American Thought Leaders - How Wikipedia Turned Into an ‘Engine of Defamation’ | Co-Founder Larry Sanger

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and coined the name “Wikipedia' in 2001. He established many of Wikipedia’s founding policies, including the original neutrality guidelines, before he left in 2002.Since then, he has become a vocal critic of Wikipedia’s growing ideological bias, particularly on politically charged issues.Sanger says certain outlets are favored as sources while others are blacklisted, creating systemic distortion and exclusion of dissenting views.Most of Wikipedia’s top editors are anonymous, which means that people have no legal recourse for lies or inaccuracies about them that may be published on Wikipedia’s pages.In this episode, Sanger breaks down what went wrong with Wikipedia and how it can be reformed.Sanger has put forward nine theses for reform, including enabling competing articles, restoring original neutrality policies, convening an editorial assembly, and creating transparent rating systems for entries.But what is the likelihood it will happen? Can—and should—Congress do something about it? And could Elon Musk’s Grokipedia offer a more balanced alternative?Editor’s Note: The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to our request for comment.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Shortly after Trump came into office, as the mainstream media became sort of explicitly biased, so did Wikipedia. In this episode, I sit down with Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and now president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation. He discusses how Wikipedia uses essentially a blacklist. And according to this list, you simply may not cite, may not use as sources of Wikipedia articles. Anything that has been branded as right-wing. How is it that we do not know the identities of many of Wikipedia's top editors? 85% of them are anonymous. You don't know how many accounts are controlled by a single individual or a single organization

that pretends to be essentially organic, but it's not. Can and should Congress do something about it? Congress is investigating now. The Oversight Committee is investigating foreign influence on Wikipedia. We need to understand what the hell is going on behind the scenes better. Could Elon Musk's Groghapedia offer a more balanced alternative?

I might be very pleasantly surprised that it actually is neutral. We'll see. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. Larry Sanger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. That's good to be back. I've been following Wikipedia for a long time.

You know, longer than 20 years, in fact, which is when I really started with the Epoch Times. And I've watched our entry at the Epoch Times changed dramatically over those years. At the beginning, it was actually, it was quite reasonable and thoughtful, and I thought well edited. and I was a big backer, frankly, of Wikipedia.

I loved the idea, right? But then, especially as we started to grow, especially as we started to become more influential, I mean, the term pack a lies comes to mind. It just turned into this gross distortion, and it creates this huge problem for us, which is when potential readers find out about the ebuck times, they'll go to Wikipedia and they'll read

this terrible distortion of reality and might not actually, you know, subscribe when normally if they just, you know, didn't have that problem, let's say, it would be something perfectly reasonable for them to look at. So I want to get at, I don't want to focus on the epoch time specifically, but I suspect it's not just us, okay? But what happened? It's definitely not just you. I've talked to a half a dozen other media sources over the last couple of weeks, and most of them have complaints of your sort. I'm an advisor of BitShoot, the video platform, and they have complaints, any sort of media platform or public figure, for that matter, that has a reputation that affects their reach and influence in the world is going to be

basically bad-mouthed by Wikipedia pretty, you know, predictably, I would say. So why? That's a good question. There's a lot of different reasons why. What I've always said is that Wikipedia is one of the institutions that the left marched through. We talk about the march through the institutions, and I think that definitely happened. It was already happening in 2001 in the first year. But I think another more perhaps illuminating and timely aspect of the question is, well, isn't there something big that has happened since Trump came into office?

the first time the answer is the mainstream media in general and I lump Wikipedia in with it really kind of went off the deep end it took what was originally just the Fox News format and then the MSNBC format and that was adopted by everyone you know and and as a a result Wikipedia just aped that and because in those new formats journalists pretensions of objectivity are out the window that essentially is what happened with Wikipedia as well Wikipedia's neutrality policy says or at least used to say that on issues of controversy it should be impossible to tell

what position the authors of the article take. That's no longer the case in practice for sure, and the policy page called Neutral Point of View has been in subtle ways rewritten so that it forbids what's called false balance, which just means basically it's required now, even, for the sake of neutrality, that they take a side when one side is clearly wrong in somebody's opinion. That doesn't sound like neutrality. No. It's sort of, it's like an inversion of the word, in fact, what you're just describing, right?

