In this episode, I chat with Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger about the history of the site, how he created it, and how it has changed the way we look at the world and the world at large and small.
00:00:00.000Larry Sanger, thank you for doing this. I think about you all the time. Literally, I know it's a little creepy because I think that Wikipedia is, you can't overstate the importance of Wikipedia in shaping our collective memory and a collective memory really is a culture, a civilization.
00:00:19.260Who are we? And Wikipedia is the answer to that question. Like, who are we? Oh, it's on Wikipedia. And it's so embedded in search that, I mean, it shapes America. Wikipedia shapes America. And because of its importance, it's an emergency, in my opinion, that Wikipedia is completely dishonest and completely controlled on questions that matter.
00:00:49.260So, thank you for coming back. And I'd love to start at the beginning. Like, you created Wikipedia. How did that happen? And what were your intentions when you did that?
00:01:13.220So, Jimmy Wales had registered Newpedia.com, the domain name, and simply had the idea of a free public contributed encyclopedia. And he hired me. It was like my assigned job to get it started.
00:01:35.940That happened in early 2000. So, I worked on Newpedia for about a year, and it was going very slowly. And so, a friend told me about wikis, and it was a revelation, this idea that somebody could just put up essentially a bulletin board, a blank bulletin board, invite other people to edit.
00:02:04.940Edit the text in real time. And it would become something actually useful. And it wouldn't be just a lot of, you know, curse words and graffiti and so forth.
00:02:37.900Yes. I didn't come up with this. It's Ward Cunningham. He invented the first wiki in 1995, I believe.
00:02:46.800So, basically, a friend told me about wikis, and I was amazed at the basic idea and just the thought that it could work.
00:03:04.480And I thought, well, this would be a way to make the problems with Newpedia go away, be a lot more articles coming into the system.
00:03:16.960And then Newpedia could be like the, you know, beat them into proper shape.
00:03:24.620But it didn't work that way. Wikipedia, the Newpedia editors wanted nothing to do with a wiki, anything that was so uncontrolled, essentially.
00:03:37.500So, it took on a life of its own. We launched it. Originally, it was the Newpedia wiki.
00:03:43.400And then on January 15, we relaunched under...
00:04:39.400For example, why would you ban the publication of original material on Wikipedia?
00:04:46.040It's supposed to be a summary of what we all take ourselves to know, essentially.
00:04:52.880And especially if it's a neutral encyclopedia, then it's supposed to canvas all of the views that can be found in humanity on every question, essentially, at a very high level, generally speaking.
00:05:08.800Of course, specialized encyclopedias can get into the real nitty gritty.
00:05:14.960And my hope with Wikipedia in the beginning was that eventually it would become that specialized.
00:05:22.060So it would be the equivalent of, you know, bookshelves worth of articles.
00:05:30.520And, well, I guess it did work out that way.
00:05:43.980Basically, for a period until LLMs came out a couple of years ago, people used Wikipedia to look up quick answers about practically everything.
00:05:58.140I actually, I would say until Siri started giving Wikipedia answers quickly, but it was still using Siri.
00:06:06.360And for that matter, LLMs, you know, AI chatbots are also trained on Wikipedia now.
00:06:49.500I've looked up a lot of questions in theology because I'm into theology now.
00:06:53.020And there are some places where I just know the only source for that particular factoid that I could find online outside of the LLM itself is Wikipedia.
00:08:09.060In the early years, we really did take neutrality seriously.
00:08:15.020And it, it wasn't just a requirement of being unbiased, right?
00:08:21.320It was, the aim was to bring people together, enable them to work together, even though they were from all parts of the world, different religions, different viewpoints.
00:09:43.400And, and let me go on because if you look farther down on the page, they go on to discourage giving equal validity to, quote, minority view, fringe theory, or extraordinary claims.
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00:14:57.360I think Wikipedia developed in sort of in tandem with the development of media.
00:15:06.300So basically as media from the founding of Wikipedia 2001 to about 2012 or so was became solidified in a center left establishment standpoint.
00:15:28.340So if you were to read Wikipedia from 2012 or so 2010, it read a lot like the New York Times or the BBC.
00:15:38.140I remember saying that at the time and then especially around about 2016 and maybe a few years before that, the media landscape changed almost overnight.
00:15:54.980So that once stayed mainstream sources became totally biased.
00:16:04.000They stated in their own voice that the president was lying and so forth.
00:17:04.740But, like, if you're getting to the point where you're disallowing, quote, fringe theories or conspiracy theorists or some other term made up by the CIA to hide its secrets, someone has to, like, okay that.
00:17:23.460You can look at it from an organic point of view.
00:17:26.520I can't tell you what was going on behind the scenes.
00:17:28.800If there were any, you know, puppet masters that were controlling the process, I don't know.
00:17:33.820What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians were just pushed out.
00:17:43.540They, in many cases, well, there is a whole, you know, army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people that they have ideological disagreements with.
00:24:25.020You know, just like any big nonprofit that's raising hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, you can essentially transfer money through grants.
00:24:36.300And now they are a grant-making institution.
00:24:39.580So, I mean, I certainly don't need to explain to you how really big foundations work, right?
00:24:49.560But money can change hands, large amounts of money can change hands through institutions like the Wikimedia Foundation.
00:25:01.540That's the name of the legal entity that owns the platform.
00:25:06.520So, the First Amendment is the one truly distinctive thing that makes America America.
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00:33:27.660It's, there's a lot of history there and we could take it in many different directions.
00:33:34.300I mean, we've already talked about the policy that permits it.
