Posted by FergusArgyll 12 hours ago
he resuggested "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", a group with the goal to make "Wikipedia more intellectually diverse" and "ensure fair and open decision-making and governance, broaden the range of permissible sources, reinforce genuine neutrality, rein in over-aggressive blocking while holding the powerful to higher standards of accountability", etc, with the implied undertone of preventing Wikipedia from drifting too far to the political left.
This is unpopular because people oppose this on various grounds (mostly that it might be vote brigading and tiling decisions in their favor just by showing up in an organised way around wikipedia). Also the same project was apparently suggested before and rejected in early stages
But then he made a tweet that basically just says "I suggested this, some people like it, some hate it". That's super against the rules, because it attracts people to the proposal who otherwise wouldn't have seen it. Probably in an attempt to sway discussion, because his tweets are obviously seen primarily by people who like his ideas
Which then lead to the vote to ban him from editing Wikipedia. With a total ban getting more votes than a more limited ban, like banning him from participating in articles namespaced for internal matters
Is that about right?
I took a quick look at what the "Wikiproject intellectual diversity" was actually monitoring. Specific articles or categories about things Mr Sanger finds interesting,right? Well, indeed: specifically it's all arbcom, admin elections, policy pages. You can check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...
Then he canvassed people from outside wikipedia to help with that project.
So he claimed to be doing one thing, but in reality it was more of a thinly disguised power play by the look of it.
After that, Larry Sanger remarked: "What people don't realize, actually, is the number of people who are actually at work on Wikipedia on any given day is not really that enormous. It's more in the hundreds or low thousands, not in the millions. Well, there's a lot of people in India. There's a lot of educated people in India, right? There's a lot more educated people in India than there are in, say, England. Just due to sheer numbers, you can field a lot of good writers on Wikipedia, and if you quite simply learn how to play the game..." (33:54).
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
The part you left out was that he was asked by the interviewer how Indians who felt the site was biased against them could fight the bias:
> When asked about how "Indians and Hindus who feel there is this bias" could "fight it actively", Larry Sanger responded:
So he’s saying that a group can combat bias on the site by participating in the site. India has a lot of educated people and therefore it wouldn’t be hard to find people to contribute. Why is this so controversial?
To be clear: it would be equally bad if you swapped left and right in that sentence. I don't know if his assessment of the issues with Wikipedia is correct, but his solutions aren't what you propose if you want to make Wikipedia more neutral
He’s not saying they need to “march through this institution”. He’s saying they need to learn how to navigate the increasingly Byzantine rules set up by the small number of editors so they can contribute to the site.
Why would it be bad to counter bias by bringing in people from the under-represented group? What would be permissible to you, if not bringing in people from that group to participate?
Because it's a far-right conspiracy theory implying Wikipedia editors are Red Guards purging universities, and calls for a counter-purge.
In other words, it is a thinly veiled call for violence based on a conspiracy theory.
The same conspiracy theory Anders Breivik explicitly cited after murdering 77 people.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a documented leftist political strategy [0].
>implying Wikipedia editors are Red Guards purging universities, and calls for a counter-purge.
No one is making the claim that Wikipedia editors are purging universities.
>In other words, it is a dog-whistled call of violence based on a conspiracy theory.
No one is calling for violence. Attempting to paint the inclusion of non-far-left voices as "violence" is a propaganda tactic.
Anders Breivik explicitly cited Wikipedia editors are Red Guards purging universities?
Those two are one and the same. Cultural Bolshevism was a Jewish plot in the Nazi world view.
Cultural Bolshevism was, at best, an attempt to link anything seen as degenerate to jews to further strengthen persecution of such. Even if Jews weren't a thing, Nazis would still mass murder, hence it was an excuse.
Cultural Bolshevism was seen as the Jewish plot to destroy the West.
It is all the same. To spread "Cultural Marxism" theories is to spread antisemitism.
The people who most talk about "Cultural Marxism" (conservatives) tend to be Israel shills, even on when it commit atrocities. In the same line, most discussions of cultural marxism don't invoke race, maybe religion (but not often Judaism).
