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
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).
You cut out the context, making it look like he was trying to bias the website.
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?
Ok, saying things like "The left marched through this institution. There’s no reason we can’t march right back" is pretty bad.
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
> Ok, saying things like "The left marched through this institution. There’s no reason we can’t march right back" is pretty bad.
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?
I'm trying to find the charitable read on this and I'm unable to. He's saying that it would be great to allow Hindu ethnonationalist sources, because that would open up a talent pool of Hindo ethnonationalist editors? What kind of an argument is that?
Yes, banned by the status quo for trying to disturb it. Wikipedia is nowadays highly politicized and more time and energy are spent on politics than on actually contributing with any useful knowledge. I've stopped contributing years ago after a decade of writing because of how bad things had gotten. It's a lost battle, all that remains is scorched earth filled with toxic editors trying to push their POV and banning everyone who exposes them or attempts to change things.
Yes agreed, for example, there was an interesting table on the starlink page I used to check every so often showing which countries had access to starlink as it was rolled out. Was interesting to see the expansion.
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.
On the other hand, some of the best is when a hoax written by a monk in the north of England some time around 1300 is debunked by late 20th century scholarship, and eventually someone makes Wikipedia no longer re-hash a propagandist revision of the Battle of Stirling Bridge re-set in Wales that stood unchallenged for almost 7 centuries.
If you spot it in Wikipedia, point it out, it does get removed. Leaving a comment on the talk page <!-- or in the article --> gets editors on-board to patrol for accidental attempts to add the incorrect information back in. Wikipedia does not like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citogenesis
Huh, ironically, the opposite happened with Tesla, when numerous editors warred to include a model on the list of "Fastest Production Vehicles", even though the model hadn't been released, based on a press release from Tesla (and even that said it was a simulated, expected number).
It got to the point where there was a column for "verified" numbers, others, and then "Manufacturer projected" numbers.
> There was an interesting table on the starlink page I used to check every so often showing which countries had access to starlink as it was rolled out. Was interesting to see the expansion. [...] Of course, some editor decided it was 'marketing' for starlink so it got deleted despite loads of people protesting.
...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.
Yeah, try to make any substantive change on many pages and you'll get met with a barrage of "WP:OR! WP:POV! WP:NPS! WP:WTF!" and don't fall into the amateur trap (that certain editors hope you will) of reverting their reversion. They'll look to get you blocked for a revert war. "What should I do then?" "You should respond to my comments on the Talk page for why I reverted you." "But you haven't made any comments on the Talk page about that." "That's beside the point."
An interesting procedural detail is how an admin decided to just close the discussion and ban the user before the mandatory discussion period was over, and got a lot of pushback for the sloppy decision making process. This was overturned, only for another admin to reach the same conclusion seven hours later, after the discussion was online for the mandatory 72 hours (with no consideration for the two hours between the wrongful decision and the reversal)
Having a labyrinth of rules to follow and then applying them asymmetrically is a classic way to build power for the ingroup and exile outsiders.
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 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.
> 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.
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?
(Note: This is what I got from the Talk page about the ban)
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).
> 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).
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.
That's not my premise, and not my conclusion. This is a summary of what the admins talk on that discussion page. So I'm just a messenger summarizing things.
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.
>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?
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"
I would describe Wikipedia's process as democratic but not necessarily open. And it's pretty hypocritical to describe how they operate as 'mob rule' while complaining that rabble-rousing on other platforms should be allowed. Which is it? Should Sanger be allowed to raise a mob to win a policy vote, or should Wikipedia forbid external vote-whipping?
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.
The Wikipedia community proudly states that they're not a democracy [1]. I don't even know how that works. People simply think their opinion is the best one while hiding behind statements like, "This is THE consensus, you can't do anything about it. Oh, Wikipedia IS NOT A DEMOCRACY, so your pathetic voting attempt has literally no power here."
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.
Remember that the editors of wikipedia do not owe us anything. Time is a gift, and they give theirs to us in great abundance.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
While this can be the case, in my experience nerves are always attached to self-image. This means one can hit a nerve not only by saying the emperor has no clothes, but also with actual defamation.
"Intellectual Diversity" seems to be another of these "Intelligent Design" rebrandings where rather than admit they were wrong the same crap just gets re-branded and goes straight back on the shelf.
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.
Could also be a typo. Unlikely on QWERTY, but if JdeBP uses Dvorak or especially Workman that's more likely than JdeBP going out of their way to misgender a man with an obscure neopronoun
> Sanger re-gained interest in Wikipedia in 2025, but still far more interested in how an encyclopaedia should be governed
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".
Yeah it's an interesting object lesson in design or user behaviour or something – I notice this come up relatively often – I think because it's rarely used, or almost exclusively in certain circumstances as you say, people infer a stricter rule/possibility than anything it actually says ('If there is a url, text is optional.').
