Larry Sanger

There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length. Man makes plans, and God laughs. Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American philosopher and the infamous cofounder of Wikipedia (leaving it in 2002). Besides being the cofounder of one of the biggest websites on the Internet, he is mostly known for two things; criticising Wikipedia, and having created many failed WikiProjects to fix said criticisms. His concern trolling and arguments on why Wikipedia is biased have been lapped up by several far-right media outlets of America, Britain, and India,  and have provided cover for various cranks and advocates of pseudoscience, ranging from intelligent design to climate change denial. Sanger is a balance extremist, though he does draw the line against giving equal time to some "whacked-out conspiracies" like flat Earth. As to which conspiracy theories Sanger regards as "whacked-out", he relies on either "no good evidence" (not for example refuted evidence), or "morally or epistemologically bankrupt" ideas, or argumentum ad populum. Problematically, these three criteria are arbitrary and can conflict with each other.

Sanger was also a consultant for Ballotpedia, where he allowed for Ballotpedia to call him a neutrality expert, though he has not written any peer-reviewed publications on the subject.

Neutrality
Sanger was an early consultant for Ballotpedia since leaving the leadership of Wikipedia in 2002, and he has become critical of Wikipedia not hewing to a strictly neutral point of view (NPOV). Sanger wrote a 2015 essay on NPOV for Ballotpedia, which presumably also explains Ballotpedia's position on NPOV. Although Sanger acknowledges the existence of "false balance" (balance fallacy), his example of NPOV for global warming is rather skewed away from adequately acknowledging the balance fallacy:

Sanger wrote this in 2015, but by 2004 it was already the case that there was scientific consensus and by 2010, it had reached 97-98% agreement among climate scientists that climate change was real and anthropogenic. and has since risen to >99%. Sanger was arguing that there was still a debate on the reality of climate change in 2015, when there wasn't one at all, i.e., the balance fallacy. Arguably, Sanger and subsequently Ballotpedia are NPOV extremists.

Later in the essay, Sanger argued along the lines of supporting the argumentum ad populum fallacy measles vaccination, thereby giving oxygen to Andrew Wakefield's antivax bullshit:

Sanger does not even acknowledge that the Centers for Disease Control says that the MMR vaccine is extremely safe and effective, or that deaths in the US from measles dropped from 503,282 pre-vaccine availability to 89 post-vaccine availability.

Neutrality is all well and good when dealing with easily verified facts, such as who and what is on an election ballot, what responses a candidate for office has given on issues, etc. However, once one starts getting into more complex issues such as science, medicine or general politics, neutrality becomes fraught with the balance fallacy (giving equal weight to refuted or crank ideas), and argumentum ad populum.

Nuttery
Reality has a well-known liberal bias. Ironically for someone having criticising Wikipedia for its lack of credibility and expertise in the past, Sanger serves as a very good case study of conservative crank magnetism.

What Sanger consistently fails to understand in each of his "criticisms" (which would never have been taken seriously even if it weren't his status as cofounder) is that neutrality is not about giving equal weight to every fringe opinion and viewpoint. It means to state the complete relevant information without bias. What even is the opposite viewpoint to the facts? Lies? It is literally impossible to entertain all possible viewpoints on an issue all at once, since not everything can be neatly categorised as a "left" vs "right" debate.

Note the fact that is only one part of ; the others being "" and ""; meaning you can not present unverifiable information for which reliable sources do not exist. This makes it almost impossible to sneak topics like global warming denialism, anti-vaccination, flat-eartherism, Holocaust denial etc. onto Wikipedia pages.

Conservatism
The Left: We hate the 1%! Also the Left: We love Soros, and Bill Gates, and the lovely globalist organizations various 1%ers fund, and we want to do everything they say, because they represent social justice and science.

He believes that the Democrats are actually left-wing parties and openly support socialism, basically straight-up admitting he has no idea what socialism actually is, just like your average conservative.

