The Free Press - Twenty-five years ago, Larry Sanger co-founded what is arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia, which now has millions of entries on every topic imaginable, was designed to be a hub of free and unfettered knowledge, built by and open to the public.
So why was Sanger, earlier this week, permanently banned from the site he helped found? He tells that story for us today. It’s one that starts back in 2001, with the admirable, game-changing goal of democratizing information. But after Sanger left the project in 2002, he “watched in dismay as the site I’d created began to drift from its founding mission.”
Ideological bias took hold; pages were whitewashed; left-leaning outlets came to dominate sourcing; and a small group of administrators grew “beholden more to each other than to any constitutional framework.”
Last week, Sanger launched an effort to reform Wikipedia from within—only to be met with a coordinated effort to ridicule, discredit, and undermine it, culminating in a lifetime ban on Monday. “I knew Wikipedia’s disciplinary processes were bad—but I had never experienced them myself,” he writes.
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