As an outsider the accusation "Canvassing" seems like a double edged sword. Similar to Reddits "Brigading" but without the hostile intention. It's not clear to me, how Wikipedia prevents this rule from being used inappropriately to silence people.
Correct, and Administrators (and users invoking administrators) will often selectively use rules to pursue editorial purposes.
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.
> 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!
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.
While Admins do have a lot of power, at the same time their power is checked by ArbCom. Admins are held to a higher standard than general users and are kicked out of the role and banned from reapplying if they're found to have abused their privileges (as well as being given topic bans or complete bans from editing).
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.
>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!
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.
I encourage people to read through his proposed WikiProject's page[0] and the related discussion.[1] Important context is also that WikiProjects are exempt from canvassing rules; members are free to notify each other of ongoing policy discussions with the goal of influencing the outcome.
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.
> advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News
As I understood it, he wasn't advocating for whitelisting Fox News, he was advocating for removing the blacklist. That's a stark difference.
> it's not a good look for Sanger either way.
What doesn't look good for him? It doesn't seem that he has an intent other than enabling the viewpoint of those other than the far-left, which compromise almost the entirety of Wikipedias admins and editors.
Heh, I remember being surprised when I looked up the editor for some great Russian history articles and saw that he identified as a straight-up monarchist.
Wikipedia editors are a bunch of diverse, geeky kooks.
Many of his essays have been deleted, and many others are Pending Deletion. Those deleted can be viewed only by admins. There is a large movement to censor this guy's opinions and undo his contributions. What happened? There is no explicit mention on the page.
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.
There is a link in the other comments that is intended to explain the context, but as someone who isn't familiar with the structure of threads / conversations in the Wikipedia editing community, I am honestly struggling to follow it.
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.)
My understanding is that he was unhappy with some of Wikipedia's direction and decided to go outside official Wikipedia channels to mobilize people to rewrite policies, which is not allowed.
It seems like there's a policy against this. I don't think having rules only apply to rank-and-file members rather than founders is better in the long run.
Guy wanted to loosen rules around Wikipedia's sourcing to allow places like Breitbart and Fox News to be used as reliable sources (they are obviously not). Things were not going his way in the vote, so he asked his large social network following to brigade the vote in his favor. That's not allowed, so he's been banned.
I also have problems with Wikipedia, sure, but I resolved them simply by setting up a private wiki, and it's been quite peaceful.
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.
trying to contribute to wikipedia was the most miserable experience in a "collaborative" process I've ever had in my life.
Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one.
in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
Most people don't realize that essentially all parts of Wikipedia are owned by random nerds versed in the beaurocracy who will revert all outsider edits. Unless you have hours per day dedicated to arguing with them (which they do!), the sign says you're welcome but the people say you're not.
Not to say Wikipedia isn't great + useful! But realize that it is owned by a distributed network of feudal nerd-lords that will defend to their death the contents of Wikipedia articles because they get off on being the dictators of what's true.
It's amazing how much this behavior is tolerated, despite very clear policies against a single person "owning" a page.
> Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
Any insight into how these people all manage to dodge the policies against such behavior? Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?
There's not a big pool of well-adjusted people who are equally willing to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia and manage it better. The people who care a lot, in the wrong ways, outnumber people who are passionately neutral. Most people don't care enough to fight bad edits and reversions. They just stop contributing. I know I did. (I wasn't even editing controversial areas, just adding to data about chemical compounds.)
I still love Wikipedia, but mostly as a starting point to find deeper references. (Which, to be fair, is primarily how you should use an encyclopedia.) The degree to which you should trust it as your sole starting point for research in an unfamiliar area is anti-correlated with the length of the article's Talk page.
People often mention anecdotes like that when Wikipedia is discussed, but I made a few changes to pages over the years and never had any issues. I took care to follow the rules, and the changes were usually accepted; when they weren't, it was always for reasonable reasons, even if I didn't always agree with them.
As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.
Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.
indeed. the field I was trying to improve tend to attract a lot of cranks and trisectors. the topics are not "contentious" in the typical political sense but the pages are closely guarded by very stubborn and uninformed retiree flatearther types.
I haven't done a whole lot, but I've also never had a bad experience editing on Wikipedia. I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages. Which, yeah, discussing controversial stuff on the Internet is a recipe for having a bad time. The other strong possibility is they are lower quality editors than they think they are. You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
> I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages.
This could be true. But I saw it in histories of not controversial pages also. Some people feel they own articles they contributed to. Wikipedia made a policy against this because it was a problem.[1]
> You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when. And to find revisions of forgotten date in Wikipedia required more time than most people would spend for a comment. And anecdotal evidence changed beliefs rarely.
> I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when
It's absolutely fair that people aren't going to dig up old edits. At the same time, I'm not sure how relevant years-old anecdotal evidence is. It would be interesting to see some actual statistics on this; I guess the data is public, so it would be possible to do research on how often helpful edits are rejected.
