Wikipedia Founder Larry Sanger: A 'cabal of bad actors...descended on the site' (video)

The New American’s Alex Newman interviewed Wikipedia’s founder Larry Sanger, who is now executive director of the Knowledge Standards Foundation and is a vocal critic of the online encyclopedia he helped to get off the ground.

Sanger confirmed that he has been complaining about a left bias on the site for over a decade but it has gotten “worse and worse”, continuing that while the bias existed previously, “it’s obvious now” more than ever.

Sanger continued to say that in around 2002:

“the the second year of Wikipedia,,,there was … a cabal of bad actors…descended on the site and and basically started undermining a lot of the more serious academic contributors…” These bad actors “kind of took it over,” Sanger said, and “made the site hostile to a lot of ordinarily polite people and just experts and made it into a kind of game that appeals I think especially to the radical left.”

Alex Newman told of his experiences of having his changes on Wikipedia immediately undone, and this author has had the same experience. One can spend hours vigilantly updating a page with factual source data only to have it immediately removed and replaced by leftist spin.

Sanger reflected that his experience with the bad actors on Wikipedia was his “introduction to how the radical left interact with people.” Sanger suggested that one of the major problems is that there is “no set way of resolving disputes,” which is something this author has personally encountered. Calling consensus for changes without authors having the ability to counter the claims is just used “as cover for people who want to impose their will on the rest of the people,” Sanger said.

The Wikipedia founder continued to say that the solution would be “a fair democratic way of actually voting on specific questions about articles,” but he does not believe that the system will change, as it is comfortably in the hands of those controlling the narrative.