00:33:40.940We could also talk about the sources that are permitted.
00:33:44.540Like, if you look at only the sources that are permitted to be used in Wikipedia, so mostly secondary sources, and they are mostly left-wing or center.
00:33:59.060Generally speaking, there is now a blacklist called the perennial sources page that contains lists of dozens of conservative sources that are just not allowed.
00:34:15.400And so, if the only defenders of Tucker Carlson can be found in those other sources, then you won't be defended in the article about you, and they will call the article about you neutral.
00:35:02.720What does that mean, working full-time for somebody on Wikipedia?
00:35:05.160Well, there are PR firms, just for example, that do nothing but edit articles on Wikipedia in order to be able to insert desired factoids according to how people pay them, essentially.
00:35:39.300And if you do do it, then you have to announce yourself.
00:35:43.920A lot of people do it, and they don't announce themselves, of course.
00:35:46.880So, my point, then, to answer your question, is that there are a lot of people who have built up clout over the years in the Wikipedia system.
00:35:57.260And a lot of them have been made into the leaders of the project.
00:36:07.660There are 833 administrators, as they're called.
00:36:12.460So, these are sort of the rank-and-file cops.
00:36:15.780Then, you've got 16 bureaucrats who can name the cops.
00:36:22.000Then, you've got 49 check users, and these are accounts that can identify the IP address of accounts.
00:36:30.760And then, there are 15 members of an arbitration committee, which is sort of like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia.
00:36:36.920It deals mostly with behavioral issues, as opposed to editorial.
00:37:16.040So, again, these are the people who are shaping Americans' understanding of the world, of their own country, of themselves, of reality itself.
00:37:58.380They're the source of a lot of this country's problems.
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00:39:15.780So they can't be sued into better behavior.
00:39:19.760But presumably they can be shamed and reasoned with.
00:39:23.280And the first, so the first step in that is just asking the question, on what grounds are you keeping the identities of some of the most powerful people in the country secret?
00:39:31.020Why can't I know who's making these decisions?
00:39:33.920Who's blacklisting entire news organizations on the basis of their politics, for example?
00:39:41.140What would Wikipedia, the foundation, say if I ask that question?
00:39:45.780They would say that according to the policies of the editorial side of their organization, which they're not responsible for, people can participate anonymously at all levels.
00:40:01.380So you could be the most powerful person on the editorial side, and you don't need to reveal your identity.
00:40:24.280So I think the answer is basically it goes back to like the zeitgeist of 1990s hacker culture when people went on like these funny names, nicknames, handles, not their real names.
00:41:48.280But if all of a sudden every history professor at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, et cetera, decided, I'm not telling you my name.
00:41:56.040As I teach your kids about the Renaissance or whatever, we would say, that's freaking nuts.
00:42:43.460And I, so here's, okay, so I'm sort of getting to one of my core concerns, which you've made me think is something to be concerned about, which is the influence of intelligence agencies on the work product of Wikipedia.
00:42:59.260It's very obvious to me, having been around that world a lot, that they're influencing some of the answers, some of the entries on Wikipedia.
00:43:30.740Not in 19, not in 2001, in 2000, 2002.
00:43:35.580No, I mean, I was a babe in the woods.
00:43:41.720Yes, it wasn't until, like, I think it was 2006, 2007, Virgil Griffiths did master's research.
00:43:51.460He came up with a tool called WikiScanner that enabled people to look up the IP addresses of people who had done edits and, like, who had edited which articles.
00:44:10.400And so, they were able to find a whole bunch of edits coming from Langley.
00:57:44.540Um, and he, um, the article about him said that he had been under suspicion of being responsible in some way for the assassination of RFK.
00:57:59.820And, uh, he was livid, of course, because he had actually, like, worked on RFK's campaign and things like that.
00:58:08.260Um, and, uh, he blamed me, and, like, I kind of didn't, you know, uh, blame him for doing so.
00:58:19.320Um, and, uh, he opened my eyes to just how reputations can be harmed by people.
00:58:29.820And I have heard from dozens and dozens, maybe over a hundred different reasonably famous people, um, since then, uh, with, with grievances about the Wikipedia articles.
00:58:44.060And they're, like, at their wits' end, they know I'm long gone from Wikipedia, and they don't know what to do.
00:59:45.460He, he contacted me also and was, uh, complaining that, um, the, the story of the, the origin of the inspiration of The Human Stain was wrong on Wikipedia.
00:59:58.040He had gone to the Wikipedia talk page and said, hi, I am Philip Roth.
01:00:04.120And, uh, you've got the story wrong and here's the real story.
01:00:07.780And they said, sorry, we can't use that.
01:00:17.620I, I mean, just what kind of person do you have to be to, to, like, to take that sort of disrespectful stance to, to somebody like Philip Roth.
01:00:32.780And, and, and to twist your own rules in that way for almost a petty reasons.
01:00:41.200There's a lot of petty power players on, on Wikipedia, I find.
01:03:20.740Well, so I think we're saying the same thing.
01:03:22.580I mean, you're describing the mechanism by which Wikipedia is the guaranteed first response to any query on a fact about a person or history.
01:04:38.520I must say my last editorial comment that I want to get to what we can do to make this better, and you've written extensively about it.
01:04:44.840But my last comment is that when people grouse about the media or corrupt news media, they're always referring to, like, companies that really don't matter, like CBS or NBC or CNN or Fox News.
01:06:59.160You have, you know, following the example of our beloved German monk 500 years ago, written some theses that you want to nail to the front door of Wikipedia.