He thinks that the global cooperation in making the COVID-19 vaccine is evidence of a deep state that secretly controls the world.

He finds the absence of conservative news outlets on Wikipedia very concerning, stating:

Yes, Wikipedia does ban certain websites from being used as a source. However, this is not because of their biases. Wikipedia also bans certain leftist news sources, such as Occupy Democrats. (Also, out of the six sources Sanger mentions, only the Daily Mail and The Daily Caller are actually "banned" on Wikipedia.) Wikipedia does this because all of those "news" sites simply kept making shit up, over and over again, and it was made abundantly clear that they were not driven by the need to inform but to mislead. While they may be right in certain aspects is not the point because they simply can’t be trusted to be reliable at all.

Obamagate
Sanger describes Barack Obama as "Wikipedia’s favorite president," indicating the fact that his article fails to mention some of his "well-known scandals." Of course, if this were the case with every article, most articles about companies would host a lengthy section detailing each of their unethical practices on their same page. Leaving aside the veracity of the allegations, Wikipedia does host detailed articles on each of the "scams" mentioned by Sanger, Specifically…
 * The 2012 Benghazi attack
 * IRS targeting controversy
 * Solyndra
 * Hillary Clinton email controversy
 * and categorises a variety more controversies.
 * and categorises a variety more controversies.

The 2012 Benghazi attack is actually mentioned in the main Obama article, specifically in the infoboxes and the section on the Libya intervention.

The fact that Sanger thinks that Obamagate, a conspiracy theory, should be mentioned in his article shows how deep he has fallen.

Trump
Sanger believes that Wikipedia page on Donald Trump is badly biased against him; pointing out the frequent use of the words "false" and "falsely" in the article, stating: "Wikipedia frequently asserts… that many of Trump’s statements are “false.” Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so…" Once again, he fails to understand Wikipedia's stating objective truth about a persona is not an indication of bias. In fact, rejection of basic facts and instead replacing it with a more "neutral"-sounding "some people believe…" would be a better indication of bias. Nonetheless, Sanger is pissed at Trump for his supposed vaccine pushing.

QAnon
Sanger has had frequent flirtations with the alt-right conspiracy theory QAnon; having retweeted tweets from QAnon accounts, defending QAnon a few times, and repeating false QAnon statements. More than 50% of his followers believe QAnon is true, according to a twitter poll done by Sanger.

He criticised a Christianity Today article that attacked QAnon by saying that the article gives "no such evidence" as to why QAnon is wrong. As the article he criticised itself states: "…here’s the genius of QAnon: For those already convinced, it’s unfalsifiable."

Although he says that he is “not… a big Qanon supporter” and that he is “open to the idea (given evidence) that Qanon is itself seriously wrong”.

Pro-life
Sanger thinks that the Wikipedia article on abortion is written with a "left-liberal point of view," stating:

In this case, Sanger is absolutely correct; conservatives would obviously never inform about the medical consensus on the safety of abortion. Sanger then performs a non sequitur while ignoring how not getting an abortion would be even more psychologically taxing and lengthy.

Queerphobia
Sanger is upset that the Wikipedia article on LGBTQ adoption doesn't list all the reasons why homophobes think it is a bad idea. This is not surprising for a person with a history of transphobic and homophobic tweets.

Sanger believes that trans people have a "mental problem" and repeats the famous and beaten-to-death "Facts don't care about your feelings" argument saying people changing their pronouns "willy-nilly based on "how they feel inside" is "one of the cringiest pop culture fads ever" and says that it is "just an attempt to control others and force them to play a frankly pathological game with you".

He has spread false statements about trans activists being closet pedophiles and being after your children while sourcing a Reddit post as evidence. He frequently and fallaciously equates children having self-determination to them being raped,  implying that any amount of freedom given to children will eventually lead to pedophilia and bestiality.

Christian fundamentalism
In his essay, Sanger produces a laughably poor argument as to why Wikipedia is biased:

Suddenly, the facts don’t care about your feelings crowd is very concerned about the feelings of Christians who may feel disheartened after knowing that Santa wasn’t real 😢.

