively, and frequently labeled as “pseudoscience” in Wikipedia’s own voice. Indeed, Wikipedia defines the very term as follows: “Alternative medicine describes any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine, but which lacks biological plausibility and is untested, untestable or proven ineffective.” In all these cases, genuine neutrality requires a different sort of treatment.

Again, other examples could be found, in no doubt thousands of other, less exciting topics. These are just the first topics that came to mind, associated as they are with the culture wars, and their articles on those topics put Wikipedia very decidedly on one side of that war. You should not be able to say that about an encyclopedia that claims to be neutral.

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 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.6 It might be better to embrace a “credibility” policy and admit that their notion of what is credible does, in fact, bias them against conservatism, traditional religiosity, and minority perspectives on science and medicine—to say nothing of many other topics on which Wikipedia has biases.

Of course, Wikipedians are unlikely to make any such change; they live in a fantasy world of their own making.7

The world would be better served by an independent and decentralized encyclopedia network, such as I proposed with the Encyclosphere. We will certainly develop such a network, but if it is to remain fully independent of all governmental and big corporate interests, funds are naturally scarce and it will take time.

Here is a follow-up article (June 2021).
And here is another (June 2023).


Footnotes

  1. The misbegotten phrase “neutral point of view” is a Jimmy Wales coinage I never supported. If a text is neutral with regard to an issue, it lacks any “point of view” with regard to the issue; it does not take a “neutral point of view.” My preferred phrase was always “the neutrality policy” or “the nonbias policy.”[]
  2. On this, see my “Why Neutrality?“, published 2015 by Ballotpedia.[]
  3. Both in the form “Jesus Christ” (e.g., 1 Peter 1:1, Jude 1:1) and in the form “Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2). “Christ” is found throughout three epistles widely held to be among the first written, including Galatians and 1 Thessalonians, and twice in James.[]
  4. I mistakenly conceded this false point in an earlier draft of this article, after not searching enough. Greek nominative and accusative Χριστόν and genitive Χριστοῦ can be found throughout.[]
  5. If you look at the footnote Wikipedia cites in support of its weird claim, you will find a sensible, not-misleading, and relatively neutral article by Britannica, the context of which makes it perfectly clear that the authors were not making any claim about the use of the title “Christ” but instead the two-word combination “Jesus Christ,” as applied directly to Jesus in his own lifetime. It seems likely that that two-word name was used rarely, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with his having the title “Christ,” but a reflection of the fact that “Ancient Jews usually had only one name, and, when greater specificity was needed, it was customary to add the father’s name or the place of origin.” Wikipedians copying from Britannica may have missed that bit.[]
  6. That it was Wikipedia’s original notion, see the Nupedia “Lack of Bias” policy, which was the source of Wikipedia’s policy, and see also my final (2001) version of the Wikipedia neutrality policy. Read my “Why Neutrality?” for a lengthy discussion of this notion. Both articles appear in slightly revised and footnoted versions in my recent book.[]
  7. UPDATE: In an earlier version of this blog post, I included some screenshots of Wikipedia Alexa rankings, showing a drop from 5 to 12 or 13. While this is perfectly accurate, the traffic to the site has been more or less flat for years, until the last few months, in which traffic spiked probably because of the Covid-19 virus. But since the drop in Alexa rankings do not seem to reflect a drop in traffic, I decided to remove the screenshots and a couple accompanying sentences.[]

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306 responses to “Wikipedia Is Badly Biased”

  1. Luis Leal

    It all comes down to something quite specific, Wikipedia has no curated content anymore.

    Quite a titanic task to be performed, useful though, as the purpose of the Wikipedia wasn’t an affordable and free way to universal knowledge but an unbiased one in comparison with others that inevitably portray facts as they are perceived for functional purposes within certain zones of procedences of them accross the globe.

    Dresden’s raid is not going to be explained the same way in a british encyclopedia than in a german encyclopedia, for example, it would inevitably contain a certain degree of bias.

    This is unnerving because many people have managed to distort the nature of the web resource at will, while I have been prohibited to let a quote on a cow picture (leading an article) stating “[Type of cow] laying happily in the grass on a summer’s afternoon” as if it was some sort of hate speech motto.