It is. So you described this, the march through the institutions, but when did you, you mentioned back in 2001, you were already seeing some kind of issue, but when did this all really become a problem? Because, I mean, there's some pages on Wikipedia that I've seen within the last couple of years. I really don't go there that often anymore because of this exact issue. But there's some pages I remember at least a couple of years ago, which were pretty neutral. But they were pages that were of no particular political import from the perspective of the gas people, as you describe them, right? Globalist, academic, secular, progressive.

This is what you describe as the viewpoint of Wikipedia today. If it doesn't have to do with that very much or it's not particularly influential, it might be neutral, might be left alone. But anything that does have a political import from these perspectives, would you say that's accurate? For sure. And quickly back to my question, when did you really start to see this shift from neutrality

into something much more politicized? When was it that, you know, became a big issue for you? To be quite honest, I was noticing chips practically from the beginning. It didn't become really obvious to everyone until, I think, maybe the last five years. But I was noticing Wikipedia taking definite stands, for example, on global warming. I thought that was surprising. and not in keeping with a neutrality policy as early as, I think, 2005, 2006, where it was taking what was at that time called a scientific point of view.

I'm not saying the scientific point of view is bad. I think it's good. It's just that it's not neutral. And what is mainstream science may not actually be the truth as the history of science. shows. That is one of the main reasons why a good encyclopedia will canvass all of the different views on a subject. Now, I said back in 2010, 2012, that the sort of bias that Wikipedia shows is very similar to that of the New York Times or the BBC. Very sort of established. establishment center left. But I noticed shortly after Trump came into office that, again, as the

mainstream media became sort of explicitly biased, so did Wikipedia. And it became, if anything worse, perhaps especially after January 6th. So I ended up writing a series of blog posts about Wikipedia's bias, which I was surprised that it did this actually. So three blog posts in 2020, 2021 and I think 2023, in which I basically gave a lot of examples. And apparently this was news to people. I was surprised that it was news. I thought everybody knew this. And even now people are still sort of waking up to

the reality that Wikipedia does, on many pages, not all of them, but on many pages act as essentially propaganda. You know, in a very similar way, it's very interesting. So I mean, basically, you lump Wikipedia in with legacy news sources that have this, you know, whatever perspective the legacy news sources have, which is often a very similar perspective across a whole range of issues.

Wikipedia just fits neatly in there and maybe in a more extreme way. That's what you're saying. Yeah. Well, it reflects those sources because basically by policy on Wikipedia, editors are supposed to cite secondary sources, what they call secondary sources. So not books, not tweets, but summations thereof in especially the news media. Well, Wikipedia now has a page, a list of what they call perennial sources, and it functions as a blacklist. And according to this list, you simply may not cite, may not use as sources of Wikipedia articles, anything that has been branded as right wing.

So I don't think that the Epic Times, for example, is particularly right wing, but it is colored red on this list. So there's a color coding of different media sources. The New York Times, of course, is green, which means you can cite the New York Times. In fact, you don't even have to say that the source is from New York Times in the text of the article. You can just speak in Wikipedia's own voice and then use the New York Times as a footnote. As if it were a fact. As if it were a fact. That is deeply disturbing.

But yes, please continue. Right. Anything that is colored yellow, which means essentially caution, and red, which means it's a no-go. You may not cite this for any purposes except perhaps characterizing facts about the source. Those things, if you actually attempt to use such sources, that actually might be grounds for you're being dismissed from the project. That's how strongly they feel about it. And just explain to me a little bit what you mean about this march through the institutions. As I recall, one of the left-wing theorists explicitly stated as a goal that we, those on the left-the-left,

attempting to effect revolutionary change, need to execute a march through the institutions. It's Marx, if I'm not mistaken, and essentially capture education, government, of course, but especially education, the media, churches, and so forth. So each of these institutions has been, to a greater or lesser extent, been systematically, carefully, strategically infiltrated by the left. And, well, Wikipedia is one of those.

Insofar as Wikipedia sort of represents what we are all expected to believe, at least from an establishment point of view, it is one of the controlling, I guess you could say one of the controlling institutions of modern civilization, I'm sorry to say. Something that just comes to my mind is a Wikipedia entry about Philip Roth and some of his writing. And I don't know if you're familiar with this example. I can tell the story. Okay, please. Sure.

