Modern Wisdom - #118 - Dr Larry Sanger - Why Is Wikipedia Broken?

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

Dr Larry Sanger is the ex-founder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is almost a public utility now, like water or energy. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet and provides millions with information every day. But all might not be as pure as it seems and the utopia of the world's biggest encyclopaedia may have some fundamental flaws. Today we hear from one of the initial members of the project as he explains why Wikipedia is so messed up. Extra Stuff: Follow Dr Sanger on Twitter - https://twitter.com/lsanger  Check out Dr Sanger's Website - https://larrysanger.org/ Check out The Knowledge Standards Foundation https://twitter.com/ks_found Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back to Mon and Wisdom. As you might be able to hear by my nasal tones, I am fully in the depths of a very British flu at the moment. However, the podcasts continue to roll in, and today I'm sitting down with Dr Larry Sanger, who is the ex-founder of Wikipedia. Her ex-founders quite a weird way to describe anyone, once you're a founder, you're a founder, but you will hear today exactly why Larry has his criticisms and his disagreements with how Wikipedia has moved forward. He's also starting up the Knowledge Standards Foundation, which is hopefully going to fix some of the issues which he sees with the Wikipedia platform.

But yeah, there's a lot of politics going on at the moment. You may have heard in the past about people who've had out, it calls written about them on Wikipedia and then they've been locked down and they're unable to be edited. There is quite a militant bureaucratic editing process and it all seems pretty sort of contrary to what you want from a user generated in psychopedia

that is free for everyone to access and probably one of the single biggest reference sources on the planet. Anyway, this really opened my eyes. Enjoy. Here is Dr. Larry Sanger. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Larry Sanger, who is the ex founder of Wikipedia among many other things. Larry, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me on.

I appreciate it. Really good to have you here. First things first, I've never heard the term X founder before. What can you explain? You're explaining what that means, please. I made it up yesterday. Oh, my God. Or the, okay, a couple of days ago.

I did a face, a Twitter poll about it. Over 50% of the people thought it was a good title for me to claim. So like in 2005, which everyone thought was ridiculous, but he was insisting on it. So it's a little bit of a dig at him for that. But it's also, whenever I tell people online that I'm co-founder of Wikipedia, especially in the last, I don't know, three or six months, they've started getting hostile toward me personally. It's like Wikipedia is out of control, they say no. You must be the devil if you actually started it. I'm distancing myself from it because of a competing, frankly, outside of the very original naysayers,

but, you know, yeah. And then I've been gone for a long time. So sometimes when I tell people I'm co-founder and, but now I'm working on whatever my latest project is they get confused and I think oh so you they seem to assume that I just left it like a couple years ago. No, I left in 2002. I permanently distanced myself from the project in 2003 and I've been working on all kinds of other things since then. So, but I got it started. Yeah, and also World's First X Founder, which is... I think so.

That's right. I think we found it. I founded the term. Yeah, you are. The World's The X Founder Founder. Right. So, before we get into Wikipedia and where it's at, at the moment and also your exit, could you

tell us the Genesis story? Could you tell us how it started on your side? Okay. Well, I first met Jimmy Wales in the mid 1990s through our common interest in philosophy. Actually it was a iron rant. I joined one of his mailing lists and later on made one myself and he joined that about philosophy. And we lost touch for a few years, but then I was sharing a idea that I had for, what would later become a blog around early 2000.

And one of the people that I shared the idea with was Jimmy Wales and he wrote back and he said, don't work on that. Work on this thing. You'd be, you know, editor-in-chief of an encyclopedia. And I was like, wow, this sounds great. I like, there was practically my dream job. It's something, if I wasn't going to be a professor of philosophy, which by that time I decided not to be, even though I was all but dissertation at the time, it would be, you know, like an editor of an encyclopedia. That sounded great.

So it was my job to start new PDF, NU PDF, and that was to be built on the principles of open source software. So there was this guy wrote a essay called The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his name is Eric Raymond. I was told to read this. It's still a great thing to read.

And it explains how volunteers can get together to build great things online simply by sharing a common vision and a common need, solving common problems. But in a way that results in something that lives in the commons. And so that was the comments. And so that's the, that was the idea. And the problem was we wanted new pdf to be as trustworthy as possible. So we had this seven step really arduous editorial process. And not many people wanted to go through it. So we generated only a few dozen articles in the first year. And that wasn't good enough.

So we were well agreed that there needed to be a new source of content for the project. And so I made some different proposals and Jimmy Wales, he, you know, dismissed them all because it would involve more coding. And that, a friend of mine, January 2, 2001, told me about this software called Wiki Software, very uber geeky, where you go to a web page, and you click an edit button and you can edit the text of the page right there

on the page and hit save and your changes are instantly live. And it was an insane sounding idea, but, you know, okay, even by that time I had been living online for the better part of 10 years. And so it wasn't that hard to imagine how it actually might work. So he got me excited enough about the idea that I started thinking, well,

this could solve the problem that we were having with Newpedia. And so I ran home actually and made a one-page proposal to Jimmy Wales basically saying, set up this software for me to work on a new project. And originally, it was going to be the new pediowiki. But then the editors of Newpedia, they were mostly PhD academics, they didn't want to have anything to do with

