Wikipedia co-founder says encyclopedia 'compromised' by CIA
thecradle.co
Larry Sanger accused the CIA and it's allies of editing articles for years to spread propaganda

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger accused the CIA and corporate actors of editing the online encyclopedia to serve state and institutional interests during an interview with the German daily Berliner Zeitung published on 7 August.

“I believe Wikipedia is already compromised,” Sanger said.

He added that the platform was identified early as a propaganda instrument, and that its anonymity rule made it easy to use as such.

[…]

“The powerful are very interested in Wikipedia,” he said, describing the site’s pseudonyms as a mask, saying that the platform treats the positions of institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the World Bank as established fact.

  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    36·
    6 days ago

    He warned that such distortions now spread far beyond the site, as search engines and chatbots draw on the site’s texts and use its content for training.

    “Such models do not develop a life of their own once they are launched. They are functions of their training data,” he said, arguing that the platform is now written from a fixed worldview he labels GASP – globalist, academic, secular, and progressive.

    On Gaza, Sanger said Wikipedia’s coverage is “clearly very one-sided,” in favor of Palestinians, and backed founder Jimmy Wales’s intervention on the “Gaza genocide” article, where Wales argued the introduction should contain more of the Israeli perspective.

    DA WOKE CIA IS PUSHING GENOCIDE NARRATIVES AND TRANSING THE KIDS

    Ffs this guy is garbage and this article is garbage.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      37·
      6 days ago

      I said it already in the crossposted thread, but I’m starting to feel like the rash of negative articles about Wikipedia recently seems like a coordinated smear campaign.

      Larry Sanger isn’t wrong that “the powerful are very interested in Wikipedia,” but that’s because they fucking hate it and want to see it destroyed in favor of shit like grokipedia that they have control over. As for the rest of the article, I think it itself is the disinformation.

  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    14·
    6 days ago

    He’s just butthurt that they kicked his worthless ass out of Wikipedia because he broke their rules without remorse - calling onto his Shitter-minions to support him on WP. Whiny loser.

    • Saledovil@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      5 days ago

      Both are authoritarian ideologies, and the thing with authoritarian regimes is that the material conditions of running a dictatorship overwrite whatever ideologies they might champion.