Share

cover art for Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created

UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created

•

Chances are, if you’ve ever been on the internet, you’ve visited Wikipedia. It is the world’s fifth largest website, pulling in an estimated 6.1 billion followers per month and serves as a cheat sheet for almost any topic in the world. So great is the online encyclopaedia’s influence is so great that it is the biggest and “most read reference work in history”, with as many as 56 million editions. 

But the truth about this supposedly neutral purveyor of information is a little more complex. Historically, Wikipedia has been written and monitored by a community of volunteers who collaborated and contested competing claims with one another. In the words of Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger who spoke to Freddie Sayers on LockdownTV, these volunteers would “battle it out”. 

This battle of ideas on Wikipedia’s platform formed a crucial part of the encyclopaedia’s commitment to neutrality, which according to Sanger, was abandoned after 2009. In the years since, on issues ranging from Covid to Joe Biden, it has become increasingly partisan, primarily espousing an establishment viewpoint that increasingly represents “propaganda”. This, says Sanger, is why he left the site in 2007, describing it as “broken beyond repair”.


For more, read The Post from UnHerd

More episodes

View all episodes

  • Yanis Varoufakis: Overthrow the Big Tech tyrants

    01:17:44|
    Former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis has dedicated his life to fighting crony capitalism. Now he faces a total rewiring of global power by the billionaires of Big Tech. How, he asks, did ‘the cloud’ kill capitalism and what has replaced it? The economist, politician and bestselling author of ‘Techno Feudalism’ joins UnHerd for an evening of conversation and Q&A.

  • John Mearsheimer: We're all realists now

    01:06:57|
    The 'realist' approach to international relations was not long ago considered a dangerous idea. But with increased Western interventionism in Ukraine, Israel and even China, thinkers that were once exiled from liberal academic circles have suddenly gained ground. Prof. John Mearsheimer, one of the earliest proponents of a 'realist' approach, joined UnHerd's Freddie Sayers for a conversation about war, peace and politics.

  • Megyn Kelly: The Washington Post is doomed

    26:03|
    Megyn Kelly joins Emily to preview Election Night on Undercurrents.

  • Glenn Loury: Why black men are warming to Trump

    32:10|
    UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets Glenn Loury to discuss what the US could look like, post election.

  • Mattias Desmet: Are you suffering from mass formation psychosis?

    46:44|
    Professor of psychology and author Mattias Desmet is the world expert on mass formation psychosis, a condition he observed during the pandemic years. He joins UnHerd's Florence Read to unpack the links between herd mentality and totalitarianism.

  • Rosie Duffield: Why I quit the Labour Party

    39:55|
    Rosie Duffield quit the Labour Party less than 100 days after she was elected MP for Canterbury. She likened working under UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer to being in an “abusive relationship”. UnHerd's Freddie Sayers spoke to her in the aftermath of her ferocious condemnation of her former comrades.

  • David Owen: A radical life

    01:21:19|
    David Owen has spent the last 60 years at the heart of British politics. After becoming a Labour MP in 1966 and serving as foreign secretary under Jim Callaghan from 1977-1979, he became disillusioned with the direction of the increasingly Left-wing Labour Party. Owen co-founded the Social Democratic Party and went on to lead it twice. In the 1990s, he was an EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia and co-authored the consequential Vance-Owen Peace Plan. He joined UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers live at the UnHerd Club, to talk about his life in politics, the ideological shifts of the recent decades and the future of the British Left.

  • Robby Soave: "I'm sick of one-sided fact-checking"

    36:55|
    Robby Soave joins Emily for a rapid response breakdown of the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz hosted by CBS.

  • Liz Truss: I think I was right

    01:11:50|
    As arguably the most controversial Prime Minister in recent British history, Liz Truss has become the face of free market libertarianism and its discontents. She joins UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers to discuss her new book, ‘Ten Years to Save the West,’ and the lessons she learned from her turbulent time as a Conservative leader.

Comments