anything called a wiki. It just did not have the sort of credibility and heft that they wanted to be associated with. And they were really good people actually. There are some famous scholars even among them. And well, so we decided fine, we still want to do this. It just won't be associated with the new media brand. media brand. So I came up with the name Wikipedia and we launched it. And internally on January 10th, I guess it was, I had already populated it with help pages and things like that. And we added some more, some first articles. and then we launched it to the broader world and the new PDA community included on January 15th. And because there were already

like 2,000 people on the new PDA mailing list, which I had collected in the previous year, had collected in the previous year, I and an assistant that we had collecting people. We were actually able to start, hit the ground running, basically. And yeah, it just, I mean, it grew faster than anyone expected it to. And it was sort of my job in the beginning to teach the very idea of an encyclopedia article to people who wanted to use it, because it was just basically an online blank bulletin board that anyone could write anything to. So you could dictionary definitions, you could write personal essays, you could do whatever. And just gradually I pushed people toward, you know, writing, and it's psychopedia article begins with something like a definition or a general

description of the term, you know, and, and, and systematically lays out the, the basic facts and explain basic policies like neutrality. So I was a big advocate of that. I'm the main author of the original version of Newpedia and Wikipedia's neutrality policies. And various other policies too. So it has changed a bit since the first year, So it has changed a bit since the first year, since like the end of the first year, but not that much actually. So it's interesting. The biggest thing that has changed since then

is that it was sort of taken over by people that back then I would have considered to be trolls and at least people who did not always have the interests of neutrality and a serious approach to the subjects at heart often had access to grind, and also were just difficult to get along with unless you pillaged their game. So that's when that all that started toward the end of the very first year of the project. Even that soon. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah. And that's actually why I ended up distancing myself. So after like I worked on it for the first 14 months, got it really going. Jimmy Wales actually basically, he's given me credit for coming up with the idea and later denied the same thing and that I was like essential to the project,

but then it actually turns out that I wasn't essential to the project. I mean, it was set up. That's the nature of a wiki. It was set up so that it could be to a certain extent self-managing. It's pretty robust. And, but I permanently distanced myself

from the wiki community like a year after laid off because they couldn't afford to pay me basically. And the bottom fell out of the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. And yeah, so they lost their contracts and were not able to pay any of the new people. Anyway, yeah, and a year after that, I basically said, this project is, you know, becoming dominated by people that I would have considered bad actors before. And you are absolutely driving away some of the very best people that we recruited for Newpedia. And if this is the case, then it's going to end up being a real problem. You know, and I think I was right.

So I gave Jimmy Wales an ultimatum. So you do something about these problems, or I'm going to distance myself from the project permanently. And he'd simply denied that there were any of the problems that I listed. And so I said, okay, bye-bye. And I've been kind of a critic ever since. I've been kind of a critic ever since. It's interesting to me when we have these big projects. You know, I recently had Roger McLean on from Facebook, early investor in Facebook, a personal advisor to Mark Zuckerberg,

he's the person that brought Cheryl Sandberg in. And he said the same thing. His story tallies up with yours that very soon after he was involved in a project which would end up changing the face of the internet, he was able to see a particular trajectory that this project was moving on, which concerned him and he highlighted it very early. And again, with that, the people who he highlighted it to, the powers that be said, don't think it's a problem.

Apparently, his analogy was that they treated him like a PR concern to be dealt with. And replied, he sent, I don't know whether you did this, but I think he actually created quite an extensive press release slash proposal, which for him was a thesis laying out where the issues lay. It was his conceptualization of exactly what was going on. And apparently the reply that you got from Mark and from Cheryl was similar to how a bad, you would, you would deal with something in a press release, bad press release. So I thought it was really interesting. Interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, well, I was nice. I didn't like go to the make a public spectacle of the thing in 2000. a spectacle of the thing in 2000. I mean, I think I considered it. I didn't actually go public with any criticisms until 2004. And that really pissed Jimmy Wales off. One of the things he responded to that on, and it's on a now defunct group blog called Corrosion. K-U-R-5-H-I-N.org.

Anyway, and he basically said, yeah, I was thinking of hiring you back and getting you back involved, but not now. And I said, well, I wouldn't have come back if you had asked, because the problems were not getting better. And some of the things that I saw, which is a tendency to ignore the neutrality policy, have gotten worse. I mean, that's been a problem since I would say a couple of years after I left. It started when one could begin to see

an ideological tilt to at least some of the articles, not always, but that goes back to like maybe 2004, 2005. Then it started getting really pronounced like 2010, but lately though, like in the last three or four years, basically, in the same time that mainstream media has decided to abandon all pretense of objectivity, Wikipedia has more or less followed suit as far as I can tell. That's so upsetting for me to hear. So first off, I did a little bit of background reading into this particular situation. I had a good chat with Vizzi, who's the guy who put me in new in touch. As a part of that, I've definitely seen recently I was watching Stephen Crowder,

and he said something, this is only the other day about the fact, his Wikipedia page has been locked down. Apparently it's had malicious edits made to it and is now locked down. And this is, I'm not even kidding you, Larry, this was a week ago, and I heard this for the first time. And I'm, you know, spend a fair bit of time on the internet, and I've been swimming in these sort of circles. I hadn't heard anything.

