by WorldTribune Staff, October 7, 2025 Real World News
Since being hijacked by the Left, Wikipedia has became an “engine of defamation,” says a co-founder of the online encyclopedia who has vowed to fix it.
Co-founder Larry Sanger, who left shortly after the site’s launch, has become one of its fiercest critics.
“I have been criticizing Wikipedia since 2004, essentially. I actually have been trying to get out of the business of criticizing Wikipedia, or at least I had been because I felt ultimately, I had said my piece,” Sanger told the New York Sun in an Oct. 4 report. “A thing that nobody has ever done before that I am uniquely positioned to do, and that is to make a proposal to reform Wikipedia.”
“I’m a co-founder of one of the biggest, most influential websites online, if I don’t do something to reform it, then I actually bear some moral responsibility if I don’t at least make an effort to have it fixed.”
Since 2020, Sanger said he has observed a significant increase in bias on Wikipedia, describing a “syndrome of perspectives” favoring globalist, academic, secular, and progressive views.
Sanger recently published what he calls the “Nine Theses on Wikipedia” naming them after the 95 theses written by Renaissance era theologian Martin Luther in 1517 that was credited for launching the Protestant Reformation, which was in response to what he saw as systematic abuse and corruption by the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy.
Sanger’s “list of nine theses focuses on three areas of reform, improving editorial standards by reviving the site’s original neutrality policy, increasing community governance, and addressing concerns of how Wikipedia engages with the public,” Perry Chiaramonte wrote for the New York Sun.
“The 62 most powerful editors in Wikipedia are anonymous,” Sanger said. “They need to allow the public to rate articles right on Wikipedia, not just for their own benefit, but also for the benefit of the rest of the public.”
Tech investor David Sacks has accused Wikipedia of being “hopelessly biased.”
“An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem,” Sacks wrote on X.
According to a 2024 Manhattan Institute study, Wikipedia demonstrates a tendency toward political bias in its coverage of conservative public figures. The research found that articles about conservatives frequently employ more critical language than those describing leftists.
“This trend appeared consistently across multiple subject areas examined by researchers, spanning U.S. presidents and Supreme Court justices to members of Congress, state governors, Western world leaders, and influential American journalists and media outlets,” Chiaramonte noted.
Sanger said he has not heard from his former colleagues at Wikipedia but hopes they will take his “Nine Theses” under consideration.
“I worry that Wikipedia will simply become less and less credible, more and more biased, and more inclined to engage in libel,” he said. “Right now it is an engine of defamation really, and I would worry that it would become even more so if changes aren’t made.”
Meanwhile, X owner Elon Musk announced that he intends to create a less biased alternative to Wikipedia.
“We are building Grokipedia @xAI,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.”
“Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe,” Musk added.
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