Larry Sanger

Your source on [2] does not quite support your interpretation: if you follow the Twitter thread from the beginning, or read Sanger's linked blog post [0], he makes no claims about his own beliefs. He's explicitly considering what one would conclude about Biblical inspiration _if_ one believed what the Bible says about itself. No faith is necessary to consider that question. [0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/10/on-biblical-inspiration/

Wikipedia has the same bias as Twitter did. It's become worthless for anything political: "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" by founder Larry Sanger: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Just so you know. Larry Sanger, a founder of Wikipedia. Wrote exactly about those articles, and it left leaning biases. https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-than-ever/ It’s a good read.

> I find it unfortunate that the academic discussions I witness tend towards "Wikipedia bad" rather than a more nuanced understanding. Some aspects of Wikipedia are great, and academia still has a lot to learn from web technologies. No Wikipedia is bad, it has become a subtle but effective political propaganda tool that reflects only a certain point of view, it is not a encyclopedia by the definition of the word. It takes stances on wedge issues by the sole fact that it eliminates any sources its editors do not agree with. When you only source assertions from a tiny number of sources you know only reflect your point of view then you are badly biased. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ The author is Wikipedia's co-founder, so he knows what he is talking about.

Wikipedia is not a good source for anything remotely controversial at this time. One of the founders did a great post on it: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ If you do read Wikipedia, always do two things: 1) Read the Talk page 2) Go to the history and read the same article from 2005 ~ 2010

Followups: http://larrysanger.org/2014/03/report-on-the-boys-march-2014/ http://larrysanger.org/2014/03/report-on-the-boys-march-2014/ http://larrysanger.org/2013/04/brief-update-about-the-boys/ http://larrysanger.org/2012/10/update-about-the-boys-2/ After reading all of the really long article, I simply did not have time reading these updates, so I don't know whats in them, but it does seem relevant here.

Larry Sanger was banned mainly because he was found "guilty" of: 1- Canvassing: the act of notifying/recruiting people in a biased, selective, mass, or off-wiki way to sway a discussion. 2- Meatpuppetry: the problem created when recruited real people show up and function as extra votes/support for the recruiter’s side. because he promoted his project "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity" [1] and posted it on X to over 90.000 followers [2] which resulted in a massive engagement of four posts and seven reposts. "Canvassing" and "Meatpuppetry" are two of many things to avoid when dealing with Wikipedia. Their full policies and guidelines consist of hundreds of pages and sub-pages, starting at [3]. The final perma-ban was issued by "ScottishFinnishRadish" by declaring a "community consensus" in the ANI at [4]. ANI stands for "Administrators’ noticeboard/Incidents". ScottishFinnishRadish is an admin since September 2022 and is responsible for a total of 17,394 block entries on Wikipedia since then – according to Codex querying the API, counting all log entries with type:block and user:ScottishFinnishRadish – over 12 blocks per day. Codex also calculated that i would need up to a full year of 8-hour-days, 7 day weeks, to actually read and understand all of these blocks by this one admin. ScottishFinnishRadish also has no user page and seems to be completely anonymous [5]. Doxxing of admins is also prohibited btw. There are ways for Larry Sanger to appeal. The most promising…

I don't think anybody who has seen an edit war thinks wiki editors (not mods, mods have a different role) are saints. I would imagine that fewer than 1% of people who view a Wikipedia article in a given month have knowingly 'seen an edit war'. If I'm right, you're not talking about the vast majority of Wikipedia users. But a Wikipedia page cannot survive stating something completely outside the consensus. Bizarre statements cannot survive because they require reputable references to back them. This is untrue. There are several high profile examples of false information persisting on Wikipedia: Wikipedia’s rules and real-world history show that 'bizarre' or outside-the-consensus claims can persist—sometimes for months or years. The sourcing requirements do not prevent this. Some high profile examples: - The Seigenthaler incident: a fabricated bio linking journalist John Seigenthaler to the Kennedy assassinations remained online for about 4 months before being fixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biography_inciden… - The Bicholim conflict: a detailed article about a non-existent 17th-century war—survived *five years* and even achieved “Good Article” status: https://www.pcworld.com/article/456243/fake-wikipedia-entry-on-bicholi… - Jar’Edo Wens (a fake aboriginal deity), lasted almost 10 years: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/15/the-gr… -…