And you're talking about something which is nearly two decades deep now with regards to this particular pathology that's going on. So I'm thinking about this and then it's gotten worse though. It's what I'm saying. Oh yeah. It's it's you saw the seeds of it right back in the day. Oh, can you explain to us in your world what would make the perfect wiki and how does that contrast with what you saw and then how has that begun to diverge further as times gone on? Well, I'll give you first what I think would be the perfect wiki and then I will give you the way I think in psychopedias generally should go, which is not necessarily

in the form of Wikis at all. Got you. So let me tell you about a couple of projects that I worked on, and the very best version of a Wikis in Psychopedias might combine both. So I actually started a competing Wiki project called Citizen as in the Citizen's Compendium back in 2006, 2007. And that was just when Wikipedia was enjoying as steep as growth curve. So it never really took off, but it had a really great start. And so the distinctive features that it had really weren't enough to really distinguish it from Wikipedia, but they were important differences. One was you had to use your own real name. So anonymity was not permitted except in special cases, in which case we allowed pseudonyms.

So if somebody wanted, if somebody were a political dissonant, they would have to trust me, at least, and I would approve of an account, and then they could just like use a suit on him. All right, that I think just takes care of a heck of a lot of the problems it did in that years that I was working on citizenry. And the other thing that helps basically solve a lot of the problems with Wikipedia is making all of the people who contribute to the project agree to a statement of fundamental principles.

And now, Wikipedia itself has, you know, some bedrock policies that it has stated, but the, the, it's commitment to neutrality in particular is really on the ropes. I think that if people were made to agree in advance with policies that are specifically devoted to strict notions of neutrality and other important policies, it goes a long way, basically. And then a third thing is we had essentially a constitutional system of governance, a project governance. It's not mob rule. There are actual elections. People can actually change the rules through a legitimate process. They can adopt new projects through a legitimate process. That doesn't really exist on Wikipedia.

It's crazy as that might sound. It just doesn't. That's in large part because they don't have one person, one vote. The reason for that is that, well, they allow anonymity. So that's one of the problems there. So, the other project that I want to tell you about is one that I've been working on since late 2007. So I have been a chief information officer of Everipedia. And Everipedia is the encyclopedia of everything, that's why it's called Everipedia. And it's now built on the blockchain. So it's the first blockchain at Cyclopedia.

It is a fork of Wikipedia and we have decided to allow contributions from all different sources from all about all different topics. sources from all about all different topics. So we're much more open as to contributors and topics, whereas Wikipedia tends to shut people down quickly. They tend to be much more closed than they used to be anyway. So we are going back to some of the more positive early tendencies, I guess, of Wikipedia in that regard. But one thing that Wikipedia never had was this idea that you could have an article about absolutely

anything. So I have an article about my left thumb just to demonstrate that it is possible to have an article about anything. And it changes the nature of the project. So if Eropedia really takes off in a big way, and it very well could, then the result might be the mass creation of not five million articles in the English encyclopedia, but 500 or 5 billion articles about everything all proper names as one of the co-founders put it. Anything has a proper name would have an article that would be attached to it. So here's another thing that is not part of that system yet, but which I think any system of collaborative encyclopedia writing has to have.

And that is a democratic dispute resolution system. Usually what happens, and this is why Wikipedia, one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so messed up, is that there is no formalized way of arriving at a decision about disputed questions. So you go there, you've got a question about, you know, what should the definition of racism be? You know, extremely hot topic. It should be possible for people to, you know, come up with a bunch of different options and maybe have a round robin competition or something like that and actually get a legitimate choice. That's not what they do.

They pretend that it is possible to have a consensus about these things. But the consensus is determined basically by the people in power on the topic. Whoever has the most seniority or seems to have the most allies or whatever, those are the people who basically declare the consensus. So it's not a consensus. It's just putting a cynical description on what is not a consensus or. So no, the decision-making process needs to be reduced to very specific editorial decisions

to be made, and then taking legitimate votes based on that. So for me, I've never submitted an article to Wikipedia or I've never tried to make an amendment to Wikipedia. I think probably maybe back in the day when I was a teenager, I'd have what search to see if I was on Wikipedia for any reason, but other than that, and other than using it for definitions, like probably most people I haven't. Can you just briefly explain what the process is that say I want to I go on and I search for racism and I think oh I have some Some information which relates to this that I think is missing. How how do I go about trying to edit the article?

Well, it's in one way it's as simple as it could possibly be you don't even need to make an account in one way, it's as simple as it could possibly be. You don't even need to make an account, except for protected accounts, like the one that you were mentioning before. You just go to the page, you press the edit this page link, up comes an edit box, you type in what you want and you hit save, and your edit will be saved immediately. And it used to work pretty much that way

back in the day. And then gradually things became more and more locked down. I think it really started happening maybe in like 2008, 2010. And now it's just, it's really difficult to, for anybody who is not in an inner circle as it were to edit any important

article at all, really. I mean, you can propose edits and maybe if they're, I don't know, um, but yeah, it's hard. It's interesting, because I was so excited. You would get banned. I'll tell you something. If you were to go and edit the definition of racism in the article about racism I bet you'd be banned just for trying really Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm pretty damn sure I'd love for somebody to prove me wrong Someone try there's gonna be thousands of people listening right now someone go and try and edit a an article about There's gonna be thousands of people listening right now. Someone go and try and edit an article about About something consensus and send us a screenshot. Well, you know, don't do it that article Okay, not that one do it about something or do it about that how to make jelly or you know something something that's kind of yeah

Non-descript and so no no it has to be something to to to be a real test It has to be something that is controversial just don't do racism. Jesus Not that one, something else. So I can immediately see, and the listeners will be able to think as well, if you allow people to make instant edits, the opportunity for trolls there, it is prevalent, it's obvious, right?

