Wikipedia is the best thing the internet has ever made
I know what many of you are thinking as you read the headline on this post: The best thing ever? But what about Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which millions of people simultaneously played the game by posting commands in a chat room? Or the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, the website that indexes every size and shape of plastic bread-bag closure? What about the legendary video of a whale being blown up by dynamite on a beach in Oregon? What about Strawberry Pop-Tart Blowtorches or Bert Is Evil? I agree that those things are amazing, and I thank Zeus for the internet every day because of them (I used to collect this kind of thing on an old website of mine, which is archived here). But I think when we put aside the things that we personally enjoy about the internet, there is no question that the creation — and ongoing maintenance — of Wikipedia is a shining example of everything the internet was supposed to do, but in the vast majority of cases has failed to do. Collaborative effort on that kind of scale is vanishingly rare, and even more rare is the ability to keep that kind of work going for years, let alone for the more than two decades that Wikipedia has been around.
Why am I writing a paean to Wikipedia? I expect that some of you probably know of one reason already, but for anyone who doesn't, Elon Musk just launched something called Grokipedia, which he describes as an "open source" alternative to Wikipedia. It is allegedly powered by the AI he built for X, which is known as Grok (as more than one person has pointed out, his Wikipedia alternative doesn't really qualify as open source, because open-source projects are required to make all of their underlying codebase publicly accessible and shareable, and Grokipedia hasn't done that). But this isn't just about another Wikipedia competitor — there have been of plenty of them over the years, and there will undoubtedly be more. Even Google, which noticed how often Wikipedia showed up in its search results, tried at one point to launch a competitor, which it called Knol (something even Google staffers later admitted was a terrible name). Knol was supposed to aggregate crowd-sourced knowledge from experts and regular Google users, but it was barely even alive in the world before it suddenly vanished without a trace.
Musk claims that Grokipedia is intended to be an unbiased knowledge source that will be edited by his AI (and then laser-etched on tiny stones that will be placed throughout the solar system apparently, to "protect against civilizational regression"), but it is also a fairly transparent attack on what Musk and the American right say is Wikipedia's "woke" bias. The decision to create a Wikipedia alternative appears to have sprung from comments by David Sacks, a friend of Musk's who is a venture investor in technology as well as the AI and crypto czar for the White House. Sacks said on X that Wikipedia is "hopelessly biased" and is run by an "army of left-wing activists" who "fight reasonable corrections," then said there was a market opportunity for AI to rewrite Wikipedia and take into account what he called "all the banned sources." Musk responded that xAI, his artificial intelligence company, was doing exactly that for "all of human knowledge."
Sacks' reference to "banned sources" appears to refer to comments made by Larry Sanger on Tucker Carlson's show, which was devoted to Wikipedia and how it is allegedly biased, and controlled by a cabal of woke editors. Sanger's opinion on all of these topics carries added weight because he is the co-founder of Wikipedia, although he hasn't been involved with the site since he left the project in 2002. However, he did come up with the name Wikipedia, and with the concept of using an open-source platform (the wiki) to solicit contributions and edits from the internet at large — prior to launching the wiki version, Wales and other staffers had been working on a non-wiki encyclopedia called Nupedia (it's worth noting that Wales doesn't consider Sanger a co-founder, although he has said that Sanger deserves a lot of credit for the things he added). Sanger also — according to his Wikipedia entry — came up with the "neutral point of view" policy that the encyclopedia still maintains as one of its five core pillars or principles.
The reference to "banned sources" comes during a discussion of a list that Wikipedia maintains — which like everything else is public — called "perennial sources," which includes a table of reputable or reliable sources of information for the purposes of editing a Wikipedia entry. The ones that are seen as reputable or reliable are in green, and the ones that aren't are in red (there are other categories as well, including "deprecated." In the preamble to the page, Wikipedia's editors explain that the list is just a collection of sources whose reliability has been the subject of multiple and repeated discussions in the "talk pages" of the site, where editors go back and forth about whether something should be included or not. The perennial sources page specifically mentions that it is not 1) a policy or guideline, 2) a list of pre-approved sources, 3) a list of banned sources that can never be used or should be removed on sight, 4) a list of biased or unbiased sources, or 5) a list of sources that are correct regardless of context.