Of course, some Christians believe that the Gospels are reliable. However, people who aren’t Christian (which happens to be around 70% of the entire global population) do not believe so. Hence describing their reliability as uncertain is correct.

White genocide/Christophobia
What if we discover people we assumed were tolerant liberals are in fact repressive authoritarians who harbor murderous hatred for Bible-believing Christians, who sincerely believe that such people are the source of all the ills of society—and are ready to take drastic action?

Global warming denialism
In his essay, Larry grossly misinterprets what scientific consensus is about:

This is false because citing scientific consensus is not the same as using argument from authority. If more than a hundred people say it is raining outside, but one says it’s not, an editor shouldn’t state both so that the reader can make up their mind, or pretend that there is some debate going on between the two when there isn’t.

Similarly, there is no debate between scientists as to whether global warming is real or not, or whether vaccines work or not. Pseudoscientists aren’t "scientific minorities"; a snake oil peddler shouldn’t be receiving the same amount of credibility as actual scientists. Entertaining fringe views of a sensitive issue like vaccination would not only be most likely factually incorrect, but also risk endangering lives. All this in the name of "neutrality" and representing "scientific minority viewpoints"…

When Wikipedia deleted its page on Sanger unsurprisingly jumped to call the action "indefensible" and "extremely biased". He once again fails to understand Wikipedia policies, and he also makes clear he didn't actually read the discussion about the deletion of the article. An article is never deleted because it violates the policy, as Larry assumes. Articles that violate NPOV are not deleted but rewritten from scratch. The only articles that are deleted are which do not meet guidelines. Specifically, the article was deleted for failing the criteria. Another problem with the article was that the list didn't include just climate scientists, but a mish-mash of random people who had no credentials on climate science. Of course, there is no article titled "List of scientists who agree with the consensus on global warming" because that would just be extremely long.

Sanger also denies global warming's effect on the planet and calls global warming a "manufactured crisis" and a leftist "boogeyman" manufactured by "globalists".

Anti-vaccine
As seen above, Sanger also happens to be a bit of an anti-vaxxer, even criticising Donald Trump for promoting the vaccine.

Sanger's views on vaccines are peculiarly imbalanced, alternately fear mongering about vaccines, and threatening to block anyone who tweets him promoting vaccine mandates.

Alternative medicine promotion
In his essay, Sanger complains:

Sanger fails to explain how this definition is wrong or biased in any way. In fact, it describes alternative medicine quite aptly; for if it were tested and proven effective, it wouldn’t be alternative, just medicine.

Anti-mask
Sanger is an anti-masker, saying that it has more “potential harm” than their value and was incredibly distressed and felt “miserable” when was asked to wear a mask at a bookstore, calling it a “totalitarian dystopia”. Sanger's anti-mask rhetoric has even verged into paranoid fantasies, "What happens when crazy people start hunting down the unmasked unvaxxed?"

Coronavirus downplay
Sanger has downplayed coronavirus in the past.

He calls the COVID-19 pandemic a leftist "boogeyman" by "globalists". He says that “the ongoing lockdowns, masking, and social distancing, despite almost-zero deaths, is due to a desire to demonstrate to the world how international elites can fraudulently call the shots in defiance of facts and science,” despite there having been a hundred thousands of deaths due to COVID-19 and several studies showing that lockdowns and masking works. Whether he thinks there is a nationwide global conspiracy to fake millions of deaths from a completely nonexistent virus or just being oblivious to the truth, we will let you decide.

Antifa did the coup
What’s more likely: that MAGAs suddenly cracked and, for the first time, started rioting Antifa-style? Or that Antifa were LARPing, which they love to do, in order to discredit MAGAs?

George Floyd conspiracy theory
Sanger's Twitter thread on the death of George Floyd are mainly a piling up of tangential coincidences and just asking questions, while cautioning not to spread rumors, ignoring the fact that asking inane questions about coincidences is a good way to start rumors.