I am confident that my edits were high quality and improved the mathematical accuracy and clarity of the page.
unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?
I hope anyone can start their own private wiki in peace and for free.
Today, we already have free blogging platforms, newsletters, photo sharing, and microblogging, but we are in dire need of a free wiki platform (and maybe a knowledge base tool too).
I'm currently experimenting with building exactly that. So far, so good, but the setup is still too difficult for non-technical people, even though it is already free to register.
Same thing for me when I used to contribute to our local transit system's page. Things were fine for years but one day an editor for some reason took an interest in me and started going after my contributions for all manner of petty legalistic policies that were usually "best practices" rather than rules. He even moved on to my edits on other pages, which mostly were where I'd corrected a spelling or formatting error. Never understood why that happened because I wasn't involved in any edit wars or even contributions on anything that could be considered political or ideological. I just moved on to other things and left Wikipedia behind. So he "won" something, but no idea what that was.
In the worst-case scenario, they will keep harassing you off-wiki, hunting for your digital footprint across other social media platforms. I actually had to retire several of my internet handles because of this wiki drama.
Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?
it was in the computational social choice sphere which attracts a lot of amateurs interested in electoral reform and "voting theory" (which of course is not the typical term used for the field but is popular among these amateurs).
these contributors tend to have some kind of unrelated engineering / technical background, though never in econ or social choice itself, are often retired with lots of free time, and _always_ have incredibly stubborn and strong opinions. the demographic matches the [trisector](https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...) very closely
if you look around on these pages in social choice and voting algorithms you will find plenty of inaccuracies, vague assertions about strategic manipulability, misunderstanding of the formalization of certain electoral axioms, and other misinformation.
>in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
As someone that has battled with this, I agree, but in my experience more often than not, the people that complain are complaining about basic rules like "stuff should have external citations". So I can't really pick either side.
I think one of the last straws for me before I quit trying to help is when I "lost" some disputed edit (and the page was subsequently locked) because the original author provided an external citation for their claim.
The problem was, if you actually go read the content being cited, it did not at all conclude what the page author was asserting it did. In fact, it concluded the opposite. So the citation was "real" but the way it was being used with the implication that it supported the author's position was pure misinformation.
I tried to point this out and petitioned to unlock the page, but I was told that "consensus has been reached, and edit warring will not be tolerated" ...
Wikipedia now is a totally corrupt organization. I came across this personally when my edits regarding the recent cocaine (!) scandal involving the Russian (!) Orthodox Church (!) were canceled by a Ukrainian (!) steward. Moreover, this was done with blatant and cynical violation of the rules, with prohibited techniques, insults, and the use of sockpuppets.
Quite often in activist spaces, the primary goal isn't to convince others of a viewpoint or even the censor other viewpoints, though those are nice side effects. The real goal is demonstrating loyalty to the group's current core beliefs, whatever those might be on that day. In spaces where the values are in constant flux, there's a greater need to constantly reaffirm allegiance to the group's current world view.
More than whatever process was used, just looking at his user page I do think some sort of ostracism-like response was inevitable. The thing about communities like Wikipedia is when you have a group of volunteers coming together to do something the culture has to be somewhat intolerant of cultural change, otherwise it'll fall apart pretty quickly. To repeat that another way, culture defines who is part of the in- and out-group, so once the group has formed it is very slow to change or the group collapses.
I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements. The parallel with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was appropriately foreshadowed by Sanger.
Organisations eventually become corrupt. Wikipedia might already be there or it might have a ways to go, who knows. But this sort of change might require a new project or some sort of schism among the Wikipedia editors, it sounds pretty radical. Especially in the post-Trump era; I expect his presidency has been a traumatic era for the English Wikipedia project.
I mean this in a friendly way: you are falling for it. Sanger's goal here is to get low-quality sources allowed on Wikipedia to promote his personal political beliefs. This was relatively politely argued down by Wikipedia editors, but he chose to try to recruit a brigade to swing the discussion in his favor, which is not allowed. There's no attempt to improve Wikipedia going on here.
> I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements.
The problem with the "competing articles" is that the end game is quite obvious - the far-right wants to get crap like Musk's "Grokipedia" or "Conservapedia" out of the gutters where it belongs and into the brand protection of Wikipedia.
Edit:
for example, here's a passage from the wiki page on frankfurt school.
Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the Institute's exile in America, was published in 1944. While retaining many Marxist insights, this work shifted emphasis from a critique of the material forces of production to a critique of the social and ideological forces brought about by early capitalism.
It is a difference, perhaps, between Marxist cultural studies, and "Cultural Marxism", a label applied by antagonists to a large variety of activities?
I see. But there's pages about other aspects of Marxist theory some of which I'm sure was used to excuse crimes against humanity by the Nazis and other evil doers. See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marxism
In general Wikipedia takes an anti censorship approach regarding articles which can cause evil.