You can just have someone go on and change every word of the to poo, and then it just destroys the article. Oh, that's easy to fix. Okay, there's a revert button, is there of some kind? I'm going to guess on the back end. Yep, exactly. It's all been made automatic. It's much easier for you to revert somebody's illicit change then for the person to make it in the first place. Great point, so. Yep, great point. There's a lot more work. So there's an asymmetry in terms of work that someone

who wants to destroy something has to do. It's actually quite rare, isn't it? Entropy doesn't usually work that way, but no, it's a good point. So, okay, we have that. We have this particular system. But you've mentioned about the fact that you have this particular ideological leaning with regards to Wikipedia and what it is and isn't allowing. And also the fact that you have this less than fair distribution of power with regards to the editing of articles. How is that manifesting on the actual platform?

So if I go on, I try to edit something just doesn't get allowed, you doesn't save straight away, so the certain protected articles, is that the way it works? Certain protected articles, unless you actually have enough, they have made enough edits in the system, you're not allowed to touch them at all. But you know, it doesn't take that long to get to the point where you actually are licensed in the system to edit even the protected articles. But I don't actually think that that in itself

is such a terrible problem because there are popular articles need to be locked down for the simple reason that it ends up being just a chore to clean up after the vandals. Right? We can't really revert things, right? Exactly. That's exactly what happens. So I'm not complaining about that, the complaint that I would have is the abuse of such a policy. They are locking down an article

so that people that you who are outsiders, they have legitimate contributions to make to the article, but you disagree with them. Those people are excluded. That's a problem. Yeah. That must be such a effortful process on the back end, on the end of Wikipedia, to constantly be looking at what what article falls within the purview of our protected racket. Is this edit in line with our particular thinking? Does it blah blah like that's a serious unless I suppose unless it's just a it doesn't get through. This is a very, very hard wall. Well, it's not like there's some centralized rules and and

world view that is enforced by everyone. I mean, to a certain extent, that's kind of true, but not really. But it doesn't matter, right? Because there's all kinds of people who have made their own little fiefdoms on their set of the set of articles that they sit on. And there's just a game that you have to play in order to get anything done on Wikipedia. And that game appeals to only a very few people. So if I may, let me explain what's going on now with me, because it develops, you're basically asking, what is my notion of the perfect wiki

or the perfect encyclopedia system. So here it is. So I said that I have been the chief information officer of every epidemiol. actually, as we speak, now I am no longer. So I resigned in September in order to start the Knowledge Standards Foundation. And we are going to be developing something that I call the encyclosphere. Now the encyclosphere will be hopefully have as a partner, Eropedia, but also Wikipedia and ballot, Pedia and Britannica and the Stanford encyclopedia

of Philosophy and the rest of them, not necessarily partners in the sense that we'll have a written agreement with them. But what we're going to do is we're going to take metadata about all of their articles and make it freely available as part of a public commons. Everyone can use. And if their articles are free, as in the case of Wikipedia, Everipedia, and ballot, and actually quite a few others, if it is free, then you'll be able to see the articles themselves. They will also be shared and made available as part of a public commons. So what do I mean by public commons? Actually, it means

something like the blogosphere. So you can, you know, right, if you start up a blog, if you don't tell it not to, then WordPress, for example, will publish your posts using a standard called RSS, really simple syndication, right? So it makes what's called a feed, and that feed can be slurped up by blog readers. And so you can go and look at feedly, for example, and feedly will allow you to subscribe to different news sources and blogs, right?

And then your blog gets collated in with other things that you might want to read and so forth. Well, we need to build that kind of system for Encyclopedias. That's what needs to exist. See, if you want to work on an Encyclopedia now, you have to work and you want it to work on the biggest most influential encyclopedia in the world. Well, that's Wikipedia. And you have to work with that weird crew, with their strange policies and put up with

their ideological editing and so forth. You have to work on one article per topic. They don't allow multiple articles, I don't know, competing articles or anything like that, of course, right? Well, I submit that there are probably millions of people who, if given the chance, would be writing encyclopedia articles about what they know, if they could be submitted into a general commons in the same way that people submit blog posts into the general commons of the blogosphere. So what we need to do is create an encyclosphere that enables the millions of people who would like to write encyclopedia articles, but who don't want to put up with the BS of Wikipedia.

So that's the idea, that's what we're building. How do you get around so you would presumably have multiple articles on the same topic, multiple encyclopedia entries on the same topic. For me, I may be judging what I consider to be an encyclopedia incorrectly, but presumably, there should eventually only be one for most things. Is that the wrong way to look at an encyclopedia? I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Interesting. Yeah, so here's the problem. I personally am an objectivist about truth. I believe that there is such a thing as a mind-independent reality. And we can get closer or farther away from a correct description of it.

