Leftist Bias Has Destroyed Wikipedia
The website’s cofounder says that Wikipedia’s commitment to neutrality is long gone.
“The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone,” Wikipedia cofound Larry Sanger recently lamented. “Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work.”
It is that view of the site being “an unbiased reference work” that is the real problem. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia essentially started as an experiment in public-accumulated knowledge. The site bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” As such, Sanger notes, “[Wikipedia] is not perceived as credible by librarians and academics because it lacks a formal review process and is ‘anti-elitist.’”
Worse, Sanger explained, leftist activists have moved in to gradually “take control of any influential institution not explicitly conservative … and they just work harder, and in more subtle ways, on the ones that are explicitly conservative.” It’s groupthink, too, he says: “And then when the rest of the media and tech became insanely far left, Wikipedia naturally went along with the trend.”
A glaring example of this leftist takeover of Wikipedia is noted by Fox News, which reported, “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.” How can you even begin to have an accurate understanding of the far Left’s bloody ideology without acknowledging its history in practice? You can’t, and that’s the point of Wikipedia’s bias.
Back in 2015, Sanger warned, “Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn’t lead to mob rule. People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.” And that’s bad news for maintaining truth and integrity.