So Philip Roth, famous American novelist, wrote The Human Stain. and he actually contacted me and was complaining as a number of famous people have done over the years and basically bemoaning the fact that he has weighed into the Wikipedia article and said that I am Philip Roth and the origin story of this particular character from the human stain is such and such. I forget the precise details. He was a friend of his in any event. And not what was speculated by the New York Times

at some previous date. So he was correcting the record, and he was an authoritative person to do so. Yes. So in the end, what he ended up doing was he ended up writing an article for, I think it was the New Yorker? I think it was the New Yorker.

Or the spectator? I can't remember, but maybe it's the New Yorker. Maybe. And that in which he told the story and he also talked about the problems with Wikipedia and that then could be used by Wikipedia as a source. So there's something really ridiculous about that.

But the bottom line is they went with, the New York Times characterization and not the actual primary sources. I mean, that's the kicker here, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. I'm not personally sure of the details in that case. But yeah, this is very much on brand for Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia has a tendency to emphasize secondary sources over

primary sources and which as a former academic just I find to be absurd you know if you're in the business of writing an encyclopedia article summing up knowledge then you ought to be able to do so from primary sources yourself and just deal with the problems of interpretation that come up. But they essentially offload those problems to the editors of secondary sources. And that just illustrates a broader problem, which is a kind of fetish that they have about very

nitpicky applications of their own specialized rules. And in ways that are ultimately unreasonably. unreasonable. So it has become a very sort of irrational bureaucracy in that regard. A lot of people have complained about this problem. So in the past when we spoke, it seemed to me like you believed that Wikipedia cannot be reformed. But now you have come up with nine theses, which you know, nailing to the virtual door of Wikipedia, I suppose, Suggest to me that you think it might still be reformed. Tell me about that.

I think it's possible. I think that the reform would not come from the people who like the system, obviously. It would require an influx of people who agree with the Theses. But that's possible, you know. thousands of people who hear about this especially as part of this campaign that I have started might actually descend upon Wikipedia and you know get some cred in the Wikipedia system they have every right to do so it is an open project it is not limited to the left in any way shape or form. So, and in addition, of course, the supposed adults in the room, the board of

trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, they have certain obligations, I think, that they can execute and impose their high-level decisions on the Wikipedia community. For example, just for example, they could declare that there will be an editorial constitutional convention. Wikipedia should convene an editorial assembly, which actually formalizes the adoption of rules instead of doing what they have done, which is very anarchical and not entirely legitimate, it according to many observers. And not as transparent, I think. That's also what you're saying, right?

Well, because the participants in Wikipedia are mostly anonymous. You don't know how many accounts are controlled by a single individual or a single organization that pretends to be essentially organic, but it's not. I think there's a lot of astroturfing going on on Wikipedia. a lot of money that is being plowed into it through PR firms especially. And it's just, but it's hard to even assess that because aside from the outcomes. If you want any chance of reforming Wikipedia, then it's absolutely necessary to have some sort of body that has been legitimized. that can actually meet face to face

and debate on behalf of the participants in Wikipedia. Obviously the people on Wikipedia can continue to debate in their usual way, but again, it's sort of a black box, what's really going on, because there's a lot of stuff that's being organized behind the scenes. It is not all transparent. But a face-to-face assembly would have a kind of legitimacy

that the current proceedings do not. And would also make it possible then for more ambitious sorts of reforms, needed reforms that simply could not be made under the current ways of proceeding. transparency is central yeah I mean I think this has been a kind of a theme of the last however many years that in the with the lack of transparency around decision making rationale a lot of bad things can happen a lot of bad policy can be instituted right one of the things that you I think your second thesis is to

enable competing articles and that you know that I like that. That's a great one, right? Because at least you can have another perspective and which hopefully would be as easily findable, because that's the other part, right? It's one thing if, you know, one article is shown as the be all and end all,

and then there's a little tiny footnote with a second competing article. But if you, that would actually be something that would be quite helpful in itself. Right, people can look on larrysanger.org There's a link to the nine theses there. So we're talking about thesis number two, enable competing articles, and there's a long essay to go with each of these.