All right? So there's a mind-independent reality and it constrains what we can know about it. But the problem is that there is no generally accepted methods and certainly no political entities that everyone can agree with for determining what that truth is, right? And the best way to arrive at the truth is to get all the views on the table to be as open as possible to proposals and then allow people to rate those different articles. Then if we have a proper user account system set up, then if I've confirmed that I am

in fact Larry Sanger, then I could say things like, well, I'm an American, I'm male, I'm over 50, I have a PhD. I have degrees in philosophy. I'm a member of this organization. I have, I went to these colleges and so forth, right? And then based on those categories or political party, religion, whatever, based on such categories, you can say, okay, show me the top-rated article according to

all of the white male Republicans or how about black female Democrats. And on certain topics, those categories probably won't matter. On other topics, they'll matter a lot. And it would be really, really interesting, I think, to compare the top-rated article about G-Had, according to, let's say, American college professors, versus E-MOMs living in the Middle East. I'll bet they would be different and it would be really interesting to compare those articles, right? What would the top rated article according to those categories of people be? And so not only would it enable us to articulate different points of view, it would actually incentivize

by creating a worldwide but completely decentralized, leaderless, centralless contest to write the best article about every topic from every point of view. So you wouldn't be, you wouldn't just get an article that is approved by American college professors or whatever. It would be the best one according to them. And there would be this constant competition to write a better one. So yeah, there's all kinds of things to be said about that, but I'll just leave it at that and let you ask questions. I think it's cool. It kind of sounds a little bit like Reddit, I guess. Well, you kind of upvote your vote particular articles

and the ones that are the most active, although I guess you wouldn't have the time degrading element of that. Well, there's a difference. Reddit doesn't constrain the type of thing that is submitted to a subreddit, right? This is just encyclopedia articles. Understood. I agree.

How useful do you think that this would be, or are there any concerns about how useful this would be for a typical layperson? I want to find out about Christopher Columbus, right? I don't want to find out about the, I might do, but broadly, I probably want the most aggregated understanding of what Christopher Columbus did. Now there may be someone way, way out there who believes Christopher Columbus went back in time from the 22nd century and etc etc. Do you understand what I mean? That you have this potential for disinformation to leak in conspiracy theories and alternative points of view whilst valid. Is that is a an encycl of the place for those? Well, let's put it this way.

Some things that were once considered encyclopedia theories are now regarded as true. Any conspiracies, sorry, I think I've mistated that. So any conspiracy theories of the past, rather, they're now regarded as, have been discovered or no longer conspiracy theories, they're just true, right? But at one point, they're conspiracy theories. Right? Okay. Okay, so the point is that yes, there is a way to approximate the mainstream view on any subjects, right? Just have to adjust the groups of people, you know, the groups of accounts that you're going to follow

for purposes of determining what the ranking of articles is. Is he what I'm saying? So yeah, I mean, it's, I don't think that's necessarily going to be easy, but I think it's like, it's a great idea, and I think it's one that we ought to be trying out. I think it sounds like a fascinating challenge. And I think depending on how sophisticated the data is, which you can crunch on the back end, it would be absolutely fascinating to start to identify the differences between, you know, we're talking here broadly about quite nebulous differences between this is how someone may write something, ideology is difficult enough to define as it is, right? It's kind of very

wishy-washy, but if you were able to really draw out in hard data where the exact differences lie between one interpretation or perhaps one platform's interpretation of a particular issue, I think that would be absolutely fascinating. Right, right, no, I agree. Really looking forward to it. Is it technically a challenge? For whoever the unfortunate person is that's got a code, try and code this thing?

Well, it's not one thing to code, except in so far as we're talking about the standards, right? Because when you're talking about the blogosphere, again, to go to return to the analogy elect to draw, there is no one set of software for the blog sphere. There's just the standards, there's just the specification, RSS and Adam, and that's it. So, that actually is not going to be easy, just making sure we have the right standards

expressed. So I've actually started a word press blog actually and you might not even be able to tell that it's a blog by the time we're done with it, we're adapting it so much. But yeah, it's going to be a big old group discussion, but a serious long form discussion about what the standards should look like. And I've already started reaching out to a lot of people. And we're going to try to get as many relevant experts involved and make sure that we've got everything nailed down as much as possible. But also in a way that isn't

that isn't interfered with by big money interests and the power brokers of the world just don't want them involved at all. So we're not gonna accept any corporate money. We're not going to accept any money from governments. Any large contributions we accept from individuals or maybe family foundations or whatever,

we're gonna actually check them out gonna make sure that they're not another Epstein. That kind of thing. We want the mighty to be clean and we want to make sure that there is no quid quo pro involved. So because knowledge is power, right? And if we actually succeed in developing the project that I'm talking about, it could be extremely powerful, actually. And I think there might be people after it to exert influence so that there's special favors done to certain people.

And that's, that isn't going to happen. I want it to be as neutral of, and democratic of standard as, as the classic standards of, you know, defining the internet have been. Understood. Yeah. So when you're talking about the Knowledge Standards foundation itself, the actual platforms, I'm going to guess that you're dealing with Wikipedia and stuff like that, in terms of repurposing their content and pulling them across. So they all within a format which is usable at the moment for you to rip that metadata out? Not really. No. So do you need to get them on board with what you're going to do? No, I am not necessarily understood. I mean, it would help. Yeah. We could probably use their help,

but I don't think it will be necessary. In the case of media wiki, that's the name of the software that Wikipedia uses. Yeah, we can, we can write basically a scraper for media wiki sites that extracts the right metadata. Thing is people do use media wiki in different ways. So that would itself need to be adapted. I'm pretty sure we're gonna have to adapt our scrapers for basically all the different sites. And I'm not just talking about a meta search engine, though,