Of course, some editor decided it was 'marketing' for starlink so it got deleted despite loads of people protesting. It was the only source I could find easily for showing which country got starlink when.
A huge list of prose is still on the page (not marketing?) showing the updates in a very hard to read and not comprehensive way. Something is really quite wrong over there.
1. There is incorrect information on wikipedia.
2. Legacy news publishes an article, using wikipedia as source (of course).
3. Now the incorrect information is essentially canonized
* https://youtube.com/v/mLdB5s7-h0w
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
1: the media has a vested interest in only reporting a certain slant, because it involves criticizing the media
2: because the media is the only source deemed reliable, that slant becomes the truth
Off the top of my head: https://citationintegrity.org/
Wikipedia features prominently as a defaulter.
It got to the point where there was a column for "verified" numbers, others, and then "Manufacturer projected" numbers.
...I mean, yeah, that doesn't sound particularly encyclopedic. "Marketing" might be a bit strong but that doesn't mean it belongs in a general encyclopedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
The ingroup knows the rules well enough that they can wait until an enemy crosses one of the rules, then they have an excuse to punish them. The more rules on the books, the more opportunities to use them against your enemies.
When someone inside breaks the rules, it’s treated as a misstep, handled internally, and then forgiven after a short ceremony to make it look like order and procedure are still being maintained.
This is why Codes of Conducts became so popular.
At clubs. At school. At work.
This is one of the first things I taught my kids to recognize and yet I see plenty of people in their 40s or more that still haven't figured it out. Some of them even become "useful fools" and make matters worse.
That instantly set off the alarm. It's a conservative phrase that's been carefully crafted to look like one of of those "should we consider feminist/indigenous/nonwhite perspectives" pieces of discourse, except in this case it means "people who have been proven wrong or have no real evidence". Anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and so on.
Edit: well that hit a nerve
Do people really not understand how propaganda works? Or do they just pretend not to in order to help enact these otherwise unpalatable policies?
Speaking the unvarnished truth often does.
How would this in any way be against the rules? Wouldn'tan open and democratic process like wikipedia want as many eyes as possible on a vote or rule change?
That sounds completely backwards from the open and free spirit of wikipedia. If even wikipedia has gone full mob rule then hwo do any projects stay open and free to everyone?
if you bring in a bunch of non-wikipedia people (i.e. people who haven't previously cared about or participated in wikipedia discussions at all), all from 1 person's twitter following, you aren't getting "open and free spirit"-ed discussion. you are getting a bunch of larry followers who want larry to "win"
The core idea is, Wikipedia has internal mechanisms to make these kinds of notifications, and making these decisions needs some knowledge and experience about how Wikipedia works.
Recruiting inexperienced people to bias decisions which requires knowledge is effectively converting that proposal to a blunt instrument and trying to force your way in (aka bludgeon).
When the mechanisms in place and requirement of experience (i.e. competence), whistling the town square and calling people to force a gate is textbook brigading, and brigading is forbidden everywhere (maybe except 4chan/8chan).
I agree with your premise and with your conclusion. That said, campaigning in a democracy is exactly recruiting inexperienced people to bias decisions which requires knowledge. Any support of that viewpoint would effectively ban political campaigning.
Moreover, Wikipedia is not a democracy [0]. It's a consensus based system. So, as they say, votes coming from outside doesn't count, and that's fine by me.
Last but not the least, this is a kind of decision on the level of law-making for the Wikipedia. People elect politicians, but don't write the laws themselves. Criticizing Wikipedia for not allowing "ordinary citizens" to write the laws is a bit stretch while giving democracy as an example to aspire to doesn't make sense, because even a democracy doesn't work the way you want to portray here.
Anyway, Wikipedia is not a democracy to begin with, so that's moot in a sense.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
I stopped engaging with Wikipedia because my experience of their administration is that it's deeply toxic. This specific instance doesn't seem too out-of-hand to me, since the rules are clear in this instance. It's where there are grey areas that their behavior starts to get unhinged.
