It’s hard to believe, but here I am once again reposting an article from The Epoch Times. This one dates back to 2021 and features something remarkable: a co-founder of Wikipedia openly admitting to the platform's bias. Your teachers were right: Do not trust Wikipedia.

Since 2021, things have only worsened—particularly following the jihad and useful idiot war on Israel. Key historical mentions, like the Arab League’s explicit intent in 1948 to wage war against Israel and kill Jewish populations, have been erased entirely. Nevermind all the primary resources, they want to erase history. Articles on suicide bombings? Deleted. Discussing true origins of neo-Palestinian history at all? Practically off-limits, perhaps because it challenges certain narratives.

Recently, Meta adopted a policy similar to Twitter’s Community Notes instead of traditional fact-checking. While far from perfect, it’s a step toward mitigating bias. The core issue isn’t whether fact-checkers are 100% accurate—they’re not—but what they choose to investigate and, just as importantly, what they ignore. For example, satire articles have been scrutinized as though they were serious journalism. Meanwhile, legitimate stories about COVID-19’s origins were censored, and people faced backlash for spreading accurate info.

Wikipedia exhibits similar bias. Consider this: it hosts a lengthy, detailed article about seven World Central Kitchen workers killed in Gaza, yet fails to mention Hamas road on their trucks. Worse, there’s no coverage at all of the eight WCK workers killed in Ukraine. Similarly, there’s an expansive article on Shireen Abu Akleh, but nothing on Shaza al-Sabbah, a journalist killed under eerily similar circumstances in Jenin—while holding a baby. Shaza’s death, de facto caused by the Palestinian Authority, is ignored. We know why.

After the article links below, I’ll share some more relevant social media content and examples.

Article 1: Wikipedia Co-Founder Criticizes Site, Says It Has Slid Into Leftist Propaganda
Article 2: Wikipedia Co-Founder Shocked by NPR Chief Katherine Maher
Not mentioned: HonestReporting covered Wiki bias against Israel since 2008

Wikipedia Co-Founder Criticizes Site, Says It Has Slid Into ‘Leftist Propaganda’

Larry Sanger criticized Wikipedia, suggesting that it has recently moved to “follow the news media.”
By Isabel van Brugen and Jan Jekielek; 9/29/2021; Updated:11/19/2024

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and former philosophy professor, among stacks of reference books at a library in Columbus, Ohio, on March 26, 2007. Kiichiro Sato/AP Photo

Wikipedia has in recent years drifted away from neutrality and slid into “leftist propaganda,” according to its co-founder Larry Sanger.

Sanger, who parted ways with Wikipedia almost two decades ago over the project’s direction, told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ that the online encyclopedia, which turned 20 years old earlier this year, has gradually shifted to follow the narrative of “the news media.”

“Wikipedia made a real effort at neutrality for, I would say, its first five years or so,” said Sanger. “And then … it began a long, slow slide into what I would call leftist propaganda.”

Wikipedia has around 125,000 active volunteer editors who work on crowdsourced articles, and more than 1,000 “administrators” who can take actions such as blocking accounts or restricting edits on certain pages.

Sanger told EpochTV that particularly in the past five years, any individual who is “on the right,” or “even contrarian,” often finds themselves with an article on Wikipedia that “grossly misrepresents their achievements, often just leaves out important bits of their work, and misrepresents their motives.”

Wikipedia “casts them as conspiracy theorists, are far right or whatever, when they and their friends and people who know them well would never describe them in that way,” Sanger said.

Sanger criticized Wikipedia, suggesting that it has recently moved to “follow the news media.”

“More recently, they’ve gotten rid of almost all conservative news sources as sources for their articles,” he explained. “And so as the news media has shifted, and as the establishment, frankly, has shifted more to the left or to the left, the content of Wikipedia has followed suit.”

He previously noted that Wikipedia has banned Fox News’s political reporting, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail from being used as sources.

Sanger said he is now working on creating a new decentralized network, a “superset of all encyclopedias.”

“We’re going to be putting all of the encyclopedic content and the world in a single network. That’s an extremely compelling vision,” he said.

He first announced in March that he was working on developing technical standards that could strip power over social media from giant companies and give users more control over the content they produce and see.

Sanger created Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001, but left the project the following year and has subsequently criticized the website.