Truth in the knowable simple facts isnt really in question. 2 + 2 = 4 isnt debateable, poll the general populus and they would agree near universally but do the same with how lasers work and you're going to find an incorrect answer. Objective opinions aren't facts, but they are better than subjective facts. If you design or produce something and everything more or less checks out. Politics need never get involved. That's a big problem of politics. Politics deals in the subjective opinions only. What should the age of consent be? How much should your defense budget be? Do either of these answers change? What about minimum wage? Should downtown NYC be same minimum wage as rural ny? There's no real answer, world war defense budgets will be bigger than peacetime. >does even Wikipedia get rather noticeably tainted ? Wikipedia made the decision to adopt political activism in place of neutrality. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ That is their decision to make. Their neutrality enabled them to build up a grand reputation. After they adopted US-centric political activism they do temporarily bias viewpoints to their side. But this is temporary because each time you do this you lose reputation and there was finite amount of reputation to burn. This is no different than CNN. They built up a great reputation but then they adopted political activists who burnt their reputation over and over. Now they are in full collapse.

I knew it was going to be Sanger based on just the title. "Trust but verify" is a good strategy for Wikipedia; the idea that Wikipedia as a whole is "partisan" is kind of ridiculous, but there's no denying that it's not uncommon to be out-edited by someone with more zeal and spare time on their hands, and these people are not necessarily always there with the best of intentions. This has always been the case, since day 1, and these slants exist in all directions. If you read the accompanying article[1] Sanger wrote then it's plenty clear that he's coming at this from a very partisan stand; that's not necessarily a bad thing, although personally, I think Sanger's anger that Wikipedia doesn't give equal merit to Tucker Carlson's unhinged conspiracy theory that the Jan 6th riots were organised by the FBI to be ... well, unhinged. He's also angry it only presents the "Established" view on climate change. We can discus the merits of what he's saying at length, but at the core it points to a fundamental problem: people have profoundly different views on reality that are impossible to unify. This has always been the case to some degree; any article will have to curate the information, or you'll end up with the weirdest quackery in any medical article. But things have moved so far apart that you'll soon become Adolf Stalin: for the left you'll be Adolf Hitler and for the right you'll be Joseph Stalin. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. It's…

I'm trying to understand what specifically makes a worldview conspiratorial for you. Are you disagreeing that the "Great Reset" involves implementing particular ideological views and political positions? Would you agree that people are allowed to disagree with those positions? And that those who disagree with those positions are allowed to call attention to powerful people pushing those positions? Personally I don't see any of those as being "cranky" or "conspiratorial" as much as just regular political engagement. Regarding the quote from Wikipedia - I don't agree with how that portion of the article is written or sourced. It is debated on the Talk page, and is a reflection of a growing bias in Wikipedia (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). That section starts off by mentioning QAnon, then says Trump amplified QAnon, and never makes a connection between all of that and "Great Reset" (it's a sort of "guilt by association" argument). Additionally, it lists out a number of right-leaning TV personalities and claims they were pushing a conspiracy theory, but none of the source articles they reference show any false claim from those same people. From those sources, it looks like these people complained that the pandemic is being exploited as a political opportunity to introduce and push various left-leaning political positions. That seems not only very reasonable to me, but also easily provable. From my perspective, I am seeing people take the very…

>I've been on this journey myself, not that I'd ever harm anyone, but I was definitly radicalised by some of the far-left areas of YT when I was younger. I lost a number of friends because I was so convinced I was morally correct and they were wrong on topics like immigration and capitalism. I can sympathize. It's worse off in Canada. We literally watched far left stuff in school. Not once did they ever show anything even marginally conservative. >I'm aware of a few cases now where subscribers of TYT have killed people, but it's hard to know how direct those conncetions are. I did not know that. Are you refering to Armenian Genocide or like TYT channel has created violent antifa type people? >I know for me TYT definitely misled me and caused me to believe everyone who didn't share my views were evil and I have wondered before what I might have done had I been a violent person. I too saw many of their videos years ago and they made lots of sense. They quite wrongfully portrayed Republicans as all nazis and KKK. Or at least a minimum of racists. Mind you, I'm not American nor do I live there. I don't particularly care about the republicans. For all I know they are all racists. >I don't really know what the answer to this is. I know for me YouTube was also part of my deradicalisation process. Listening to people like Sam Haris allowed me to shift into the centrist I am today. I followed Sam before TYT era mainly during the Hitchens and Dawkins time. Sam is very smart but…

