Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, will be speaking at COSM, Friday, November 1, at 10:30 am.

His topic?: The increasingly pressing matter of preserving our knowledge.

He should know. Originally a co-founder of Wikipedia, he has become increasingly critical of its role as a go-to source. In 2021, he warned, “If only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power,”

But let’s go back a bit

Sanger, who has a Phd in philosophy (2000), was approached by entrepreneur Jimmy Wales that year to come to work for him on a project that evolved into Wikipedia. The name is based on wiki, a collaborative software that enables the creation and development of articles.

Sanger describes himself as a “philosopher who works on websites” who is “not in it for the money.” Rather, he likes finding new ways to organize knowledge online and he wants that knowledge to be free to everyone. So he started working at Wikipedia in 2001.

The idea took off. By 2006, Wikipedia was among the most popular internet sites. It is very often the first source that the dominant Google search engine offers today.

But Sanger left in 2002 and he has continued to distance himself from Wikipedia ever since. What happened? He explained it here in 2010:

“Where I really was at fault was in [6:22] not setting up a sensible system of community governance. I had bought the whole misguided line that Wiki communities could be managed completely from bottom up, without any process for designating who had what authority. And this turned out to be a problem and continues to be a problem for Wikipedia. Well, no big enterprise can be managed that way, so we couldn’t escape the consequences of the power vacuum”

And here:

So the inmates took over the asylum [0:03]. I didn’t realize until it was too late that we really should have adopted a Community Charter and established ourselves as a sort of sensible constitutional republic. Instead what we got was anarchy which quickly descended into the mob rule that besets Wikipedia’s governance today.

He added in the Comments below, “…Wikipedia has long since stopped being anarchistic, insofar as there are in fact people in de facto authority. But they do indeed have an unearned, and frequently undeserved, authority.”

Here is an example of the outcome…

If you consult the Wikipedia entry on the intelligent design controversy, you will find:

Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Proponents claim that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”^[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.^[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.^{[n 1]}

You would never guess that the question of why the universe seems fine-tuned for life has occupied great minds in science for as long as science has existed — whether it was Albert Einstein and Spinoza’s god or Fred Hoyle and the hated Big Bang. Sanger has called that particular entry “appallingly biased.”

He hasn’t given up on the idea of an encyclopedia that works better

Sanger has continued to work on many knowledge software projects. Now President of Knowledge Standards Foundation, his main project is the encyclosphere: “Imagine all the encyclopedias in the world, connected into one decentralized network, the way all the blogs are loosely connected. You’ve heard of the blogosphere; now, we’re building an encyclosphere.”

There, the watchword is “No small group of elites deserves the power to declare what is known for all of us.”

There couldn’t be a more important issue in communications today

Power brokers from both Europe and the United States actively seek control over the news stream on the internet. They threaten outliers like Elon Musk with arrest for failing to censor according to their demands. And recent events in Brazil leave little doubt that they are serious.

You won’t want to miss Sanger if there is any way you can get to COSM. Register here.

Note: Folks can still get the $100 discount by registering with the DI-FRIEND promo code.

You may also wish to read: Wikipedia’s bias meets a free-speech alternative. The famously free encyclopedia’s pages on abortion, communism, and historical figures reveal a left-leaning bias. (Caitlin Cory)