So the idea is that articles would be, anyone could start an article on a topic that already has an article. It would be a competing article, but it wouldn't immediately go live. would be in a draft name space, which many different people could look at. Articles would be moved to the main name space when they meet objective criteria. Perhaps, as I explain in another of the thesis,

number seven, they would be promoted when they are rated in a certain way, whether by AI or by public rating or some other objective things, like number of edits and number of contributors and things like that. And then the idea is the author would determine who works on the article, generally speaking, we might encourage people to allow anyone who wants to, except perhaps people from a list

that the original article starter would want left off, because they were causing problems. And essentially, if you want an article to be truly competitive, if it's just another completely open article, then that new article could be squatted on by the same old people, if you see what I'm saying. The idea is that each article would be started with its own framework.

So right now, as we were saying before, Wikipedia has what I describe as a GASP framework. This isn't necessarily bad. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying that it is a framework. So globalist, academic, that's fine, secular, and progressive. And the combination of these things marks out Wikipedia's operative editorial framework. as being very narrow, essentially the narrow approach

of Western elitists essentially, and leaving everybody else out. So there are many other frameworks that one could work with them, like just an unbiased American political framework would openly invite both Republicans and Democrats to work together using explicitly stating that it's possible to use sources from what

are characterized as the far right and the far left. Maybe not the absolutely insane ones, but right, we'll have some standards. And the Overson window would be opened deliberately pretty wide. And that's an example of a framework. You state that out front and you say, if you want to contribute to the article, then you're going to follow these basic

ground rules. Wikipedia could do this. This is the proposal. I think it's not likely that they will, but they could. And the fascinating thing to me, to just contemplate, is that if this were available, I can imagine people starting frameworks explaining things from the Chinese communist point of view, the Indian Hindu point of view, the, I don't know, the French intellectual point of view, and a million others. Well, so a few things would happen. One is Wikipedia would grow quite a bit, right? Right.

And second, you could explore these different viewpoints. Right. overtly, as opposed to being sort of stuck in the only framework which is allowed. Yeah, I would say there's a difference here between a framework and what Wikipedia calls a point of view, though, in the way that I'm using the word, I want to say that Wikipedia strives by its own lights to be neutral. I don't think it does a very good job. It could do a lot better.

but it does strive to be neutral by its own lights. And I would say that that would be true or should be true of all the other frameworks. In other words, you don't have a blank check and open license to share whatever biases you like in the article. Not at all, right? So one of the things that means, for example, is that if a point is, you know, controversial, the views expressed in the article have to be attributed to their owners. And there has to be some acknowledgement that there are others who disagree. But even within those sorts of broad neutrality guidelines, it's still possible for different, call them takes on neutrality from different points of view. Again, a British national writing about gun control

but by his lights, neutrally, will sound very different from an American national. So this makes a ton of sense to me, right? You're always striving for neutrality, but you accept that we all have inherently some sort of inherent biases, some particular viewpoints on the world, and that's going to inform how we actually do things. but all the while striving for neutrality. That's different than saying we're going to create something biased. That's right. That's right.

And of course, one of the options here is thesis four, revive the original neutrality policy. I like that one. There doesn't have to be competing articles. In fact, if you adopt thesis four, that sort of renders to two unnecessary. So two, again, is enable competing articles, and four is revived the original neutrality policy. So the idea is that if Wikipedia does continue to have just one article per topic, but goes back to representing the broad landscape of discourse on controversial issues, then that actually scratches the itch.

It actually does properly give the user the tools they need to make up their minds for themselves, which is the function of neutrality. Well, so one of the problems that we have, and I don't know actually exactly how to address this, is there's this, well, let's just say with certain approaches to the world, right? Notably, what I would call the leftist approach, right, or the communist approach especially, is to paint anything that isn't within the boundaries of my worldview to be beyond the pale, to be something that it deserves to be slandered, and frankly, not given any acceptance at all. Right.

This is, you know, I'm thinking about Herbert Marcuse's repressive tolerance right now, to justify that in the cultural sphere, which seems to have been adopted by a number of people. So I don't know how, knowing that that's the case, and it's not just that group that functions this way, but it's just, it's antithetical to kind of, I don't know, liberalism or a world where plurality of viewpoints is generally considered valuable. And we don't just say that everyone is either Hitler or Mao. or something like that, that isn't part of our team, right? Exactly, yes. Well, I mean, obviously, back in the 1940s and 50s,

the whole discourse by Popper, for example, and others of the open society, this was very clear to people. And for a couple of generations, the ideal of free speech was really much, bound up with the idea of being tolerant to a very wide variety points of view. So the way I put it is I think that you can't really

