Larry Sanger

Dr. phil. Larry Sanger: "I wouldn’t trust Wikipedia — and I helped to invent it." Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been critical of Wikipedia since he departed from the project in 2002. He went on to found and work for competitors to Wikipedia, including Citizendium and Everipedia. Among other criticisms, Sanger has been vocal in his view that Wikipedia's articles present a left-wing and liberal or "establishment point of view". Sanger has cited a number of examples for left-wing and liberal bias, such as that "Drug legalisation, dubbed drug liberalisation by Wikipedia, has only a little information about any potential hazards of drug legalisation policies" and that the Wikipedia article on Joe Biden does not sufficiently reflect "the concerns that Republicans have had about him" or the Ukraine allegations. Because of these and countless other biases, Sanger views Wikipedia as untrustworthy. He has also accused Wikipedia of abandoning its neutrality policy (neutral point of view).

Lawrence "Larry" Mark Sanger (born 16 July 1968) is an American internet project developer and co-founder of Wikipedia, for which he coined the name and wrote much of its original governing policy. Besides the Internet, Sanger's interests have been focused mainly on philosophy—in particular epistemology, early modern philosophy, and ethics.

Life

OK, here is my resume. I was born Lawrence Mark Sanger in Bellevue, Washington on July 16, 1968, in a Lutheran church-going family as the youngest of four. In December 1975, we moved up to Anchorage, Alaska where my Dad had a job as a marine biologist. In my teen years I’m afraid I lost my faith entirely and became heavily interested in philosophy. I went to college from 1986 to 1991 at Reed College (B.A. Philosophy, in Portland, Oregon, taking six months off in Munich, Germany, and then a year off processing insurance claims. I went to graduate school at Ohio State from 1992 until 2000 (Ph.D. Philosophy), again taking a year off back in Alaska 1996-7.

Both Jimmy Wales and I are listed, but neither of us is Jewish, in fact. Religiously, I was raised Lutheran and am now agnostic, and ethnically, I am a typical American cross-breed (English, German, and French). If I have any Jewish blood in me, it would have to be from several generations back.

Wikipedia

In 2020, he stated that Wikipedia had abandoned its claimed neutrality and was now “badly biased.” As one of several examples, he pointed to and contrasted double standards regarding the entries for former President Barack Obama and for President Donald Trump. Criticisms also included science articles. "In any event, when the Establishment (or maybe just the Establishment left) is unified on a certain view of a scientific controversy, then that is the view that is taken for granted, and often aggressively asserted, by Wikipedia." He stated that "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. Of course, Wikipedians are unlikely to concede any such thing; they live in a fantasy world of their own making."

External links

• Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
• Reporting of child pornography images on Wikimedia Commons