He also asks his followers “what reason is there to believe these riots, and recent U.S. riots generally, are bought and paid for by George Soros?”

Election fraud
Sanger spreads false claims about the 2020 US presidential election.

Views on RationalWiki
No points for guessing what Larry thinks of us. RationalWiki is an irrational, far left troll site. Trust me, you don't want to be citing them. Of course the creepoids that crawled out of the slime of RationalWiki are going to defend lolicon. LOL Leading the charge against crypto in general on Wikipedia is one David Gerard, who is, let’s just say, one of the people responsible for the mess that Wikipedia has become—and a leader of the libelous, silly RationalWiki. Has been a friend of Jimmy Wales. I'll leave you with another piece of advice: do not make this a partisan encyclopedia, biased in the opposite direction. Then it is likely to end up like Conservapedia or RationalWiki, which nobody (outside of some true believers) takes seriously.

Projects
List of (mostly failed) projects by Larry Sanger.

Citizendium
Sanger's contempt for Wikipedia's supposed lack of expertise inspired him to found Citizendium. The main idea of CZ was that anyone who made edits had to prove they were accredited in a given area (proof of medical licence, Ph.D., Bachelor's degree, etc); of course, this severely limited the amount of people who could actually edit the wiki, or, given how personal the account request form was, how many people wanted to edit the wiki. The main problem became which areas of study Sanger recognized as valid; pseudoscientific and fringe studies like homeopathy was, but women's studies wasn't. Sanger's slight persecution complex made it so that submitted articles were locked from editing, thus creating echo chambers that no one could change. As a result, pseudoscience and woo spread across the site, and relatively little was done about it.

Everipedia
Another of Sanger's attempts (and failures) to make a Wikipedia offshoot. This time, the gimmick was that anytime you made an edit, you'd get a Bitcoin Dogecoin IQ token, Users with higher token counts were more or less admins with full power over the other helpless plebians. Sanger stated he was abandoning the project in 2019.

Encyclosphere
The current project. Sanger describes his goal as a "totally decentralized network, like the Blogosphere—or like email, IRC, blockchains, and the World Wide Web itself." In essence, he wants to create a massive, centralized hub where people can link or upload encyclopedic articles, and search for any encyclopedia article on the Internet. So Wikipedia, with a dozen extra steps. Some proposed features include: It all feels a little eerily similar to both Citizendium and Everipedia. Unlike CZ, though, which created echo chambers because of excessive emphasis on accreditation, Encyclosphere is probably going to create echo chambers due to its disregard for pre-release review. One can only imagine what shit will get dumped there before anyone has the chance to proofread it.
 * article publishing without the need for review by anyone
 * some kind of rating system
 * a search engine
 * data aggregation

To support Encyclosphere, Sanger has created the "Knowledge Standards Foundation", which will act as the tech support and developers for the site. Again, this Management Council, so to speak, is reminiscent of Everipedia's IQ token system and the social classes it created as a result. History repeating itself? So far, we have yet to see. It is unknown how far along the project even is; the website mainly promotes Sanger's upcoming Encyclosphere conference, and his blog has little, if any, mention of the project (as far as his posts go). The project was announced in late 2019, and for all we know it hasn't progressed.

Time will tell the success of Encyclosphere. All we can do right now is wait.

Minifeed
Minifeed is Sanger’s knockoff of Wordpress that may or may not be totally abandoned in favor of a revamped version of the site. It claims it has "enhanced privacy," but this is not explained anywhere on the site. The rest of the "About" page is terribly vague, and the most recent post (from December 2021) is a post noting the progress of the new version of the site. The future of the site is unknown.

Sanger Academy
Sanger Academy is basically knock-off Sanger also has homeschooled his kids, which might be the inspiration for the project. It has videos on several topics, all taught by Sanger himself using PowerPoint presentations, including art, music, metaphysics, a three part series on free speech.