have a robust freedom of speech where people have something interesting to say, let alone the right to say, unless there is something like a right to be exposed to neutral approaches. to issues, unless you are taught or able to learn a wide variety of perspectives on an issue, get the full range of facts, then your opinions are easily guided, manipulated by people. And again, this was just obvious when I was growing up, you know, and somehow, we have forgotten somehow forgotten all of this in the last 15 years it's only been that

recent too the whole idea of of free speech and neutrality for that matter being somehow right-wing causes is that's it's ludicrous of course and that that started only like 10 years ago 15 years ago well and so when I read your nine theses, okay? I see, you know, you're harking back to transparency, to free speech. These, I mean, this is infused, but really what you're saying is that, you know, the ideological viewpoint that tends to dominate Wikipedia or perhaps the leadership right now would actually have to change. Yes. Or the enactment of that viewpoint or something. there's a couple of different ways that it could happen i mean it could be an act of god and you know

the leadership of the week media foundation might might simply decide you know what singer actually is on to something here with the idea of a editorial assembly that's a good idea let's let's start that and they could start that by themselves right they can impose it from above And there's nothing wrong with them doing that. They own the platform, first of all, and there is no way that some such thing is going to bubble up from the bottom. It just couldn't. It actually has to.

That's the sort of thing that I should have started when I was getting Wikipedia going. I realized this only a few years after I left, that I should have established some sort of editorial governance apparatus. And it has lacked one ever since. And if it doesn't come from, you know, the Wikimedia Foundation, maybe Jimmy Wales could get behind it, although he, again, alone is not enough. That's one way. The other way is Congress. And the general public can raise a and cry and bring real pressure to bear, which might cause the rank and file of Wikipedians to change their tune. And I think that is very much a reasonable approach at this time for us to take.

I think that it's high time that we talk back to Wikipedia, you know, in an organized way. So are you saying you want to lead such an effort now? As we were talking that I could organize a letter of protest. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have been badmouthed by Wikipedia who would sign such a letter. We can send it to the Wikimedia Foundation and to Congress and the White House and other governments around the world perhaps I don't know I'm not saying that I want to you know use the power of government to impose anything on Wikipedia I don't want to do that at all I still have many libertarian bones in my body

that actually makes me uncomfortable but some of the the worst problems with Wikipedia today that would cause, you know, somebody like you, to sign such a letter of protest, are actually creations of the law, which I can explain if you like. Yeah, no, please too. Well, so the Communications Decency Act in the 1990s was very reasonable. It set up a legal framework where people who ran open forums on the internet, couldn't be sued for the conversations that happened

on the forum. If there was some liable, they weren't responsible for that. And if, well, for example, there was violation of copyright law, they could just get a takedown request, and then it would be taken down, problem solved. So this was covered in what's called Section 230. This is the famous Section 230. I know a lot of people understand this already, but for those who don't understand it, I think it does need to be explained.

So what this means, though, is that Wikipedia has a system in place in which it's very wealthy, right so it has money to solve problems as necessary and yet right the platform sources content that is it's anonymous in other words you don't have to announce your identity not saying that you should have to on Wikipedia but it is anonymously generated content and such content is presented as part of an encyclopedias, factual and neutral, they use that term. And yet, on top of all other, and it's actually received by a lot of the public as being reasonably reliable. You know, even if you're aware of Wikipedia having problems, if it says it in black and white

there on Wikipedia, that actually makes you, you know, take pause. And the platform refuses to identify key content decision makers. 85% of the 62 most powerful editorial participants in Wikipedia, for lack of the good general covering term, the power 62. 85% of them are anonymous. And these are the most, or at least they represent the most powerful accounts. on Wikipedia. There aren't that many really powerful accounts on Wikipedia. And 85% of them are anonymous. So you can't sue them. You can't sue the Wikimedia Foundation. So if there is a real tort, the legal term meaning the grounds for a harm, which is grounds for a lawsuit,

there is no one available to sue. So there is no legal recourse. The reason, the reason, that I dwell on this is that people have come to me dozens of people over the years some of them reasonably famous like again Philip Roth and John Seagenthaler Sr., Robbie Starbeck recently, various others, and all complaining, look, Wikipedia is saying, these false things that are, you know, materially harming my reputation, making it harder for me to be elected or, you know, sell my product, whatever. And there's nothing I can do about it. It is a real problem, you know, and I don't like being the person who inflicted this situation on the world. But ultimately, as I say, it's a creation of Section 230. And so there could be a carve-out,