    The latter it’s possibly a ridiculous example, but it speaks volumes about the herd reasoning that has kidnapped the internet information flow.

    And yes, I’m kind of “influenced” by Sam Vaknin’s views on the matter, but I’m talking also from a personal perspective where simple behavior conditioning is the new normal in the consumption of web resources.

    Youtube, the most visited website in the world, penalizes its users when they don’t conform to the flow they customize for them through their algorithms.

    Imagine the following:

    • The end user 1 search for Miles Davis.
    • The end user 1 gets a myriad of results containing Miles Davis.
    • The end user 1 picks a video and sees it.
    • Previously, the end user 0 in the same geographical zone search for Doja Cat, end user 0, for the purposes of this example, has already successfully been located.
    • In the sidebar aside the video player, the end user 1 gets Miles Davis related results, and if by any chance the website has managed to locate end user 1 on the geographical zone where end user 0 was located too, it combines the query with the data the website has in the aforementioned zone so end user 1 gets Miles Davis and Doja Cat results in the sidebar.
    • If by any chance the end user 1 searches again, let’s say, Chet Baker, and decides to ignore the suggestions, the website delays content delivery for periods that go from 2 to 5 seconds.

    It’s known that users tend to respond quite good to this kind of conditioning, since 2 seconds is already a huge delay for internet standards today, take as example that if any user experiences a delay of 2 seconds by entering an e-commerce website, chances are that the potential customer doesn’t come back at all, never again.

    The same applies for Facebook, the second most visited website in the world, although is the one the users spent the most time so it’s the better asset in terms of “un-real state”.

    This place makes their users to define themselves as man or woman, and that’s done for a reason, targeting better.

    Men that have no easily consumed content included within their profile such as memes nor entries to website URLs that have an easy debate entry point because the persons or the topics mentioned there are not under the current mass media regular basis are targeted with nudes of all kinds, the algorithms start with females and if they don’t have any response to that then continue to nude men, the feed tends to be populated with “popular content” aside of the nudes and also include mild and highly sexually suggestive content, photos, illustrations, stories, products, you name it.

    That happen too when the user forbids the infamous pixel to retrieve all the data that would “ideally” be part of its profile.

    When the user freely opens its consumption habits the algorithms stop the attack and proceed to advertise as much as possible based on the information that has been granted.

    That’s the kind of pavlovian conditioning the users have been suffering since years ago.

    You cannot expect to get an unbiased point of view from that population sample, that’s the people that is now in charge of the Wikipedia.

    For them, the content within could look like it’s indeed unbiased, reliable and in one word good.

    Unfortunately in order to have an actual unbiased perspective you have to be able to substract yourself from the equation, and very few people can do it.

    Thank you for the article.

  2. […] Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, published a blog post this month declaring that the online encyclopedia’s “neutral point of view” policy is […]

  3. […] Wikipedia Is Badly Biased […]

  4. Matt

    I would never use Wikipedia as an authoritative source for any controversial topic. Although the topic of Wikipedia bias is worth discussing. To me, not expecting something from an information source that it is incapable of delivering is just a matter of good media hygiene.

    Given your authorship of [2], I’d be curious to hear more on your thoughts on the proper role of neutrality in modern political discourse (if you are willing to go a bit off-topic).

    Abstractly and sans context, I also support neutrality. But we do not live in a world sans context and our political communication has consequences. Outside of specialized academic discussions, it is not really clear to me that neutrality is usually the best choice. Some thoughts in no particular order:

    * In [2] your dismissal of Holocaust Denial as a tiny fringe belief really misses the point. What if it wasn’t a fringe belief? You seem to be dodging the question of a writer’s moral obligation to his readers. Is it really acceptable to raise the profile of an idea that is almost certainly false and dangerously anti-Semitic by treating it as “just another” potential historical account of equal status to the consensus one?