I've read the guidelines. I do not see how what I wrote breaches them. The first half enquires on reckless group-think in tech that would bring about a situation such as Xinjlang, I wrote this in the hope those behind it could engage to allay my fears, provide context or offer links to discussions on the recent politicisation of our software. I made a submission when purges were enacted 50 days ago - it was instantly flagged. [1] I've designed systems in place in both defence and telecommunications. I don't trust any aspect now that updates without thorough audit, you might not like it, but that is undeniably relevant to this place. I did not post it to wage some political battle, it is in response to one waged upon us all. [2] The second half responds directly to the submitted article, offering a rational position on why China might persue active measures while speculating on why media bylines might push disgust. I've not minced words, I am from the UK so the burden is upon you to tell us what the ideal replacement population is in a country which rejects theocracy, believes in equality before the law and loves its pets to bits? Theil and so Palantir predict it as a potential destiny of ours, our loved ones and our descendants. [3] Now, if we were to search 'racist' here on HN, over the last month there's over 100 pages of unchallenged comment. When this term is used carelessly without justification or applied to groups it is most insidious, we can accurately label it…

Larry Sanger, the person who accuses Wikipedia of "smear campaigns against conservatives" [0] and begs Elon Musk to investigate whether members of the administration are contributing to Wikipedia [1] and to immediately defund them. That Larry Sanger. [0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/06/how-wikipedia-smears-conservatives/ [1] https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/media/wikipedia-co-founder-calls-on-elon…

We need more Larry Sangers. https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/

> it’s sources are curated. I think that’s a good thing. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's founder, does not. https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#3-abolish-source-blacklists

The creator of Wikipedia disagrees with you. https://larrysanger.org/2025/08/on-the-cybersecurity-subcommittees-wik…

Given the mountain of evidence for Wikipedia's left wing bias[1][2][3][4], it seems something ought to change, but hard to answer "how?" I expect to receive many downvotes for this, despite providing high-quality and authoritative sources. Which is not unlike what happens on Wikipedia :) [1]: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-biased [2]: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipedia [3]: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ [4]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5022797

You're not trying very hard to see a side that's different from yours, are you? You are responding to a comment saying "leftist != realistic", yet you seem to be pretending my intent was to say "here's proof Wikipedia is left-leaning." Neither of my links were given to "prove" bias, either, only to show that accusations of leftwing bias are accusations that Wikipedia is valuing propaganda over truth and objectivity. Anyways, to get off-topic from my original comment, here's some evidence for you to ignore: https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-than-ever/ https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is-wikipedia… https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased https://stophindudvesha.org/the-myth-of-wikipedias-neutrality-unmaskin…

To be fair, Wikipedia is in fact incredibly biased (towards the left). This was also noted by its cofounder: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ You can see this in edit history or discussions on various articles. For example whether something gets labeled as a conspiracy theory or not is a matter of opinion, but the coordinated groups of activist editors and their bots and various powers always win, and their bias is in one direction. That said, I don’t think it’s appropriate for the government to interfere in speech, except by encouraging and supporting a diversity of ideas.

Fox News was deemed "generally unreliable" for politics and science, which in practice means that it's unusable in most cases, not so different from deprecated. I also find it interesting that Al-Manar (essentially Hezbollah's media office) has a slightly better status than, say, Daily Mail. See also (Wikipedia cofounder) Larry Sanger's critique of Wikipedia' source bias - https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-than-ever/

According to its cofounder, Wikipedia abandoned truth long ago. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Maybe so, but the world often does treat Wikipedia as a reliable source. The editorialization ends up influencing them. This is why you see such heated battles on the talk pages of Wikipedia - there are people actively fighting to take control of this tool. Wikipedia’s founder has been warning the world about increasing bias on Wikipedia for several years now (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/).

Damn, this is a pet peeve of mine. A supposedly-objective article simply assuming the results of an old debate, when there was no actual conclusion to it (and thus the situation is a lot more nuanced than the article implies). It's like doing the whole "history is written by the winners" thing but way too early. When you notice it, you'll realize that it happens everywhere. Good media is rare (understandable, given how we don't like to pay for it), media tends to be slop or activism. Wikipedia is actually pretty terrible at being objective about controversial topics, too[1]... [1] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Here’s an article from Larry Sanger (original creator of Wikipedia) giving the case for why Wikipedia is biased https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ .

Wikipedia is incredibly biased when it comes to certain topics, especially anything pertaining to Jesus. The irony is, the section you have quoted doesn’t even have a source attached! More reading: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

"Wikipedia Is Badly Biased": https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ By cofounder Larry Sanger

AFAIK, it is on par with other articles on wikipedia.[0] [0] https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-than-ever/

> https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ Mmm, in this polemic, Larry Sanger complains that “[Wikipedians] live in a fantasy world of their own making.” Yet, in the same polemic, he believes conspiracy about the MMR vaccine, and asks for religious scripture to be treated as fact. He says he asks for neutrality, but perhaps he is being reductive in his definition of neutrality.

The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has written on this topic repeatedly. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2022/03/why-neutrality/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0P4Cf0UCwU