A new movement is sweeping through right-wing circles and gaining momentum, a campaign to fix the alleged ideological bias and faux neutrality of Wikipedia. Leading the charge is the website’s cofounder, Larry Sanger. If ever there were a time for such a crusade to form, it would be now.
As possibly the largest repository of information in the world, Wikipedia has the power to shape collective memories and historical records. It is often the first thing people see when looking through Google and other search engines; the summaries are almost impossible to avoid. More concerning, however, is that the online encyclopedia is one of the top sources of training data for large language models, which means it’s where much of what AI chatbots relay to their users comes from. Over the years, many people have argued that the platform leans heavily to the left, but the complaints didn’t gain much traction. Now that might all change. And if it backfires, Elon Musk may have a solution.
Wikipedia and the Dream of Neutrality
Sanger published a manifesto last month called the “9 Theses”: propositions to overhaul Wikipedia and return it to its neutral roots. He introduced these during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in September and posted them on his Wikipedia page. One of the biggest problems he highlighted was what the nonprofit considers “reliable sources.”
Wikipedia keeps a growing and vast list of outlets it deems reliable, dependable, generally reliable, deprecated, generally unreliable, or blacklisted. The acceptable sources lean decidedly left and include outlets such as PinkNews, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, The Nation, The New Republic, Mother Jones, and NPR. Right-wing sources, such as Fox News, The New York Post, and The Daily Caller, are labeled unreliable.
Sanger suggests ending the blacklist, which was established in 2017, the year Trump was inaugurated for his first term. The cofounder also thinks the website should allow competing articles from different perspectives to give each page balance, letting the reader decide what to take away. He then proposes that the platform return to its original neutrality policy and end all decision-making by consensus.
This is not a new cause for Sanger. He has been sounding the alarm for years, publishing articles on his website with examples of bias on Wikipedia. In one piece from 2020, to show the online encyclopedia has lost its neutral point of view, he pointed to Wikipedia’s article on Barack Obama, which “fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal.”
One would think that an article about a major political figure in an encyclopedia would mention such events. The only reason not to add those details would be to paint the person in a better light. The website’s page on Donald Trump certainly doesn’t pull any punches. The sections on “investigations” and “impeachment” are “unrelentingly negative,” said Sanger. “Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are ‘false.’ Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution.”
Encyclopedia Leftannica
Names of prominent US politicians who lean left tend to have more positive sentiment than their rightward counterparts when mentioned on Wikipedia, said researcher David Rozado. He published a study in the Manhattan Institute last year, revealing that “Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts.” Anger and disgust are more often connected to terms suggestive of the right, while “terms associated with left-leaning ideology are more frequently linked with the emotion of joy than terms associated with right-leaning ideology.”
The more one digs into its methods and history, the more Wikipedia appears to be a reflection of legacy media, an encyclopedia through a leftist lens. For anybody subscribed to those beliefs, this likely seems completely normal. Heck, The Washington Post last week called Wikipedia “a website that has become one of the country’s last bastions of shared truth — and a bedrock of factual information for the AI systems that increasingly answer the world’s search queries.”
The former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation might beg to differ. “[T]he people who write these articles are not focused on the truth, they’re focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now,” said Katherine Maher, now the CEO of NPR, during a 2022 TED Talk. “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” She also once called the First Amendment an impediment to censorship, making it difficult to suppress “bad information.” But she hasn’t been at Wikimedia since 2021 and supposedly had little to do with the website. It would seem, however, that the Wikipedia editors have kept her version of truth alive and well.
Wheels in Motion
Sanger has gained attention since the release of the “9 Theses” and his discussion with Tucker Carlson, who Wikipedia asserts is “a proponent of white grievance politics.” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-TX) sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation calling for it to root out the “ideological bias” on the website. In August, prior to Sanger’s manifesto, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee began investigating allegations that “hostile nation-state actors” use the online encyclopedia “to expose Western audiences to pro-Kremlin and anti-Western messaging.”
However, Sanger said that “while he welcomes Republican leaders asking questions about Wikipedia’s policies, government intervention isn’t his preferred solution to the site’s shortcomings,” explained The Washington Post. Instead, he wants to enlist hundreds of conservatives around the globe to become Wikipedia editors and “work in concert to revise articles on such topics as the Israel-Gaza war, Hindu nationalism in India, the safety of vaccines and the causes of climate change.”
That’s one solution. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and X, has another: Grokipedia, an AI-powered alternative to Wikipedia. Musk had planned to introduce it last week but postponed it to “purge out the propaganda,” he said in an X post. Released today, October 28, Musk has not given much information about it in advance, just that it’s powered by his AI, Grok, which sounds as if it would be similar to Amazon’s Alexa. But if Musk has everything he considers propaganda removed from it, it seems plausible that he might overcorrect and end up making another biased platform – leaning right instead of left. In this day and age, though, the way some Americans wear their political identities like security blankets, one wonders how many people are even interested in neutral and balanced information.