Wikipedia officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

Larry Sanger Speaks Out

The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.
Christopher F. Rufo; Apr 18 2024

Photo by Ali Balikci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Larry Sanger remembers the promise of the web. He co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, with the hope that it could sustain a “free and open” Internet—a place where information, dissent, and creativity could thrive. At Wikipedia, he proposed a system of rules that encouraged users to “avoid bias” and maintain a “neutral point of view.”

That Internet is gone.

I reached out to Sanger following the revelation, from my original reporting, that former Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher, who is now CEO of NPR, had explicitly rejected the principles of a “free and open” Internet, collaborated with government officials to censor dissent, and spurned the concept of objective truth altogether, in favor of left-wing relativism.

Sanger told me he was shocked, but not surprised.

Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, should prompt champions of the free and open Internet to push back against the rising censorship regime before it is too late.

Christopher Rufo: What are you thinking as you’re watching these statements from former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, who is now the CEO of NPR?

Larry Sanger: I’ve been following your tweets. You’ve kind of shocked me. The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that she thinks it, but I am surprised that she would say it.

Rufo: In another clip, she says explicitly that she worked with governments to suppress “misinformation” on Wikipedia.

Sanger: Yes, but how did she do that in the Wikipedia system? Because I don’t understand it myself. We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.

And it’s fantastic, in a bad way, that she actually comes out against the system for being “free and open.” When she says that she’s worked with government to shut down what they consider “misinformation,” that, in itself, means that it’s no longer free and open.

But the thing is—I’m using the words carefully here—the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t have an authority in the Wikipedia system: the website, its talk pages, the various bureaucratic structures. It just doesn’t have the authority to shut things down. So, if Big Pharma or their government representatives want to shut down a description of their research of a Covid-critical biochemist, I want to know how that happens. And I think the other people who are at work on Wikipedia, we want to know how that happens.

Rufo: I’ve talked with some reporters who cover “misinformation” and they have noted that Katherine Maher has ties to multiple NGOs that are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence services. Do you have any suspicion that she has been working with American intelligence to shape Wikipedia entries from a distance?

Sanger: I have suspicions. We do know that Virgil Griffith did research on how different agencies and corporations use Wikipedia to manage their reputation. He found that Langley, Virginia, had a whole lot of edits back in 2007. Why would they have stopped that?

I will say this: it’s outrageous, frankly, that a purportedly “free and open” resource, built by the public, built to deliver a neutral representation of the views on every subject, has not just been taken over by the Left, but has been co-opted by and is working with the government—that’s not a thing I would’ve imagined happening 20 years ago.

Rufo: Take me back to that time. What was the vision of a free and open Internet?

Sanger: Everybody had that vision. We didn’t have to have a special vision of a free and open Internet. That was the Internet. That was just its nature. We thought it was always going to be that way. The thing that excited us about the Internet was that anyone could publish anything, as long as it was legal. And the notion of restrictions on free speech was nowhere to be found. In the 1990s and 2000s, Democrats and Republicans were competing with each other to demonstrate how much in favor of free speech they were. But, as a philosopher, I knew that this was not automatic, that it could easily change. We could lose these freedoms.

Rufo: And what do you make of Katherine Maher, as an archetype? She’s against the idea of an objective truth, against a free and open Internet, and sees the First Amendment as an impediment to censorship. What does that represent to you?

Sanger: The fact that she is not immediately hounded out of her job—and she won’t be, I’m sure—shows you how profoundly and how quickly the culture of not just the Internet, but of the United States and the West in general, has changed.

The fact that you had to do some research and surface these videos, that they weren’t immediately caught as smoking-gun evidence of how bad things have gotten, shows you that the attitudes that she expresses are what we expect these days.

I’m at once shocked at what she says, and yet, not terribly surprised, either.

Rufo: In your opinion, what should happen at NPR, given what we now know about its new CEO?

Sanger: If NPR wanted to prove that they were still committed to free speech, to being ideologically neutral, and simply nonpartisan, they would let her go right away.

I don’t expect them to do that. They don’t listen to people like us. They don’t care what we think. But nevertheless, this is an important story because it shows just how cynical it is. It is getting to the point where you can’t accuse people like Katherine Maher of hypocrisy anymore because they’re not being hypocritical. They’re actually saying it out loud: “We don’t really believe in this freedom stuff anyway.”

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.

Now for some recent examples of Wiki’s bias and flat out lies: