Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created
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Very interesting concept, but it went nowhere.
"Trust but verify" is a good strategy for Wikipedia; the idea that Wikipedia as a whole is "partisan" is kind of ridiculous, but there's no denying that it's not uncommon to be out-edited by someone with more zeal and spare time on their hands, and these people are not necessarily always there with the best of intentions. This has always been the case, since day 1, and these slants exist in all directions.
If you read the accompanying article[1] Sanger wrote then it's plenty clear that he's coming at this from a very partisan stand; that's not necessarily a bad thing, although personally, I think Sanger's anger that Wikipedia doesn't give equal merit to Tucker Carlson's unhinged conspiracy theory that the Jan 6th riots were organised by the FBI to be ... well, unhinged. He's also angry it only presents the "Established" view on climate change.
We can discus the merits of what he's saying at length, but at the core it points to a fundamental problem: people have profoundly different views on reality that are impossible to unify. This has always been the case to some degree; any article will have to curate the information, or you'll end up with the weirdest quackery in any medical article. But things have moved so far apart that you'll soon become Adolf Stalin: for the left you'll be Adolf Hitler and for the right you'll be Joseph Stalin. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. It's unworkable.
Interestingly, Sanger's entire Citizendium project was based around this fact: "give due weight to the experts", but now he's criticizing that Wikipedia is only reporting "the facts from The Establishment". Hmmkay.
Personally I mostly see Larry Sanger as Wikipedia's Eric S. Raymond: once did some okay-ish work, now an unhinged conspiracy theorist not worth paying too much attention to, but still riding on the glory of this thing he did 20 years ago.
[1]: https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
Maybe Sanger couldn't handle the fact that a community can produce thousands of free Featured Articles (community-verified high-quality WP articles) while he ran out of money trying to produce a few dozen.
Sanger left Wikipedia over 20 years ago, he only worked on it in its first first year from earlier 2001 to early 2002.
Besides, Sanger has always been a bit of a cook, on CZ he just outright rejected feminism as an academic field because it was too left-wing, never mind his love for all sorts of pseudoscience on CZ. It's hilarious, because he started an entire site based on expertise, and then just rejected this expertise if he didn't like it in all sorts of fields.
This is the man that's we're supposed to take serious when he talks about Wikipedia? Pull me another one. Wikipedia has its fair share of issues, but CZ was outright and openly partisan in a way that Wikipedia never has been.
A lot of it was scrubbed of nonsense after he left, but by then he already managed to chase off most experts he had initially recruited and the project was pretty much dead (I'm amazed it's still online today though, although the only real edits in the last 30 days is one person editing the Peter Jackson page).
The little fact you drop here for some reason is right there in the video description.
I'm saying that SirensOfTitan's comment adds nothing that isn't already present in the linked video (and he freely admits that he didn't watch it) and therefore really serves no purpose (other than to boast, "I know things about this topic already _and_ I don't even need to watch the video".)
Your defense of SirensOfTitan's comment's supposed utility is to make your own tangential point which does nothing to argue that the original comment is valuable.
So I maintain: What was the point of SiresOfTitan's comment?
Aside from the obvious problems of how to determine “established oneself as an idiot”, what implications does this have for the concept of redemption?
People don't change without an impetus to change. Since the majority of the complaints that Sanger has had with wikipedia can be equated to the false balance logical fallacy and Sanger opens the video with the false balance logical fallacy then Sanger has continued to establish that he is in fact an idiot. Pretty easy to dismiss. You can declare me to be an idiot. You clearly don't care what anyone has to say, you seem to have an agenda, I don't know what it is or why you're so hot under the collar about this but I could call you an idiot as well and dismiss what you have to say. As a matter of fact...
But for non-political subjects, wiki is still great IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
He says this seemingly as a "liberty loving conservative". I don't find the arguments about these particular topics very compelling. And these article are naturally politically charged...
I'd be more interested in a discussion of bias in less politically charged articles, because I'm sure this also exists to some degree.
It's not that the sources that en.wikipedia uses to arrive at the opposite conclusion are even banned or neglected, or the reliable source policy is different at all - the difference is largely achieved by structure, prioritisation and editorialising, such as immediately offsetting every statement at odds with the narrative end with a healthy dose of FUD (e.g. the Unit 731 article's mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Shinozuka is a four-line paragraph of which the last two lines are to the effect of "however, his statement has been cast into doubt because POWs in China have been known to be brainwashed into self-criticism, and moreover Unit 731 did not have a Youth Brigade at the time") while letting the ones in agreement stand uncritically. Looking at the talk page, it is clear that the articles tend to be maintained in that state by a number of opinionated power users who have far more devotion and domain knowledge than any drive-by editor in disagreement can bring to the table, which is basically the same thing as the English Wikipedia is being frequently accused of (though perhaps more stark here because they look to be so obviously in the wrong to the Anglo-American observer).
I do wonder how this problem could be solved in a systematic way. It does seem to me that the effect of powers users who feel ownership of an article or topic is basically universally negative the moment the article becomes a subject of political controversy (as the power users tend to use their power to defend the undue weight given to their preferred viewpoint, at the expense of the NPOV ideal), and this perhaps would suggest that a sort of no-questions-asked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism mechanism might be good (make it so any editor that becomes too prominent can and will be easily banned from editing an article; if they are actually right, then surely others will take their place in defending their position), but it is also easy to imagine that this rule would be gamed to detrimental effect by off-site canvassers (say, a real-world club of homeopaths could over time muster enough warm bodies to outright take over some article on medicine).
There’s no reason to expect truth to prevail in an environment where it doesn’t have an adaptive advantage.