So why is the aspect of Marxism which deals with culture completely taboo and not represented? I'm not even sure if it's due to something bigger I just think the article on cultural marxism might be one of the worst on Wikipedia.
I think the article about the conspiracy theory you linked addresses your concerns quite well, it talks about what the Frankfurt school was actually about and the way the far right has been twisting it to support the narrative that has led to so many dead.
I'm not sure why you were so opposed to said article, I read it and it seems to lay everything out pretty well, including full sourcing. Could you tell me what exactly you take issue with?
Always thought the dencrentalisation and forking of Wikipedia would be the endgame. Would allow for people to actually curate their own spaces again. Wikipedia is a great project, but I feel it's basically complete, and is technically limited.
Half the references are dead or paywalled, so it's impossible to actually read more about anything. I'm sure AI would effectively be able to recreate webs of knowledge.
Indexing services which compare different forks and communities providing different 'lenses' on topics would be incredibly interesting.
Would give various institutions around the world something to do, aswell; curating their space and giving a badge of approval to provide a slight anti-slop defence.
Can you explain the reason? from a brief skim he is promoting some project he wants to start in wikipedia from outside wikipedia, is that it or did I misunderstand?
I've been following Wikipedia almost since it began, the stated reason is not matching the actual reason, They've wanted Larry Gone for years, even Jimmy will very be betrayed eventually. Unfortunately the real aftermath won't be known until many more get banned.
Larry was essentially inactive on Wikipedia from 2002 until he started stirring things up last year. Nobody "wanted him gone" - he simply wasn't relevant to the project.
One useful thing to do sometimes when looking at whether or not a user is interested in participating in Wikipedia or just participating in arguing about things is to look at their contributions to actual wikipedia articles, the thing Wikipedia is all about.
This is the list of articles Sanger contributed to in 2026: [1]
Compare that too all his contributions: [2]
Does it seem like this person is participating in Wikipedia in a genuine way? Or is he there to start political arguments on various internal pages?
So to summarize:
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?
Well, sure, it looks like one thing, but ...
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.
Well there is a lot more, e.g.:
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...
You cut out the context, making it look like he was trying to bias the website.
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?
Ok, saying things like "The left marched through this institution. There’s no reason we can’t march right back" is pretty bad.
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
> Ok, saying things like "The left marched through this institution. There’s no reason we can’t march right back" is pretty bad.
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?
I'm trying to find the charitable read on this and I'm unable to. He's saying that it would be great to allow Hindu ethnonationalist sources, because that would open up a talent pool of Hindo ethnonationalist editors? What kind of an argument is that?
Yes, banned by the status quo for trying to disturb it. Wikipedia is nowadays highly politicized and more time and energy are spent on politics than on actually contributing with any useful knowledge. I've stopped contributing years ago after a decade of writing because of how bad things had gotten. It's a lost battle, all that remains is scorched earth filled with toxic editors trying to push their POV and banning everyone who exposes them or attempts to change things.
Yes agreed, for example, there was an interesting table on the starlink page I used to check every so often showing which countries had access to starlink as it was rolled out. Was interesting to see the expansion.
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.
And the worst is the cycle:
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
On the other hand, some of the best is when a hoax written by a monk in the north of England some time around 1300 is debunked by late 20th century scholarship, and eventually someone makes Wikipedia no longer re-hash a propagandist revision of the Battle of Stirling Bridge re-set in Wales that stood unchallenged for almost 7 centuries.
* https://youtube.com/v/mLdB5s7-h0w
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
If you spot it in Wikipedia, point it out, it does get removed. Leaving a comment on the talk page <!-- or in the article --> gets editors on-board to patrol for accidental attempts to add the incorrect information back in. Wikipedia does not like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citogenesis
Citogenesis, a well-known hazard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
or:
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
Circular references. This methodology has been called out by several researchers. NYT, WaPo are key users of this technique.
Off the top of my head: https://citationintegrity.org/
Wikipedia features prominently as a defaulter.
Huh, ironically, the opposite happened with Tesla, when numerous editors warred to include a model on the list of "Fastest Production Vehicles", even though the model hadn't been released, based on a press release from Tesla (and even that said it was a simulated, expected number).
It got to the point where there was a column for "verified" numbers, others, and then "Manufacturer projected" numbers.
> There was an interesting table on the starlink page I used to check every so often showing which countries had access to starlink as it was rolled out. Was interesting to see the expansion. [...] Of course, some editor decided it was 'marketing' for starlink so it got deleted despite loads of people protesting.
...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.
It’s a shame :( There’s a lot of blatantly incorrect information on wikipedia, and i’ve had multiple wikipedia edits reverted due to ’bad sources’
Yeah, try to make any substantive change on many pages and you'll get met with a barrage of "WP:OR! WP:POV! WP:NPS! WP:WTF!" and don't fall into the amateur trap (that certain editors hope you will) of reverting their reversion. They'll look to get you blocked for a revert war. "What should I do then?" "You should respond to my comments on the Talk page for why I reverted you." "But you haven't made any comments on the Talk page about that." "That's beside the point."