to be very clear. What I want to exist is like plugins for WordPress or for browser plugins that you could use when you're working on a medium article. For example, you press a button. It imports the data on the page into a form, and then you fill out other fields to make sure that everything is correct. And then it republishes it on a feed, in a feed, and then that feed could maybe another thing that it could do is ping one of the feed aggregators, right? It will pull in different encyclopedia feeds from different encyclopedias, but also, and this is the point, individuals. If you just want to put up an encyclopedia article about your hobby,

and you like, okay, I don't know a lot about a lot, but I can write, you know, a dozen articles about table tennis as a part. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, transporting whatever. Then, then, that's fine. You'll be able to do that. And they will be collated in and ranked against all the others. I think I just can't get over how big of a technical undertaking this is. Like, it sounds, it just sounds like, because obviously from your side, philosophically,

it is very interesting. Another thing that I've got in my head at the moment is how similarly this matches up with what's happening with blockchain technology at the moment, with decentralization of currencies and stuff like that. This is why I joined Evropedia, right? And Evropedia is still committed to using this sort of system. But when I joined Evropedia, I said, OK, so this is the project I really want to work on.

So I said, OK, well, you develop the ideas, and you can give speeches about it, and that's what I did. But also early on I said eventually somebody is going to have to actually define the standards that common standards that are used if people are going to be submitting articles to the Eropedia network then they would have to have common standards for doing that. And I eventually came to the conclusion that if it's really going to be open and not controlled by Everipedia Inc, then it actually has to be something that is

built not on the blockchain, but built on the World worldwide web, basically. So it'll be basically a text feed, right? And but of course, you know, everypedia will, in fact, be able to tokenize that work. Perhaps you'll have to do something special in order to get an article submitted to everypedia. Maybe you'd have to have an every PDI account in order to earn IQ tokens for doing that, right? But you're not at all wrong that the whole idea of decentralizing content development is something that people are really excited about,

a blockchain for enabling. So. It's interesting, isn't it, that this particular pathways acting across multiple different domains, so to speak, within tech? This push towards decentralization. Yeah.

It's just a movement, basically, to take power back, take it out of the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. Right? Yeah, I think it's a huge problem that they have decided to ignore our privacy rights and even though our content is what they have built their multi-billion dollar corporations on, they insist on censoring us. The arrogance is mind-boggling to me. And that wouldn't fly if you were talking about blogs, would it? Yes, yes. There's no central blogging authority.

Why the hell does there have to be a central tweeting authority or a central, you know, social update, Facebook update kind of authority that doesn't have to be? It's increasingly now I'm hearing this discussion about is it a pipeline versus platform or a pipeline versus publishing, which is the analogy, which is being used, that they are either simply the delivery vehicle for whatever people put on there, or they are publishing platform, which curates the content, which goes out. And apparently there's some very different rulings legislatively, in terms of copyright, in terms of a whole host of other things, which every

platform right now, YouTube, Twitter, there's again, to go back to Stephen Crowder, he unloaded a load of stuff in this one video I watched the other week. He was talking about, he showed his analytics on his YouTube channel, and apparently YouTube has made essentially a fourth-right declaration of the fact that there will be restricting political speech in the build-up to the American election. And I was thinking, it's crazy. It's absolutely insane. But that's because maybe for me, I don't see the, I hope that these particular organizations

are these big transparent enablers of information freedom, right? That's what I think. But as these organizations, that's what we all thought. 10 years ago. You were absolutely. And as these organizations grow, they need tax breaks,

they need favors, they potentially get into some legislative problems, they need to favor off someone, someone needs to favor off them, they grow a bit more, they grow a bit more, they get someone on the board, and you can see how these sort of this beautiful princess of purity dressed in all white kind of gets a bit more mucky as time goes on and the dress gets a bit dirty and torn and then she's grown an extra arm and become this horrible gargoyle after a while. And it is bizarre. And again, same that Roger McNamey said, the same thing Tristan Harris is talking about, the centrifugal main technology and a lot of the people that I'm very interested in at the moment, yourself who now added to that list, Larry, it's interesting that this movement is toward decentralization,

toward more transparency. And I wonder if we'll see some of the large organizations either dig their heels in aggressively trying to claw at particular projects or what some of the reactions will be, because there's no chance that they're gonna go down without a fight. Okay, I have a data point on that. It's interesting. So last spring, I had this idea that we really need to decentralize social media. And I gave a speech at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And I asked just out into the public space,

I asked Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, three questions. So question number one was, will you agree Jack to let us republish our tweets into a common data format that could be used on other platforms like Facebook or brand new platforms? And will you also enable to import posts into our Twitter feeds on Twitter.com or the Twitter app from other sources. So say my friend doesn't using Twitter but is posting a lot on minds. And I want to see all of the social media activity in one place. Will you enable us to import those posts? And then a third, I said, will you just generally give us a hell of a lot more control over

the algorithm that the algorithms that shape our feeds. And somebody wrote down the questions and tweeted them at Jack and Jack responded. He said, yes. So I actually clarified, I said, okay, here's question one. Do you agree? He said, yes. Here's a question two. Do you agree with that?