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Wikipedia but with more racism
So is Grokipedia without bias? Only if you already have the proper bias before you start looking at it, I expect — one that accords with Musk's world-view and that of Sacks and others of that ilk. According to a review from The Verge, the new Grok-powered encyclopedia is both racist and transphobic, and coincidentally also "loves Elon Musk." Not to mention the fact that a large proportion of this would-be Wikipedia competitor appears to be a carbon copy of Wikipedia itself (which is open source, of course, meaning anyone can make use of it, including reproducing the entire thing verbatim). But for entries that refer to certain topics, the Verge piece says, articles often veer away from the content included on their respective Wikipedia pages, and include instead "alternative" facts such as right-wing talking points, factual inaccuracies, critiques of the mainstream media and even unfounded conspiracy theories. Among those topics are those that refer to scientific controversies such as the connection between vaccines and autism, something that has become a hobbyhorse for much of the right.
Wikipedia states that “extensive investigation into vaccines and autism spectrum disorder has shown that there is no relationship between the two, causal or otherwise, and that vaccine ingredients do not cause autism” and notes the overwhelming “consensus that vaccines are safe” from scientists and medical bodies like the WHO, CDC, and FDA. Grokipedia is more circumspect. Its entry only rejects the idea that MMR vaccines cause autism, it lends credence to so-called vaccine-skeptical views by calling the idea a “hypothesis,” and the sole mention of scientific consensus is to say how a recent CDC contract signals “sustained policy momentum despite opposition from mainstream scientific consensus bodies. For covid origins, Grokipedia again fails to acknowledge consensus and amplifies suggestions the virus was engineered, while Wikipedia repeatedly describes allegations of genome engineering as “misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence.”
The examples of anti-woke entries continue: On climate change, Wikipedia says that there is a “nearly unanimous scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that this is caused by human activities,” while Grokipedia focuses instead on a “heightened public alarm” that it says is caused by media and advocacy organizations like Greenpeace. In the article on transgender, Wikipedia says that the term "transgenderism" is widely viewed as a pejorative, while the Grokipedia entry uses the term multiple times. The Grokipedia entry for Chelsea Manning, the former US Army intelligence analyst and WikiLeaks whistleblower, uses her "dead name" (the name she used before she transitioned) and the wrong pronouns. And the entry on race and intelligence claims that science shows some races are more intelligent than others, while Wikipedia's entry on the same topic notes that the scientific consensus on IQ is that differences can't be explained by genetics. Wired magazine notes that Grokipedia also traffics in conspiracy theories around AIDS, blaming the rise of the disease in part on gay pornography.
Larry Sanger may be the new poster boy for Wikipedia's "woke" bias, but he didn't just come up with the idea that Wikipedia is no longer abiding by its core principles — his appearance on Carlson's show is just the latest iteration of a long-running campaign against the website he sort of co-founded, as Will Oremus notes in a piece for the Washington Post. For years, Oremus says, Sanger has criticized what he calls the site's liberal bias, argued that the site is mismanaged and routinely defames people, and says there is a noticeable leftward slant to its coverage of hot-button issues such as crime, religion and climate change. He has called the site "a bus careening down the highway without a driver and slamming into innocent people." And as Oremus points out, Sanger has gone from a loner crying in the wilderness to a guy whose opinions are sought out by a growing group of right-wingers like Sacks and Carlson.