An interesting procedural detail is how an admin decided to just close the discussion and ban the user before the mandatory discussion period was over, and got a lot of pushback for the sloppy decision making process. This was overturned, only for another admin to reach the same conclusion seven hours later, after the discussion was online for the mandatory 72 hours (with no consideration for the two hours between the wrongful decision and the reversal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
Having a labyrinth of rules to follow and then applying them asymmetrically is a classic way to build power for the ingroup and exile outsiders.
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.
Wikipedians refer to such ingroup members as The Unblockables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unblockables
This.
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.
> 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.
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?
Consensus-based decision making doesn't work if people can bring in their existing audience from elsewhere to overwhelm the discussion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing.
(Note: This is what I got from the Talk page about the ban)
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).
> 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).
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.
That's not my premise, and not my conclusion. This is a summary of what the admins talk on that discussion page. So I'm just a messenger summarizing things.
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...
>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?
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"
While I agree, the internet has also long suffered from brigading (for better or worse) because the barrier-to-action is virtually zero.
I would describe Wikipedia's process as democratic but not necessarily open. And it's pretty hypocritical to describe how they operate as 'mob rule' while complaining that rabble-rousing on other platforms should be allowed. Which is it? Should Sanger be allowed to raise a mob to win a policy vote, or should Wikipedia forbid external vote-whipping?
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.
The Wikipedia community proudly states that they're not a democracy [1]. I don't even know how that works. People simply think their opinion is the best one while hiding behind statements like, "This is THE consensus, you can't do anything about it. Oh, Wikipedia IS NOT A DEMOCRACY, so your pathetic voting attempt has literally no power here."
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:IS_NOT_A_DEMOCRACY...
Why not quote the rule, if it is so offending?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...Fun fact:
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/423054
Remember that the editors of wikipedia do not owe us anything. Time is a gift, and they give theirs to us in great abundance.
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.
> 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
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.
> "intellectually diverse"
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
> that hit a nerve
Speaking the unvarnished truth often does.
While this can be the case, in my experience nerves are always attached to self-image. This means one can hit a nerve not only by saying the emperor has no clothes, but also with actual defamation.
Much like “free speech.”
Do people really not understand how propaganda works? Or do they just pretend not to in order to help enact these otherwise unpalatable policies?
Much like “inclusive speech.”
Do people really not understand how propaganda works? Or do they just pretend not to in order to help enact these otherwise unpalatable policies?
And once they get powerful enough, both diversity and intellect suffer.
"Intellectual Diversity" seems to be another of these "Intelligent Design" rebrandings where rather than admit they were wrong the same crap just gets re-branded and goes straight back on the shelf.
There is a long history here, and if you are looking at just the WikiProject and the community ban discussion, you are missing a Hell of a lot.
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.
Maybe not particularly relevant, but I'm noticing you using "xe" pronouns for Sanger. Why is that? Just wondering if I am missing more context.
Larry Sanger is very clearly a man and has never expressed any desire to be treated differently than that.
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.
Could also be a typo. Unlikely on QWERTY, but if JdeBP uses Dvorak or especially Workman that's more likely than JdeBP going out of their way to misgender a man with an obscure neopronoun
> Sanger re-gained interest in Wikipedia in 2025, but still far more interested in how an encyclopaedia should be governed
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".
Possible context at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis... - might be a better link, too.
Seems to be a place full of pleasant people.
Yeah I wasn't sure which to post. Maybe dang can put that link in the description...
Fwiw in future - you can do that too on submission. URL and description are not either-or.
Oh I thought that was only possible in [ask, tell, show]hn.
Thanks!
Yeah it's an interesting object lesson in design or user behaviour or something – I notice this come up relatively often – I think because it's rarely used, or almost exclusively in certain circumstances as you say, people infer a stricter rule/possibility than anything it actually says ('If there is a url, text is optional.').
As an outsider the accusation "Canvassing" seems like a double edged sword. Similar to Reddits "Brigading" but without the hostile intention. It's not clear to me, how Wikipedia prevents this rule from being used inappropriately to silence people.
> It's not clear to me, how Wikipedia prevents this rule from being used inappropriately to silence people.
It doesn't. Wikipedia rules are often abused and selectively enforced.
There is a scale, sorta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Correct, and Administrators (and users invoking administrators) will often selectively use rules to pursue editorial purposes.
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.
> 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!
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.
While Admins do have a lot of power, at the same time their power is checked by ArbCom. Admins are held to a higher standard than general users and are kicked out of the role and banned from reapplying if they're found to have abused their privileges (as well as being given topic bans or complete bans from editing).
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.