Yes. Question three. Do you agree with that? Yes. So he was on the record, on Twitter, saying yes to the decentralization of Twitter. It hasn't happened yet though. No. Ha. It hasn't happened yet though. It hasn't happened yet. It'll tell you more. I'll tell you

something else. I had a half hour long discussion. So out of the blue, I got a message from Jack, I got a message from Jack, a direct message, and proposing that we chat. So I had a half an hour long discussion with him on the phone. And he read to me what sounded like a plan that somebody had written that went into details about the sorts of things that I had asked questions about. Like this is, I mean, it sounded great. Like it was a real plan. Of course, they haven't talked about this plan. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, That's really big. You would think it's big, but nobody ever wrote any news stories about it. Ever.

I think it's pretty big. I thought it was pretty big too. So nothing happened, and that kind of pissed me off, so I didn't really pull any punches. How long ago was this, sorry? Well, the conversation, I think it was in March or I think it was March. This year. Yeah. So it's, I mean, in the tech world, things move fast, but in a big company like Twitter, I guess there's probably a, like, things move pretty slow, right? It could still happen. It could still happen, for sure.

Okay, but there's another thing. I decided to do a social media strike in July. July 4th and July 5th, I invited people to sign a declaration of digital independence. You could still sign. I love it. That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, you should read it still sign it. I love it. That's cool. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. You should read it and sign it.

It's still up. It's on my blog, LarrySanger.org, just search for Declaration of Digital Independence. And I told people a strike on July 4th and 5th. And a bunch of people did, I don't know, thousands and thousands of people did. And they were declaring that they were on strike and so forth. I got there were dozens of articles written about it too. I was on CNN, I was on Fox talking to what's his name. Anyway, yeah. And so it was as far as getting the idea out there goes. That was a success.

Not that many people actually went on strike, but it was still a fair few. And here's the interesting thing. After that, like beginning toward the end of July, and since then, Facebook has gone down from an Alexa rank of three to five. Twitter has declined from 11 to 30 today. Their Alexa rank is 30 today. It used to be 11, right? I've written an article about this on my blog.

There's various others that are big decliners. Like Instagram is another one has gone down like 25 or 30 places. This Alexa ranks publicly available. Yeah, yeah, well Alexa, I've never heard of it. It's said to the ranking of how many people are asking Alexa to do a particular thing, is that correct? Nope, nope. And it's the ranking of websites.

It's not Alexa, it's also an Amazon product, but actually predates the Alexa device. So what is it? It's a web traffic service, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's so this is much more serious than people not having their smart speaker to access Instagram. This is general traffic going down. This is general traffic going down. Oh Wikipedia has gone from a ranking of, it is used to be the fifth most popular website. Now it is the ninth. Just in the last in the last six to eight weeks. Have there been any notable ascensions? Yeah, there have been a few.

It's interesting. Bing has gone up to search engine. Microsoft Office has gone up. eBay, a little bit stack overflow has gone up a lot. Stack exchange has gone up. Apple for some for whatever whatever reason. Release new iPhone, that's why. Yeah, that happens when you release a brand new iPhone. You're probably right. You're probably right. Medium. And then all kinds of mainstream traffic sources, sorry, traffic sources, mainstream news sources have gone up. I think they've absorbed

traffic from declining social media sites. This is my theory. The EVC, ESPN, New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, Breitbart, Wall Street Journal have all gone up significantly in the last three months. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, another one that has gone down a lot is Pinterest. Pinterest. So it's I don't get it. Pinterest. Quora, how the mighty has fallen. Quora used to be at rank 82 and it's now down to I know 200 and let's see what the latest is here. Just a second 262. Wow. Did you see the big who harb between them and Jordan Peterson about a month ago? I'm not sure I did. The big who harb between them and Jordan Peterson about a month ago?

I'm not sure I did. Okay, so um, Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life was originally based on a core opposed. Someone asked him what are the best pieces of advice that you would give someone for life? And he wrote, he wrote 40 Maxim's or Aferism's or whatever you want to call them. He wrote a list of all. I remember that. Yeah, okay. I've got the poster of all 40 outside in my whole way, next in my bathroom. And it's, I wrote these 40 and it's like one of the most engaged Quora posts of all time. It's legendary. And it got taken down because it because it contravened community standards. Then he appealed it very, very publicly screen-shutting what the processes he's going through with Quora. And they came back to him and said, we're very sorry, we're not going to reinstate your post

because we've reviewed it manually and it does indeed contravene our community standards. So it's down and you are never getting it back. And he put he put this post up online his followers reacted appropriately and then he got a DM from someone who worked at the standards department at Quora, just a guy, some guy. And he was like, give me a couple of days, like just hold on, give me a couple of days. And again, he's publishing this, publishing this exchange with this particular,

this gentleman, and he reinstates it. But it's not until they've been through this big process that just every single time that this happens, every time that Stephen Crowder's article gets locked down or that Douglas Murray released a podcast with him two days. You know who he is. He doesn't have a blue tick on Twitter. I've got a blue tick on Twitter. And I went on a TV. I went on a TV program seven years ago and I've got a blue tick. It's fucking, I didn't have a blue tick until until a May, until after I talked to Jack. He created, you created Wikipedia, yeah, that's it.

Excuse me, by the way, like I just got one favor to ask you, mate, well, we're having a quick chat. Can you just sort me out with that blue tick thing, please? So, yeah, like, how does Douglas Murray have a blue tick and it's right. Did you listen to Jack Dorsey when he went on Joe Rogan twice, both times? I did. Well, I listened to one of them for three hours. Yeah.

