Wikipedia cofounder seeks to unmask its deep state, strip legal immunity if it resists reform

Across the Atlantic, Wikipedia has contemplated going dark in the U.K. rather than comply with the Online Safety Act, which could force it to strip the anonymity underlying its volunteer model for creating and editing entries.

On this side of the pond, the 24-year-old crowd-sourced encyclopedia is facing a Reformation-style campaign by its disillusioned cofounder Larry Sanger to strip the anonymity of only its most powerful editors and break their grip on narrative control.

The crown jewel of the Wikimedia Foundation is losing its sheen in the face of Sanger’s “nine theses,” promoted by nascent Wikipedia competitors including X owner Elon Musk, and the stories of dissenting editors and article subjects who claim Wikipedia’s elite suppressed their work and locked or scrubbed articles to prevent challenges to its orthodoxy.

The House Oversight Committee recently opened a probe of alleged coordination by Wikipedia editors to skew U.S. public opinion on sensitive topics by manipulating articles.

This spring, then-interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Ed Martin accused its parent of violating nonprofit obligations by peddling disinformation aimed at Americans, a month after the conservative Media Research Center documented it trashing President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and censoring their Wikipedia pages.

‘Good-faith dialogue’ or Section 230 immunity at risk

Wikipedia now represents the “GASP point of view” of globalists, academics, secularists and progressives and shuts out others, Sanger told Just the News, No Noise this week, a change to the neutrality Sanger gave the platform when pitching it to cofounder Jimmy Wales as a replacement for their prototype Nupedia.

But after its traffic took off and content started showing up at the top of Google search results, “elements of the left descended” on Wikipedia in line with its “traditional walks through the institutions,” said Sanger, who has dinged the platform as a socialism fanboy.

“There are still people on the center and even conservatives on Wikipedia, but they have to be quiet because otherwise they will be blocked by the current crop of administrators,” he said, blaming the anonymous “Power 62” accounts, which allegedly comprise 85% of the “most influential” accounts on the platform.

Having previously called for recourse for victims of Wikipedia defamation, Sanger now wants to shine a light on its deep state, uncloaking editorial leaders while leaving anonymity open to the “rank-and-file” contributors who make edits, he told Just the News, No Noise.

The platform’s political bias is merely a “syndrome of mismanaged and missed opportunities,” for which he seeks “good-faith dialogue” with Wikipedia.

“We ought to give it the college try at least one last time,” Sanger said, calling himself “the poorest founder of a top-10 website” by global traffic. If “little people” like him show up en masse to edit, “they can’t go back on that, and as long as you behave yourselves, there’s nothing stopping us from going in.”

If Wikipedia rejects his “commonsense proposals,” which are not “particularly, actually conservative,” it shows the platform is beyond reform, he said.

After Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called Wikipedia “brazen propaganda” in sharing Sanger’s viral interview with Tucker Carlson, Sanger proposed statutory removal of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Section 230 immunity shield should the foundation ignore him.

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