>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!
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.
Link to the reason for his ban:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
I encourage people to read through his proposed WikiProject's page[0] and the related discussion.[1] Important context is also that WikiProjects are exempt from canvassing rules; members are free to notify each other of ongoing policy discussions with the goal of influencing the outcome.
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...
Can you show me a single far left wikipedia admin?
Heh, I remember being surprised when I looked up the editor for some great Russian history articles and saw that he identified as a straight-up monarchist.
Wikipedia editors are a bunch of diverse, geeky kooks.
Many of his essays have been deleted, and many others are Pending Deletion. Those deleted can be viewed only by admins. There is a large movement to censor this guy's opinions and undo his contributions. What happened? There is no explicit mention on the page.
The left-wing cabal in control of Wikipedia considers him a threat to their power.
>There is a large movement to censor this guy's opinions
Wikipedia is the wrong place for opinions
Having opinions on Wikipedia policies is perfectly appropriate.
Sure, and he's probably not being censored on those.
He is. His essays have been deleted.
Nope.
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Why_I_am_n...
Still there after 23 years.
In theory.
In practice, just read TFA and this whole thread of comments about it.
The main wiki pages are not for opinions.
The meta-pages where people discuss the pages and the sites are full of opinions and debate.
> Wikipedia is the wrong place for opinions
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.
Don’t make me spit out my coffee!
There is a link in the other comments that is intended to explain the context, but as someone who isn't familiar with the structure of threads / conversations in the Wikipedia editing community, I am honestly struggling to follow it.
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.)
My understanding is that he was unhappy with some of Wikipedia's direction and decided to go outside official Wikipedia channels to mobilize people to rewrite policies, which is not allowed.
it appears that larry sanger used twitter to promote an active wiki-related proposal ("WikiProject Intellectual Diversity"), and that is bad.
It seems like there's a policy against this. I don't think having rules only apply to rank-and-file members rather than founders is better in the long run.
Guy wanted to loosen rules around Wikipedia's sourcing to allow places like Breitbart and Fox News to be used as reliable sources (they are obviously not). Things were not going his way in the vote, so he asked his large social network following to brigade the vote in his favor. That's not allowed, so he's been banned.
I also have problems with Wikipedia, sure, but I resolved them simply by setting up a private wiki, and it's been quite peaceful.
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.
Banning transparent bad actors, even when they don't outright admit that's what they are, is both legitimate and necessary.
Did he explain why he returned to save/undermine Wikipedia after all this time?
Paid by evil billionaires? Or just a continuing descent into MAGA-tinged madness?
No one escapes the gatekeeping pundits.
trying to contribute to wikipedia was the most miserable experience in a "collaborative" process I've ever had in my life.
Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one.
in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
Most people don't realize that essentially all parts of Wikipedia are owned by random nerds versed in the beaurocracy who will revert all outsider edits. Unless you have hours per day dedicated to arguing with them (which they do!), the sign says you're welcome but the people say you're not.
Not to say Wikipedia isn't great + useful! But realize that it is owned by a distributed network of feudal nerd-lords that will defend to their death the contents of Wikipedia articles because they get off on being the dictators of what's true.
Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
It's amazing how much this behavior is tolerated, despite very clear policies against a single person "owning" a page.
> Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
Any insight into how these people all manage to dodge the policies against such behavior? Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?
There's not a big pool of well-adjusted people who are equally willing to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia and manage it better. The people who care a lot, in the wrong ways, outnumber people who are passionately neutral. Most people don't care enough to fight bad edits and reversions. They just stop contributing. I know I did. (I wasn't even editing controversial areas, just adding to data about chemical compounds.)
I still love Wikipedia, but mostly as a starting point to find deeper references. (Which, to be fair, is primarily how you should use an encyclopedia.) The degree to which you should trust it as your sole starting point for research in an unfamiliar area is anti-correlated with the length of the article's Talk page.
People often mention anecdotes like that when Wikipedia is discussed, but I made a few changes to pages over the years and never had any issues. I took care to follow the rules, and the changes were usually accepted; when they weren't, it was always for reasonable reasons, even if I didn't always agree with them.
That was my initial experience, too.
As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.
Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.
indeed. the field I was trying to improve tend to attract a lot of cranks and trisectors. the topics are not "contentious" in the typical political sense but the pages are closely guarded by very stubborn and uninformed retiree flatearther types.
I haven't done a whole lot, but I've also never had a bad experience editing on Wikipedia. I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages. Which, yeah, discussing controversial stuff on the Internet is a recipe for having a bad time. The other strong possibility is they are lower quality editors than they think they are. You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
> I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages.