if necessary. I don't want there to be, right, but a carve-out, meaning a deliberate, targeted exception for a reasonably narrow but still generalized category of, of, platform. So Fostasesta has a particular carve out for Section 230. So I know we're getting into the weeds, but this is actually important. So the Fostasesta law basically serves as a precedent, creating an exception where websites can be taken down if they engage in human trafficking, right? Even if the the people who run the website aren't doing the human trafficking if it's being organized on the website they can still be sued for that and I think that's

unfortunate but it seems to be necessary so in the same way if the law if the combination of the law and the irresponsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation has created a situation where Wikipedia is functionally an engine of defamation. And again, if Wikipedia refuses to do anything about the problem adamantly, and they've proven that they're not going to do anything about the problem, then I think, I hate to say it, but I think Congress would have to act. And it could.

I sure hope it would be written in a way that would not be a threat to free speech online. Or use the threat of that to actually enact some reforms. That would be another route. Right. And this is not the only possible. idea. Yeah. A lot of creative people in and around government. Well, not very many, but there's some. So one of your theses is letting the public rate articles. In general, of course, sounds like a good idea. But there's also this opportunity. You mentioned astroturfing. And just

for the benefit of our audience, for people that might not be familiar with the term, we're talking about, you know, contrived attempts to kind of influence rating systems or, basically, there's a kind of a single party that is looking to, you know, or a few parties that are looking to create a certain sort of sense or certain narrative, but they make it look like it's a whole bunch of individuals, like it's a grassroots effort. So, I mean, the moment you do that, though, you're opening the door to this, aren't you? Like, the moment. that you say let the public rate, right? I don't know the answer to this, by the way, right?

But I know that the heck of a lot of astroturfing happens. Yeah, no, I agree. And it's a serious problem, or more generally, gamification. But yes, I can easily imagine how any such system would immediately be seized upon and analyzed to figure out some way. to make it work for basically one ideological position. I think the thing that would be necessary in this case is to basically secure one person, one vote.

And the other option, of course, is to leave it all up to AI and make sure that the AI is entirely open source, which means everyone can view the source code, And I'm not really sure what the best solution is, but I present both of them in essay number seven. I would say that any system which is completely open and where anyone can just make an account with an email address is not going to be very good at representing public opinion. because the presumption will be that it will be gamed. And I can easily imagine how media matters, or the Russians, or the Chinese Communist Party,

or whatever, would run a lot of bots and just like put a bunch of false data in there. And they might do that. People who are a fan of the current system might do that just in order to sort of crash such a rating system. So, unfortunately, what that means is that there has to be somewhat, I would say, expensive and time-consuming measures taken to ensure that it is just like one person, one vote. Well, so let's talk about AI.

Elon Musk has said that he has a solution to all this problem. Grochapedia. Okay? What's your take? I don't know what Grockapedia is going to be like. I can tell you what I think of GROC right now. Generally, if you ask GROC questions about politics or anything, any sort of litigated science issue, whether it be global warming or COVID or, you know, vaccines generally, whatever, maha,

It takes a pretty left-wing point of view or establishment point of view. I know enough about AI to be able to say fairly confidently that they, A, know that that is taking place, and B, they could fix it by changing the internal prompts that are used. So they, I think, have designed the GROC chatbot to reflect the kind of bias that it shows now. I don't know why they have done this, and it's not what you would expect, given Elon Musk's reputation, but it's a fact, in my opinion. Okay, I think it's a fact. So maybe they'll surprise me, and Grochoppedia will not have a similarly left-wing bias, but we'll have to see, won't we? You know, and perhaps, you know, it's interesting that you say this, because perhaps I'm just so used to seeing in a whole lot of sources very, you know, I would say even extreme bias.

GROC doesn't come across that way to me. I mean, I actually use several systems I use, you know, for the benefit already, I use perplexity, I use GROC for research, right? Sure. And this is extremely helpful. Absolutely. And I cross-check between them. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they don't.

