TagEncyclosphere
COSM: Wikipedia Co-Founder To Speak on Today’s Knowledge Risks
Larry Sanger is not a fan of the baked-in bias at Wikipedia today and wants to found an encyclosphere — like the blogosphere — insteadLarry 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 Read More ›
Could Decentralization Fix Twitter’s Censorship Problems?
Decentralization is not an automatic guarantee of internet freedom, but it may be a good first stepTwitter is considering decentralization according to a recent report from The New York Times. But what does decentralization mean, and how would it impact our experience with social media? Is this a solution to all the problems around censorship standards that Big Tech companies have faced in recent years? According to The New York Times, Twitter is following the early vision of a former employee named Blaine Cook by “funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter.” Kate Conger reports: Some skeptics believe Twitter is jumping on the web3 bandwagon, joining a trendy movement in tech to shift many Read More ›
Wikipedia’s Bias Meets a Free-Speech Alternative
The famously free encyclopedia’s pages on abortion, communism, and historical figures reveal a left-leaning biasLast December, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announced that he would be launching a free speech alternative to Wikipedia, a website that Sanger believes has lost its credibility as a neutral source of information. Sanger’s Encyclosphere is meant to be “an open encyclopedia network” (Sanger compares it to “the blogosphere”) with the goal of “build(ing) a network that … all of humanity owns and no one exclusively controls.” One of Wikipedia’s declared “fundamental principle(s)” is NPOV – neutral point of view. Wikipedia defines NPOV as “representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.” “This policy is non-negotiable,” the website states. But according to Sanger, “Wikipedia’s ‘NPOV’ is dead.” Read More ›