This could be true. But I saw it in histories of not controversial pages also. Some people feel they own articles they contributed to. Wikipedia made a policy against this because it was a problem.[1]
> You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when. And to find revisions of forgotten date in Wikipedia required more time than most people would spend for a comment. And anecdotal evidence changed beliefs rarely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
> I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when
It's absolutely fair that people aren't going to dig up old edits. At the same time, I'm not sure how relevant years-old anecdotal evidence is. It would be interesting to see some actual statistics on this; I guess the data is public, so it would be possible to do research on how often helpful edits are rejected.
I am confident that my edits were high quality and improved the mathematical accuracy and clarity of the page.
unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?
I hope anyone can start their own private wiki in peace and for free.
Today, we already have free blogging platforms, newsletters, photo sharing, and microblogging, but we are in dire need of a free wiki platform (and maybe a knowledge base tool too).
I'm currently experimenting with building exactly that. So far, so good, but the setup is still too difficult for non-technical people, even though it is already free to register.
Same thing for me when I used to contribute to our local transit system's page. Things were fine for years but one day an editor for some reason took an interest in me and started going after my contributions for all manner of petty legalistic policies that were usually "best practices" rather than rules. He even moved on to my edits on other pages, which mostly were where I'd corrected a spelling or formatting error. Never understood why that happened because I wasn't involved in any edit wars or even contributions on anything that could be considered political or ideological. I just moved on to other things and left Wikipedia behind. So he "won" something, but no idea what that was.
In the worst-case scenario, they will keep harassing you off-wiki, hunting for your digital footprint across other social media platforms. I actually had to retire several of my internet handles because of this wiki drama.
It's a dangerous to go alone out there!
Take this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hounding
> sooooo much technical misinformation
Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?
it was in the computational social choice sphere which attracts a lot of amateurs interested in electoral reform and "voting theory" (which of course is not the typical term used for the field but is popular among these amateurs).
these contributors tend to have some kind of unrelated engineering / technical background, though never in econ or social choice itself, are often retired with lots of free time, and _always_ have incredibly stubborn and strong opinions. the demographic matches the [trisector](https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...) very closely
if you look around on these pages in social choice and voting algorithms you will find plenty of inaccuracies, vague assertions about strategic manipulability, misunderstanding of the formalization of certain electoral axioms, and other misinformation.
>in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
As someone that has battled with this, I agree, but in my experience more often than not, the people that complain are complaining about basic rules like "stuff should have external citations". So I can't really pick either side.
I think one of the last straws for me before I quit trying to help is when I "lost" some disputed edit (and the page was subsequently locked) because the original author provided an external citation for their claim.
The problem was, if you actually go read the content being cited, it did not at all conclude what the page author was asserting it did. In fact, it concluded the opposite. So the citation was "real" but the way it was being used with the implication that it supported the author's position was pure misinformation.
I tried to point this out and petitioned to unlock the page, but I was told that "consensus has been reached, and edit warring will not be tolerated" ...
Wikipedia now is a totally corrupt organization. I came across this personally when my edits regarding the recent cocaine (!) scandal involving the Russian (!) Orthodox Church (!) were canceled by a Ukrainian (!) steward. Moreover, this was done with blatant and cynical violation of the rules, with prohibited techniques, insults, and the use of sockpuppets.
Most of his posts and articles are about policy and criticism towards Wikipedia.
Ironically they might have amplified the reach of their articles to laymen and editors and made him a martyr in the process.
Quite often in activist spaces, the primary goal isn't to convince others of a viewpoint or even the censor other viewpoints, though those are nice side effects. The real goal is demonstrating loyalty to the group's current core beliefs, whatever those might be on that day. In spaces where the values are in constant flux, there's a greater need to constantly reaffirm allegiance to the group's current world view.
At best Wikipedia is a well-edited wiki of a smorgasbord, great writing, and an incredible resource that provides amazing value.
At worst it can be a hive mind echo chamber where certain views are banished to the Abyss.
Certain topics attract the latter rather than the former…
I gave up on Wikipedia when the Deletionists took over.
Pure sabotage
More than whatever process was used, just looking at his user page I do think some sort of ostracism-like response was inevitable. The thing about communities like Wikipedia is when you have a group of volunteers coming together to do something the culture has to be somewhat intolerant of cultural change, otherwise it'll fall apart pretty quickly. To repeat that another way, culture defines who is part of the in- and out-group, so once the group has formed it is very slow to change or the group collapses.
I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements. The parallel with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was appropriately foreshadowed by Sanger.
Organisations eventually become corrupt. Wikipedia might already be there or it might have a ways to go, who knows. But this sort of change might require a new project or some sort of schism among the Wikipedia editors, it sounds pretty radical. Especially in the post-Trump era; I expect his presidency has been a traumatic era for the English Wikipedia project.
I mean this in a friendly way: you are falling for it. Sanger's goal here is to get low-quality sources allowed on Wikipedia to promote his personal political beliefs. This was relatively politely argued down by Wikipedia editors, but he chose to try to recruit a brigade to swing the discussion in his favor, which is not allowed. There's no attempt to improve Wikipedia going on here.