    * Intelligent Design raises the issue of how to deal with disingenuous positions. ID was always an obvious Trojan Horse, I don’t believe even its proponents took it all that seriously as a scientific theory. However, “teach the controversy” raised a real issue. Real scientific controversy happens at the level of academic journals in jargon-laced and carefully worded exchanges between experts. It seems unreasonable for HS students – who should be focused on achieving basic mastery – to be exposed to fringe views, or to be taught that evolution is “controversial”. Is it really “neutral” to raise a fringe theory to apparent equal legitimacy with a well established one?

    * The treatment of vaccinations brings up the role of expertise in neutrality. Real medical studies are very careful in their treatment of causation – both in their word choice and in the conclusions that they draw. But by the time this filters down to popular media, well-considered qualifiers by experts can be viewed as abject uncertainty by non-experts. Thus, attempts at neutrality, coupled with a complete lack of expertise, result in poor understanding and poor decision-making. In this case, shouldn’t true neutrality be reserved for experts?

    * Modern social media and the 24-hour news cycle have the real problem that there is simply too much for anyone to objectively and carefully consider all the information available. This system is very susceptible to attempts by bad actors to disrupt the flow of real information by, as Bannon put it, “…flood[ing] the zone with shit.” How, then, can responsible news organizations enable their readers to make well-informed judgments? It seems to me that strict attempts at neutrality plays into this strategy, trying to balance insincere and intentionally distracting positions with legitimate ones. What you call “the canard of false balance” seems like a real problem, to me.

    * Finally, to choose the most hyperbolic example, how do you ethically cover the rise of Hitler in a neutral way? It seems that responsible journalists (or encyclopedia authors) are perfectly justified in using condemning and negative language in such cases. Again, scrupulously neutral language in the face of atrocity can have the very real consequence of shielding its perpetrators and is thus actually not very neutral (again, outside of specialized contexts such as a sociological analysis, etc.).

    1. Re: “Real scientific controversy happens at the level of academic journals in jargon-laced and carefully worded exchanges between experts.”

      This is utterly wrong. Consider everything going on with SARS-COV-2 and COVID for the past 5-6 months. This is one of the greatest, most interesting and most public scientific controversies of the past 60 years. If you’re young, you might not appreciate how unique it is, but there hasn’t been anything like it for decades.

      The learning process with COVID is NOT happening purely at the level of academic journals, nor purely between academic experts. In fact, those so-called experts didn’t understand what was happening either, had to learn on the fly, and frequently made very visible mistakes. It’s absolutely fascinating stuff!

      The reason for teaching scientific controversies in high school – the last level of mass education right now – is because it’s vital for the general public to be able to appreciate such public scientific issues. Everyone’s lives and many people’s livelihoods are at stake. But the experts don’t know everything, so people need to be able to think for themselves.

      And to do that, they have to be taught the minority viewpoints as well as the consensus. Even on things like Intelligent Design. Which, by the way, is a legitimate minority viewpoint even without the religious aspect. It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that life on Earth was seeded from outer space by an alien species of intelligent bioengineers. (They needn’t be God.) Of course that won’t be the consensus viewpoint without further evidence, but simply by contemplating the alternative view, one is led to interesting questions that would otherwise be neglected.

      Similarly, last January’s early “expert opinion” consensus, on what is currently the COVID pandemic, was proven utterly wrong, over and over again, by people willing to look at the minority alternative options and dig for evidence to prove or disprove them.

      “1500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you “knew” that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll “know” tomorrow.” – Kay, _Men in Black_ (movie)

      1. Matt

        @Wisdom Seeker

        Please don’t use a phrase like “so-called experts”. Experts are “so-called” because they have an acknowledged expertise in theirs fields. This does not make them infallible even within the area of their own expertise. Just because experts are occasionally wrong does not diminish the need for expertise.

        I agree, that the process of science with all its foibles is indeed fascinating, though far beyond the scope of a blog comment. I can understand why you might feel lucky to be able to see it unfolding so publicly.

        So, broadly speaking, I have no issue with exposing people to a wide variety of information and allowing them to make up their own minds. Students should absolutely be exposed to the scientific method rather than be taught “science” as a collection of facts. In principle, I encourage students to explore and try to form their own conclusions.

        But, there are pragmatic limits. And I honestly don’t know how to draw this line – that is one of the reason’s that I commented.