It's perfectly acceptable for them to charter their own rules and keep these kinds of matters internal until they agree it's best, for their goals, to involve the public.
Frankly, they strive to be some of the greatest practitioners on neutrality. This is not the kind of organization that needs the kind of public correction you are wondering about.
And if it was, I think we can all understand why modern day Twitter is the wrong place to exclusively inspire that discussion.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:IS_NOT_A_DEMOCRACY...
Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy or any other political system. Its primary (though not exclusive) means of decision making and conflict resolution is editing and discussion leading to consensus—not voting. (Voting is used for certain matters such as electing the Arbitration Committee.) Straw polls are sometimes used to test for consensus, but polls or surveys can impede, rather than foster, discussion and should be used with caution.
Off-site petitions and votes have no weight in the formation of consensus on Wikipedia.
Sanger wrote the original version of that rule, and its change over the years has reflected a shift from people coming to Wikipedia in the very early years thinking that they could just do whatever the Hell they wanted, to in later years people coming to Wikipedia thinking that it is run like a legislature.
A democracy can vote that pi=4.
This is not a very useful property for an encyclopedia, so you're going to need a different system for determining outcomes.
Preferably you need a method that is somehow still somewhat fair. And that's how we get to the concept of rough consensus. It's absolutely not perfect, and it's not meant to be, because nothing is. Improvements welcome.
It's gone now, but this is hilariously on-brand - Wikipedia Review had its own axes to grind but did hugely in-depth work exposing Wikipedia Admins for "caballing", having secret mailing lists that Wikipedia denied the existence of, private IRC channels where admins had their pet topics that they owned and would "get suppressing fire" from other admins when they were going to make edits that reflected their POV (i.e. "watch while I edit and block/ban people who try to revert or interfere"). They'd do the same for admin elections etc.
Until I see a situation where this is used to add leftists or far left to a right wing organization, I will just assume it means quota for minimal number of underqualified right wing hacks.
Thanks!
Very short background:
Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2003.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/707321
Sanger went on to set up Citizendium, a wiki encyclopaedia project organized the way that xe thought one should be organized, with an extensive rulebase and 'constables'. Sanger's edits on Wikipedia were sporadic from 2004 to 2023, and were almost exclusively focussed on Jimmy Wales's account talk page, the articles on Sanger and Wales, the article on Citizendium, and the articles on the history and criticism of Wikipedia. There was also a whole debate on whether Sanger was a co-founder or an employee.
Citizendium died 15 years ago. (Yes, you can see it now. It was resurrected in 2022, everyone having to start from scratch with new accounts.) I actually thought of getting an account there in its early years, but for several years prior to its effective death it sported an announcement that the new accounts process was temporarily not in service, come back later. The writing was on the wall for a long time.
Sanger re-gained interest in Wikipedia in 2025, but still far more interested in how an encyclopaedia should be governed, which motivated the creation of Citizendium in the first place, than in actually writing one. In the intervening years, xe had done a lot of punditry from the sidelines, concentrating everything through a lens of U.S.A. politics.
JdeBP is misgendering him on purpose, which is a very serious offense and even illegal in many parts of the world.
We'll see if this is allowed to stay here.
$10k US, email on profile.
It wouldn't truly be The Internet without a little bit of Tough Guy Posturing, I suppose. :)
Oh no. It's not like a fairly large swathe of admins (and their clingers on) haven't been credibly accused of speed running their contributions just to try to get admin/bureaucrat status. My own Wikipedia history has dozens and dozens of "No" votes on people who either had a serious chance of, or were, elected, who had a contribution history of 80%+ in the WP: namespace, rather than, as you say "than writing an encyclopedia".
This is usually not a problem, but given how aggressively vague the WikiProject's goals are (eg. "We hope to open Wikipedia up to using more sources" - which?) and Larry Sanger's prior conduct (eg. advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News[2]), it seems the real goal was organizing conservative editors. I'm not sure whether the fact that this is not clearly written is deception or trolling, but it's not a good look for Sanger either way.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Cou...
[2]: https://san.com/cc/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site-has-libera...
> advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News
> it's not a good look for Sanger either way.
Yeah, citation needed on that one.
Wikipedia editors are a bunch of diverse, geeky kooks.
It doesn't. Wikipedia rules are often abused and selectively enforced.
I learned about wikipedia rules before learning about actual law, it's interesting to see exactly how the mechanisms of modern democracy protect against the specific ways in which Wikipedia fails:
1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!
2- Ignore all rules, certainly crazy, it makes the rules an afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the Common Law focus on Case Law as opposed to Napoleonic Civil Law's focus on codified laws, but way stronger.
3- No or weak procedure. Imagine you are in a legal fight with another editor, and you say a bad word, woops, turns out that's a 2 day ban. Maybe there's a parallel with contempt of court? But what happens in wikipedia is that the whole edit war is lost on that technicality, Administrators don't rule in favour of one edit or the other, they distribute penalties to one part or the other and if one party is temp banned, they can't edit the article anymore and the article state the other party desires has a stability and consensus advantage. The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.
Merely inactive admins are automatically deadminned, because if you don't need it, you don't get it.
There is also something analogous to the political world: users can petition for an administrator recall, if the issue is a rogue admin abusing their privileges, or even just the admin is trying to hold onto their privileges when it's clear to others that they don't actually need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RECALL
So while I don't think Wikipedia is perfect, it does better than your summary implies.
There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators#Invol...
While admins do have the rights to block users or protect pages, many a times, they leave it to other admins to carry out the administrative actions on the users or pages they are involved with. The editors have recalled or reported admins who had overstepped such boundaries one too many times as well.
Separation of judge and party is enforced pretty consistently, it is official policy that people shouldn't participate in a decision if they were involved in the kerfuffle in any way. You can edit articles and enforce rules, as long as these are separate. And then, rules can be proposed by anyone, but they're not just created on the fly because it's convenient. That would obviously be objectionable.
In fact this isn't limited to admins, regular users have the power to decide on a ban. An administrator is only needed to close and enact the decision, and this is what happened to Larry Sanger here.
>The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.
Admins don't have a special power to decide what should be in important protected articles. It is not like a government where people are elected, and then citizens don't have any say until the next election.
The community tries to reach a consensus, and admins are part of the community. They get an input like everyone else plus special powers to enact decisions. But any "ruling" better reflect consensus, or you better bet you will wake up to the Noticeboards on fire with about 50,000 words of heated complaints and discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
Wikipedia is the wrong place for opinions
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Why_I_am_n...
Still there after 23 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Ordinary_Leg...
And this one is now pending deletion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Editorial_pa...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/1359185792
And the second is being discussed, with at minimum 3 more days of discussion to go. It isn't pending anything yet. It only becomes pending deletion when the outcome of the discussion is a consensus to delete. Indeed, the discussion so far has a fair number of people arguing that it should not be deleted.
So still nope.
In practice, just read TFA and this whole thread of comments about it.
The meta-pages where people discuss the pages and the sites are full of opinions and debate.
Wikipedia is literally all about opinions. A huge amount of its activity is different ideological camps battling to control the narrative presented in the reference work millions use by default and treat as authoritative.
And it's not an even close to an even playing field for every camp. Some camps get to push their opinions as authoritative and squash dissenters, others have to fight for the barest representation.
The key is selective enforcement: depending on your camp, you either have to walk on eggshells (and probably will get banned anyway) or can behave atrociously towards others and be given a pass every time time.
Can someone here please help me understand what the issue is?
(I keep seeing stuff in that linked article about canvassing and "the left marching through institutions" but again I'm not following the overall argument / issue. Please forgive my ignorance if I'm missing something obvious.)
Changing the whole institutional culture at Wikipedia is more of a social challenge than a technical one, and I am not well-versed in that area. So, I would rather fork some wiki software, write code, and write articles for myself.
Will my wiki be able to compete with a giant like Wikipedia on the internet? I don't know. I don't even know whether mine is indexed by search engines yet. But I love writing articles, so I'll keep doing it as long as I can.