> I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements.
The problem with the "competing articles" is that the end game is quite obvious - the far-right wants to get crap like Musk's "Grokipedia" or "Conservapedia" out of the gutters where it belongs and into the brand protection of Wikipedia.
And that, frankly, is an existential threat.
This guy seems to have fallen hard for the "Cultural Marxism" hard-right conspiracy theory - an idea that traces back to actual, real-world Nazis. [0]
He talks of "undoing the lefts march through the institutions", as if he was fighting some sort of Maoist movement.
The guy has lost the plot and has become a troll trying to use the encyclopedia as ideological battleground.
Good riddance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism
If there's one article that shows the problem with Wikipedia it's the one you're quoting and it's sister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... which says that cultural marxism is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory.
And then you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School and leave confused...
Edit: for example, here's a passage from the wiki page on frankfurt school.
Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the Institute's exile in America, was published in 1944. While retaining many Marxist insights, this work shifted emphasis from a critique of the material forces of production to a critique of the social and ideological forces brought about by early capitalism.
So, culture? and marxism?
It is a difference, perhaps, between Marxist cultural studies, and "Cultural Marxism", a label applied by antagonists to a large variety of activities?
Would you say those articles are Entartete Kunst?
Are you implying I'm a Nazi for thinking that there's a cultural component to Marxist thought some of which is present in modern culture?!
If I misunderstood your comment, I apologize
I'm not implying you're a Nazi, but I am pointing out the historical heritage of this line of argument.
We've been here before, this exact same conspiracy theory was created by the Nazis to justify the unjustifiable.
The slight rebranding of "Cultural B̶o̶l̶s̶h̶e̶v̶i̶s̶m̶ Marxism" is what Anders Breivik used to justify his acts of terrorism.
We've gone done this road before. It doesn't lead anywhere good.
I'm not putting ill intent on you, but I would implore you to reconsider your stance on this.
I see. But there's pages about other aspects of Marxist theory some of which I'm sure was used to excuse crimes against humanity by the Nazis and other evil doers. See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marxism
In general Wikipedia takes an anti censorship approach regarding articles which can cause evil.
So why is the aspect of Marxism which deals with culture completely taboo and not represented? I'm not even sure if it's due to something bigger I just think the article on cultural marxism might be one of the worst on Wikipedia.
I think the article about the conspiracy theory you linked addresses your concerns quite well, it talks about what the Frankfurt school was actually about and the way the far right has been twisting it to support the narrative that has led to so many dead.
I'm not sure why you were so opposed to said article, I read it and it seems to lay everything out pretty well, including full sourcing. Could you tell me what exactly you take issue with?
> it talks about what the Frankfurt school was actually about
Can you quote it here? I seem to have missed it in my rereading.
This is now the end of Wikipedia for me, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the admins try to split the wiki into endless forks.
... I mean, Sanger very publicly broke up with Wikipedia almost a quarter of a century ago. You may be a bit late.
Always thought the dencrentalisation and forking of Wikipedia would be the endgame. Would allow for people to actually curate their own spaces again. Wikipedia is a great project, but I feel it's basically complete, and is technically limited.
Half the references are dead or paywalled, so it's impossible to actually read more about anything. I'm sure AI would effectively be able to recreate webs of knowledge.
Indexing services which compare different forks and communities providing different 'lenses' on topics would be incredibly interesting.
Would give various institutions around the world something to do, aswell; curating their space and giving a badge of approval to provide a slight anti-slop defence.
did you read the reason why he was blocked? I can't say who's right or wrong but their reasons for blocking him seem to be valid in nature.
I found the thread hard to parse.[0].
Can you explain the reason? from a brief skim he is promoting some project he wants to start in wikipedia from outside wikipedia, is that it or did I misunderstand?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
Simple.
He broke this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
This is fairly straightforward, with the result (blocked from editing) mentioned clearly. It doesn't matter the topic.
Being a cofounder is immaterial.
The link you provided does not describe what would be usually be thought of as a "rule".
Consider updating your comment to make more sense wrt. that.
I've been following Wikipedia almost since it began, the stated reason is not matching the actual reason, They've wanted Larry Gone for years, even Jimmy will very be betrayed eventually. Unfortunately the real aftermath won't be known until many more get banned.
> They've wanted Larry Gone for years
Larry was essentially inactive on Wikipedia from 2002 until he started stirring things up last year. Nobody "wanted him gone" - he simply wasn't relevant to the project.
One useful thing to do sometimes when looking at whether or not a user is interested in participating in Wikipedia or just participating in arguing about things is to look at their contributions to actual wikipedia articles, the thing Wikipedia is all about.
This is the list of articles Sanger contributed to in 2026: [1]
Compare that too all his contributions: [2]
Does it seem like this person is participating in Wikipedia in a genuine way? Or is he there to start political arguments on various internal pages?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...