        For example, HS students – and the population in general – do not have the background needed to meaningfully weigh-in on many relevant scientific topics. There can be real negative consequences when the ignorant think they know more than experts. The recent outbreaks of Measles in the US is one such result. So how can you be “neutral” when some readers will use your words to make decisions that will hurt themselves, their families, or their communities? This seems irresponsible.

        Your point on ID would be valid if ID were supported by evidence that legitimate experts genuinely believed supported that conclusion. Even I would have no problem exposing HS students to it if that were the case. But ID was always just a fig leaf over Creationism (if you don’t believe this, then look at how much ID literature is about attacking Evolution vs. supporting ID). In my opinion, this disingenuousness presents a real challenge for Mr. Sanger’s thesis on neutrality.

      2. Peisistratos

        “500 years ago, everybody “knew” that the earth was flat.”

        No, that is not true. Mankind has known at least since Eratosthenes (3rd cent. BC) that the Earth is a sphere.

        That people, especially medieval Christians, should have believed in a flat earth is an disingenuous lie, fabricated in the 19th century.

        1. Correct, but 500 years ago, everybody did believe in a cosmological falsehood, namely that the earth was the center of the universe.

  5. Your post here is very welcome to everyone interested in promoting objectivity and good will.

    It is sad to see a utopian idea die, but to be honest, it is impressive that it lasted as long as it did before becoming corrupted.

    One has to wonder if the dramatic increase in funding for Wikipedia has directly led to its downfall. No doubt the biggest donors wanted something for their donation.

    1. Christopher Beland

      Most of Wikipedia’s funding comes from individuals. Mentioned in the financial reports are contributions in kind from ISPs, money from some charitable foundations, and also some from Google, which uses Wikipedia content. Most funding is used for IT infrastructure, improving user interfaces, and hosting conferences. The vast majority of contributions to Wikipedia are made by volunteers who don’t get any funding or assistance from anyone, and who generally don’t know who is funding the Foundation.

      Some donations and non-profit group activities go toward helping underrepresented groups like women and linguistic minorities fill in content gaps, which if anything is making Wikipedia less biased. You might worry about Google’s Wikipedia article, but it seems to have a pretty robust Criticisms section. So I’m not sure what nefarious donors you are referring to, and what content changes you think they are “getting” in return.

  6. Charles Platt

    Google’s “Knol” project promised to avoid this problem, years ago. I never understood why they abandoned it so quickly. It allowed multiple authors on any topic, with authors sequenced according to click-popularity. Really quite similar to a bookstore where the popular titles are at the front but you can still find the unconventional ones at the back. And no pretense of neutrality. The user could read multiple viewpoints and reach an independent conclusion. The Wikipedia concept of just one “neutral” source was never credible to me.

  7. Hugh Wintters

    First of all, I’m saddened by what Wikipedia has become. I’m guessing, like many others, I don’t reference Wikipedia like I once did -because I no longer trust its objectivity. I assume that Mr. Sanger, like me, are proud classic liberals -the hallmark of which, invites all conversation, points of view, discourse, disagreement, etc. which hopefully distills to the best available truth. My heart bleeds for how bad he must feel for what his baby has grown to be.

    My take on the problem of left-wing bias at Wikipedia is simplistic, left-wing ideologues make the time and have great interest in expressing their point of view on Wikipedia. Because of such, right-wing and centrist counter-arguments are quickly overwritten by the phalanx of left-wing editors.

    What can be done to right the Wikipedia ship? I’m guessing not much. Other than strong management, which -because of the scope of the endeavor may be plausible. Another idea might be to identify which edits are made by whom and provide a link to their other edits -this might shed light on the person’s consistent bias. Buyer beware!

    1. Christopher Beland

      Every article already has a complete history which shows who made which edits, and you can click through to see their full contributions. There are links from that “View history” tab to tools which can find who added or removed any given text, and to pie charts of which editors contributed how much. https://www.wikiwho.net/ can provide you an annotated version of an article showing who contributed what.

  8. Ivan

    i wonder what the LARRY SANGER wiki looks like now
    … terrorist, nazi, far right extremist, climate denier, holocaust denier, anti-vaxer, baby bunny killer …

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