Was that the one where he had himself and Tim, what is his name, not Tim Irby? Yes, Tim Poole. Tim Poole. Did you listen to that? Yes, I did. It was right. The one before that was pointless. So just as well.

But yeah, that one with temple and Tim's right, like, it always appears to be, to be kind of viciously left leaning. It always appears to be the people that hold a slightly more conservative viewpoint or don't perhaps adhere to the social justice mentality as much that the ones that are suffering. So yeah, every time that this happens, it just makes people lose faith in tech. And do you know the one, the one group that Roger Mackle me of the whole thing, this big conversation and this footnote at the end? And as I said, so tell me, like, we need to use technology. I want to get an Uber.

I want to direct myself from where I am to the hotel that I'm staying in tomorrow night. What's the best of the bad bunch? Rodgers, Diamond in the Roof, was Apple. So he said that Apple is genuinely committed to user privacy. He said that it worked incredibly hard to do a number of things that are losing the money. So he said Apple maps loses tons of money. So once you finish your journey, it splits it up into 10 pieces and then scatters them across the God knows where,

it delays them so they can't be found, people can't track you, all these sorts of stuff. But across the board, it would appear, you know, the old establishments of the internet, Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, Google, fucking, Quora, like, they're no longer the same sort of trusted institutions. And I guess that's exactly where things like the Knowledge Standards Foundation and other organizations, there is a gap in the market for someone to come in and first off create a standard and

then secondly, be a voice of reason. Yeah. It's actually the way I would put it is there are things that are considered markets that didn't used to be considered markets and should no longer be. Do we talk about the blog market? Right? No, do we talk about the email market? No, they're just communication media. And of course, you can make blogging and email products. There's nothing wrong with that. In the same way, you'll be able to make encyclopedia apps and things like that. There'll be nothing wrong with that either. But I had to comment

on what you were saying about Apple. So, I mean, I am not that impressed. I mean, I agree that Apple talks a good game and have taken some public stands that indicate that they are more serious about privacy. But there's a lot of things that they do that are not that great for privacy and security. So I actually recently bought, I pre-ordered and will soon have delivered the first mass produce Linux phone. So it's made by a company called Purism and it's called the Librom 5. It's the first Linux phone. How cool is that? It's a third phone ecosystem. It's a third smartphone ecosystem.

You'll be able to actually access the command line for your phone. You'll be able to plug it in and show the desktop, run it like a computer. And anybody will be able to make apps and have to get special permission from Apple to run the apps. And so I'm excited about that.

I think that's really how it ought to be. I don't know if it'll ever get as big as Apple and Android, but well, it can always hope. Convenience is so high, though, right, for users. Yeah. It needs to be the the kiddie's sandpit version of of whatever it is that we're talking about. It's the same reason that I'm not running Linux on my laptop. I'm using I'm using a MacBook because I tell you, Linux is easier than that.

It is. I'm telling you, I wouldn't have said that when I first installed Linux, like back in 2002 or whatever it was. I installed like Red Hat Linux and this is, it was definitely four geeks only then. Now, it's totally different game. Basically, it's easier to install Linux, first of all, than it is to install Windows, at least some versions of Linux,

like Ubuntu and a few others. But the actual day-to-day use, if you wanted grandma to have a daily use machine, and she didn't know about computers, and wasn't used to anything, you'd give her Linux, and it would be better. She's never gonna have to go to the command line anymore. Linux rocks now, I'm telling you.

Could you imagine if you gave you grandma Linux for a couple of months and you came back and she was just like, she had a vertical, a portrait, external monitor, and she was doing hardcore coding. And you're like, Grandma, have you been on, have you been on Reddit at all? I have indeed. That'll be awesome.

That's funny. That'll be awesome. Larry, today's been awesome. Can you tell, we spoke about your blog and the Knowledge Standards Foundation, where can people go? They want to learn a little bit more, where should they head? Well, I hope they would do a couple of different things. You can look at my blog,

if you're just interested in my thoughts about life, the universe, and everything, actually, mostly tech and education, because I home school my boys. But if you want to just like keep up with me, then please subscribe or follow me on Twitter or it's a L-sanger. And then also on Twitter is KS underscore found as an knowledge standards foundation. If you could follow that, I just put out a call for people to like, to follow that. And for some reason, it went viral and I went from 60 followers to like, I've almost got 150 now. All right. Sorry. 1,500. So in just a couple of days. Not bad, gross. So, yeah, yeah. That's your mate, that's your mate, Jack.

That's your mate, Jack. Go ahead. Larry's a good guy. How do you go chat with a couple of months ago? We'll keep on, we'll let the algorithm work for another couple of months. Any sort of image that I share is locked down as sensitive content. I swear to God. I just said, I just posted something.

It was just saying thank you for putting us up over a thousand. That's what it said. That's all it said. And it was marked as sensitive content. Some X rated sharing that you've obviously got going on there. Larry, I've had a few X guests that have done that as well. But yes, everything that we've spoken about, not only standard foundation, your blog, Larry and your Twitter will

be linked in the show notes below. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few months. It'll be exciting to see if you guys manage to change the space of the encyclospheres. Encyclospheres, just like the blogosphere. Encyclospheres. I love it. Larry, thank you so much for your time. All right, thank you. you