Wikipedia co-founder slams the website for having 'abandoned' the neutral point of view
Larry Sanger discusses how the website has become more biased on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight'
The co-founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, who left the organization more than a decade ago and has increasingly opposed what he says it has evolved into, told Fox News on Thursday that biased and partial actors have "gamed" the user-edited database, ruining what it was meant to be.
Larry Sanger joined "Tucker Carlson Tonight," and said that because Wikipedia allows anonymous contribution, it has been taken advantage of by governments, corporations, criminal entities and other agents who "play the Wikipedia game" to create the desired "factual" result on a particular webpage.
"What results is basically that establishment views are the ones that you find pushed, and they have completely abandoned the neutral point of view [on the site]," Sanger said.
In 2001, Sanger collaborated with entrepreneur and former market trader Jimmy Wales to create an editable encyclopedia on the internet, based in part on the project they had worked on together called NuPedia.
Host Tucker Carlson went on to note that people have increasingly found slanted or missing context and facts in Wikipedia entries, as well as the dynamic of editors "playing up something that doesn't seem to be true or is highly politicized."
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"I don't know that there is a way to fix Wikipedia within Wikipedia. It's an institutionally conservative place," Sanger later replied. "What I want to see, actually, is a new, basically knowledge-comments, a network of all the encyclopedia articles in the world collected together and made it easily searchable."
"I'm embarrassed, to be quite honest, and I've said so for a long time. I've been a leading critic of Wikipedia for over a decade now," he continued. "I've been trying various things to try to improve on it and I'm sorry to all the people whose reputations have been sullied by what I got started 20 years ago."
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