Wikipedia Co-founder: Site Hijacked for ‘Info Warfare’

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger says the U.S. intelligence businesses have hijacked the web encyclopedia he helped create and are utilizing it for “information warfare.”

In a latest interview with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, Sanger mentioned that from roughly 2010 to 2015 he observed that Wikipedia articles turned “obviously biased,” including that “it really got over the top” between 2013 and 2018.

“We do have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” Sanger mentioned. “Do you think they stopped doing that back then?”

By the time former President Donald Trump took workplace, the alleged bias had intensified and Sanger mentioned that “no encyclopedia to my knowledge has been as biased as Wikipedia has been.”

A frequent critic of the location’s leftward leanings, Sanger mentioned that the “deeper explanation” is that “the left very, very deliberately seeks out to take control.”

The Wikipedia co-founder went on to say that “intelligence now, a great part of intelligence — information warfare is conducted online,” and the place, he questioned, “if not on websites like Wikipedia?”

“They pay off the most influential people to push their agendas — which they’re already mostly in line with — or they just develop their own talent within the community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger mentioned.

The unique thought of Wikipedia was to create an encyclopedia that could possibly be accessed for free by everybody and wouldn’t be partisan in tone.

“One of the most important features of a credible encyclopedia was that you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an article was written by a Democrat or a Republican,” Sanger mentioned. “Generally speaking, you should present the information that a person would need in order to make up his own mind about issues of controversy.”

“Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way,” he added.

This is not the primary time Sanger has criticized the location he helped discovered. In 2021, Sanger instructed Tucker Carlson he was embarrassed about serving to create it as a result of the unique neutrality coverage had been deserted.