At 20, Wikipedia has become a refuge from Big Tech's misinformation

So very many moderators with an ax to grind.

If there is a net bias, it is against new information that upsets professors emeriti. New and wrong do frequently go together, but that should not protect old and wrong.

Unbiased, or even slightly biased, is impossible. The torrent of factual information is of such a magnitude that it is impossible to present “all the facts”. And presenting any subset of those facts, even a random sampling, induces a bias in the resulting narrative. Including the information suggested in the article would add a different kind of bias. Impartiality is impossible. Neutrality is a a lie. Strong bias is inevitable, no matter the intent.

This article is really arguing that Wikipedia is not conservative enough for Larry Sanger's preference.

He is arguing that minority opinions should be given more equal coverage, but only as far as this applies to conservative points of view.

Sounds like he wants Wikipedia to move away from a centrist/neutral position more towards the right.

Larry Sanger is a weirdo whose entire persona over the last nearly two decades has been as a contrarian to Wikipedia. (I say this as someone who initially joined him in his Citizendium venture, only to bail as I learned more about the man and his vision for an online encyclopedia, which seems inferior to Wikipedia, in spite of Wikipedia’s warts and all.)

Sanger remains of those standard figures that the media goes to if they want criticism of the most popular option, but his criticisms of Wikipedia are often inaccurate, disingenuous, and he himself has lost too much everyday contact with the running of an online encyclopedia to be up to date with things.

This is something that has recently made me pessimistic about the modern internet: not only has the organic blogging community of the early millennium dwindled, but what blogs exist now are often created as intentional copies of other blogs so they draw advertising revenue. You often see jobs posted on sites like Upwork where the client wants to hire someone to examine a preexisting blog and then re-write its content in order to escape copyright law.

Recipe blogs are probably the most egregious example of this content theft (the blog owner who claims to be “born and bred in Louisiana and passionate about Cajun food” makes grammatical mistakes suggesting an Eastern European or Southeast Asia origin), but it is now spreading to all kinds of other hobbies and interests. If you are an original writer about a subject with no advertising on your site, it sucks to see you and your peers’ content buried in search results among the copycat websites.

And now the same commercial pressures to simply copy someone else’s reportage are now commonly seen in news businesses that were hitherto thought to be respectable. Is it inevitable on the modern web that all original content will end up copied by others?