Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger is now working on a decentralized encyclopedia

I always chuckle when people complain, even if it is from a cofounder, that Wikipedia has a "leftist" bias.

Gosh, you built a system that is dependent on a gigantic army of volunteers who donate their time and expertise freely for the sole purpose of building something for the communal good, and you are surprised it has a "leftist" slant?

The site appears to already have pivoted into a navel-gazing encyclopedia about blockchains:

https://everipedia.org/

Although it still has a rotting carcass of old Wikipedia content as well, with no sign of the mentioned update scraping.

I don't think this is new. Everipedia was two-years-old when this 2017 article was written: https://www.wired.com/story/everipedia-blockchain/

Here's Sanger's blog post from 2019: https://larrysanger.org/2019/10/ksf/

> If you want to participate in the world’s largest encyclopedia, you must collaborate with a shadowy group of anonymous amateurs and paid shills on exactly one article per topic. If you’re new, you won’t be treated very nicely. If you don’t play their strange game, you’ll be summarily dismissed. Like the social media giants, Wikipedia has become an arrogant and controlling oligarchy.

> Like Facebook, Wikipedia is also controlling its readers. It feeds them biased articles, exactly one per topic, does not let users give effective, independent feedback on articles (you’re forced to become a participant) or to rate articles. They have in a very real way centralized epistemic authority in the hands of an anonymous mob. This is worse than Facebook. At least with Facebook, Congress can call Mark Zuckerberg to testify. There isn’t anyone who is responsible for Wikipedia’s content. The situation is, in some ways, more dire than with Facebook, because you can’t effectively talk back to Wikipedia.

Sanger has been working on various different iterations of that for twenty years and has failed every time because, shockingly, an encyclopaedia that cites academic research is more useful than an encyclopaedia that cites The Daily Mail.

I'm not "working on a decentralized encyclopedia." I am working on tools and standards to network together all the encyclopedias in the world. See encyclosphere.org.

man, don't link to the epoch times

Is Epoch Times a good source for technical stories?

The Epoch Times is the house newspaper of the Falun Gong movement. Whatever legitimate disagreement they may have with the Chinese government, it is a frequent publisher of right-wing conspiracy theories.[1]

Sanger has had disputes with Wikipedia for more than a decade now. At least so far none of his alternatives have really taken off.

Disclaimer: I used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-in...

I think English Wikipedia has a leftist bias. Arabic Wikipedia has an Islamist/Islamo-facist bias. I would guess and say Chinese ones have CCP bias... etc

Populism is one hell of a drug

It would have been nice to have at least one clear example of the bias that's being claimed.

Argue about the source all you want (you should really look into the group behind the Epoch Times before you interact with it much. Short answer is it's a highly politicized Chinese cult), but the actual article has a point. Wikipedia is hostile to any people or ideas that are seen as rightist, and has become increasingly so. That's a problem for a site that claims to be an online encyclopedia.

This is really a wider phenomenon though. It seems like in the last 8 years or so, nearly every entity has been forced into a specific political affiliation. Technology being what it is has a very left wing tilt, and that means most major tech plays are left-bias. I suspect we'll see more and more Parlors (X but for right wingers) pop up if this trend continues.