I find it to be much more neutral than a whole lot of other sources. So maybe I'm, and that's useful to me. But so that I haven't noticed it as strongly, or perhaps I'm just like, you know, happy that something exists that's not, you know, that far down the road. you will okay right and maybe I should be more vigilant right I I know what you're saying and perhaps it isn't as pronounced as some but and I'm not saying that it's biased on every topic we might have been searching different topics but generally speaking when you ask it to give feedback for example on a given

thread on X, the former Twitter, it generally does just reflect what you would see in the New York Times. And if you are specifically asking a question and maybe it knows you, your experience might be different. So I really don't know what it's going to look like. Grockapedia could be, I might be very pleasantly surprised that it actually is neutral. Elon Musk says that it's going to be neutral. We'll see. So this, I mean, given that there is, you know, Grogapedia in imminent, given that Grogopedia is going to be imminently deployed as we're being promised, I mean, you can

kind of imagine every LLM now, right, any one of these language models to be doing the same thing, right? So you almost think you could have, there could be some kind of competition among and you know people with it who have or let's call it stakeholders in particular areas I mean look the area that I've been looking at because I'm writing a book on the topic right now is the is the forced organ harvesting industry in China and I'm constantly pleasantly surprised given the way this the very poor way this has been presented over the last 20 years since we've been known that it's real how well these different language models or at least the

that I've tried, including GROC, reflect the reality that we know, okay? And it's a particularly charged issue. So that's my viewpoint. So I would be, you know, one of these stakeholders that could look in and say, okay, how is this compare across all these different Grockopedia, open Iopedia, I don't know, right? I don't know what. So it does present a very interesting possibilities, but it also presents a huge opportunity for massive abuse, as I think you're kind of.

suggesting so right and well it's it's interesting to reflect on what's going to happen to human written encyclopedias I think competition to write the the best encyclopedia by AI would be really interesting like I myself I have talked to people who have used to draft encyclopedia articles. It can be done. The articles are often surprisingly not that bad. And once you figure out the prompt to use, you can do this yourself with Grog.

In fact, that's one that I have tried myself. Well, for that matter, I guess Grock and Chad GPT and Claude to evaluate different articles and collect sources. So it's very clear to me that it can be done. And the results can be reasonably good. But the bottom line is it's hard to do well. And this is the conclusion that a lot of people have come to.

And it's certainly what. Wikipedians will tell you, I mean, some of the first people to, like, look into this issue, of course. And they have rules against using LLMs to generate articles on Wikipedia, which I think is fair if they want to take that approach. I think that's fine. But the point is that it does require human input to be really reliable at this point so in other words they are not hallucination free yet so the bottom line if you're the epoch times or some other stakeholder whose Wikipedia page is a gross distortion of reality what can and should you do right now

I'm going to set up a letter of protest. I don't think I'll call it a petition, probably a letter of protest. And I'm going to try to circulate this around to a lot of prominent people who have been wronged in various ways by Wikipedia. I think that will help. But at this point, it seems to be... increasingly necessary, making some noise at Congress, which is now got, the Oversight Committee is investigating foreign influence on Wikipedia, and this bears on the more general problems of Wikipedia being, as I say, an engine of defamation.

I am not trying to get Wikipedia to be generally regulated. That would just be a disaster, of course not. That's not what I'm trying to do. I simply want to be possible to sue somebody if there has not been any satisfaction from the Wikipedia fold. Where there is a tort, there must be a defendant. That's my idea. So I think, and for that matter,

speaking directly to the Wikimedia Foundation, making your feelings known, especially if you're a prominent person, you know, if you're a congressman or senator, obviously your voice counts for more. You will be listened to more by the adults in the room at the Wikimedia Foundation. There's one of the thing that I want to sort of inject into the conversation here that bears on this question of like the stakeholders, and that is that some of the stakeholders are already, they already know what's going on. Because, you know, if you want to, the Wikipedia article about your enterprise or about yourself affecting your reputation to read a certain way, then

And you know that you actually have to pay to basically have your article read a certain way. And sometimes, maybe not all the time. But like if there's a problem, you can get it fixed. You're going to have to pay like $5,000 or $10,000 or something to some PR firm that will, you know, with a reasonably good chance of success, be able to affect changes. So there are gatekeepers, back channel gatekeepers, that are controlling things. I'm not saying that this is something that, no, the government should not be trying to control this. That's just, I mean, right, that would be far worse than the situation we have right now.

