Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger said the contents on the world’s largest online encyclopedia amount to “propaganda” because the articles push a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything,” Unherd reported.
In an interview with Freddie Sayers on LockdownTV, Sanger commented on Wikipedia’s left-wing bias on every topic from COVID-19, politics, and journalism to Eastern medicine and Christianity.
Sanger said Wikipedia’s prejudice comes in part from the fact that it has “banned” all entries from The Daily Mail and banned Fox News as a source for social, political, and economic issues.
The ban on centrist mainstream outlets like Fox News and The Daily Mail “means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream centre-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.”
Sanger said that Wikipedia, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, has uncritically adopted far-left institutional viewpoints regarding COVID-19.
“If you look at the articles that Wikipedia has, you can just see how they are simply mouthing the view of the World Economic Council or World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organisation, the CDC and various other establishment mouthpieces like Fauci,” he said.
He called the censorship surrounding COVID-19 “a global enforcement of a certain point of view.”
Sanger said Wikipedia’s decentralized entry model has been hijacked by progressive activists so that the entire website, which should reflect the internet’s viewpoint diversity, contains left-wing talking points.
“There are companies like Wiki PR, where paid writers and editors will go in and change articles,” he said. “Maybe there’s some way to make such a system work, but not if the players who are involved and who are being paid are not identified by name.”
Wikipedia is supposed to identity the names and companies that publish and amend articles.
Sanger said companies spend money to keep Wikipedia’s articles left-wing because it “has a lot of influence.”
“So there’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say,” he said.
Sanger said Wikipedia should give readers the facts that they need to think accurately and clearly, not the narrative that left-wing activists want them to ingest.
“You want the tools to think about an issue…When we are trying to get some basic information in understanding a topic, we do not want to be led by the nose, right? We are free individuals who want to make up our own minds.”