But I do think we're legal purposes, both concerning foreign affairs, you know, and matters of state, like Congress is investigating now, but also torts. We need to understand what the hell is going on behind the scenes better. And then the other thing doesn't really concern the stakeholders. That the other thing that needs to be done is, I think, over the next few weeks and months, we need to have a season of participation by the people who have been left out of Wikipedia. If we descend en masse to Wikipedia, you have to behave yourself, or they will just get rid of you, and you won't have anything, you don't have a leg to stand on in the system.

But if you behave yourself, follow the rules. Ask an LLM for help about, you know, how to craft this so that it's, that your contribution is, is acceptable to Wikipedia and your talk page comments have to be just so. Or, again, you will be, you will be booted in short order. That actually goes to thesis number eight and indefinite blocking, which is a real big problem. But just let me get this right. you're suggesting that people who have problem pages and maybe have given up long ago on trying to actually deal with them because it was impossible,

come back to it. Well, yes, those people, but also everybody else, all of their allies, right? There's nothing wrong with doing that. Now, you can't organize such things in public. That's called canvassing. All right, so don't do that. But...

Aren't you canvassing right now, but maybe very broadly. Well, that's entirely legitimate. Wikipedians do that. Wikipedians organize that and pay for it using the Wikimedia Foundation. That's just, I'm simply encouraging more participation. I can even do that and say, I want more, you know, centrist and libertarians and Republicans and conservatives, religious people, religious Hindus and Jews and Christians, Falun Gong. They should all be able to participate.

Why not? The people who are there might not like it, but they know, they know that they can't prevent you. They're not supposed to, and they will not be able to, the system is not so far gone that they will, that they can simply get rid of you on grounds that, oh, well, this is just an obvious Republican or something. So, Larry, as a final thought, best case scenario, what happens? Briefly. The best case scenario would be the Wikimedia Foundation convenes an editorial constitutional

Convention, meeting face-to-face in like, you know, New York City or London or wherever. In addition, they just outright adopt a few of the rules. Of the nine theses? Of the nine theses, sorry, not rules. For example, what rule changes is what I mean. For example, the Wikimedia Foundation could decide on its own recognizance that if you want to occupy certain positions of editorial authority on Wikipedia, then you must reveal your identity. And then the Wikimedia Foundation would indemnify such people and also help protect such people

as necessary. I don't think a lot of protection per se is going to be necessary any more than you or I need protection. I mean, I've been the subject of all kinds of attacks over the years, But for the most people, you know, nobody's beating me up yet. Not, not yet. I don't expect that to happen with Wikipedians. And are they really so cowards that they can't take real world responsibility for the exercises of power that they have? That's a thing that the Wikimedia Foundation could do.

That's one of the things that, in the best case scenario, would happen. Also, there are a number of different theses that actually have a surprising to me amount of support. Like number five, there's this humorous rule that I came up with called ignore all rules. Right back in the day, just a few weeks into the project, I said, you know, to the new people who were nervous about editing each other's articles, if rules make you nervous and not desirous of participating, then just ignore them and go about your business. That's pretty much how I put it.

And that was a sense made into a kind of rule that is used by insiders to exert control over the newbies. So it's, again, entirely inverted. And there is quite a bit of support for overturning that. It's very possible that maybe that one and maybe a few others will be overturned from within the system. That would be great, not expecting it, I hope, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility. Another part of the best case scenario is that the public really does respond, you know, actually take real meaningful action. Again, signing this letter of protest and similar letters and making your voice known to the various powers that B that govern Wikipedia at various levels. Again, there's the illegal institutional owners of the platform at the Wikimedia Foundation, and then there's the Power 62 accounts.

You can talk back to them. Why the hell not? Those people are powerful. They might deny it. They might say, oh, no, oh no, he's sending people after us. These people are more powerful than, like, the editors of the New York Times. Right. So they might deny it, but they can't.

It's entirely possible that with pressure brought to bear, they can realize that there is a problem here, The Wikipedia really does need some reform, and they might not, you know, use these nine theses as a template for change. They might find ways that are more palatable to them, but which are still responsible ways to improve the system, make it a better citizen of the world, so to speak. I'd be all in favor of that. You don't have to take my ideas and use them.

So I guess that would, that sort of sums up. up the way it might actually happen. Well, Larry Sanger, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Well, thank you. It's always a pleasure to talk to you yet. Thank you all for joining Larry Sanger and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek. The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to our request for comment.