Sanger’s long-standing criticism is finding fresh traction with leading conservatives as they push in the second Trump administration to reclaim cultural institutions and information sources that they argue have been captured by the left. Billionaire Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and pundit Tucker Carlson are among those calling to reform or supplant a website that has become one of the country’s last bastions of shared truth — and a bedrock of factual information for the AI systems that increasingly answer the world’s search queries. Earlier this month, Cruz sent an open letter to Wikipedia’s parent nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation, demanding answers about what he called its “ideological bias.” In August, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into possible manipulation of the platform by what they called “hostile nation-state actors to expose Western audiences to pro-Kremlin and anti-Western messaging.”
Flawed but still inspiring
Wikipedia is no stranger to attacks on its credibility — it has been criticized almost since the day it launched over two decades ago. In its early years, the attacks also focused on whether it was reliable or not, but unlike today there was less of an ideological basis to the criticisms. The idea of an open-source encyclopedia, where anyone could submit an edit or propose an article, seemed insane and/or unworkable to many people, especially academics — and to be fair, it seemed that way to just about everyone except Wales — so the assumption was that it must be riddled with errors. Professors routinely ordered their students not to use it. One of my favourite counterpoints to this argument is that the Oxford English Dictionary, a bastion of old-world orthodoxy if there ever was one, was also in many ways a crowd-sourced project to which anyone could (and did) contribute. One of the most famous contributors, who provided more than 10,000 words for the dictionary over a number of years, was William Chester Minor, a US Civil War veteran and an inmate at a high-security British psychiatric hospital, where he was committed after he killed a man in London.
The more recent attacks on Wikipedia's credibility, however, are just the latest extension of a much broader campaign against institutions that right-wing Americans blame for making people "woke," a term that has become synonymous with "liberal." It's the same campaign that has targeted universities like Columbia and Harvard, with Donald Trump and his deputies ordering them to change their curricula and hire more conservative professors or face cuts to their federal funding, and the same campaign that has targeted infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci for his alleged role in the "plandemic" of COVID. Not content with replacing people at scientific institutions, the Trump administration has systematically removed frunding from organizations that have any relationship to concepts like climate change (a term that federal employees are now forbidden to use). As Amy Bruckman — a professor at Georgia Tech — told Oremus, those who criticize the site’s coverage are "yelling at the truth."
Ted Cruz cited several of Sanger’s arguments in an Oct. 7 letter requesting “information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation.” As an example of liberal bias, Cruz cited a debate around a Wikipedia article about the August stabbing of a White woman by a Black man with a criminal record on a train in Charlotte. A video of the killing went viral on X, where Musk and others on the right portrayed it as a symptom of Democrats’ alleged failure to crack down on crime. Cruz noted that some Wikipedia editors sought to have the article taken down, arguing that an individual street crime wasn’t notable enough to merit its own page. Cruz’s letter didn’t mention that their push was unsuccessful: Other editors voted to keep the article and it remained on the site, as does a page that records editors’ internal debate over the decision.
Sanger has posted what he calls Nine Theses on Wikipedia (a reference to the 95 theses that Martin Luther nailed to a church door in the 1500s, which jump-started the Protestant Reformation), and recommends — among other things — that the site's senior or most popular editors be identified publicly. Interestingly enough, Sanger tells Oremus that while he welcomes Republican leaders asking questions about Wikipedia’s policies, government intervention isn’t his preferred solution to the site’s shortcomings. Instead, he said that he is working to enlist hundreds of conservatives in the United States and abroad to become active Wikipedia editors and propose revisions to articles on topics like the Israel-Gaza war, Hindu nationalism in India, the safety of vaccines, and the causes of climate change. "Nothing is stopping us," Sanger said. "All of us who feel like we have been shut out of Wikipedia, driven away over the years — I think it’s a good idea that we spend a few months, a season, on Wikipedia and see what can happen."
Over the years, there have been many attacks on Wikipedia's "cabal" of editors, how they are largely male and white, how they control access to articles, and gang up to bury opposing viewpoints on whether edits should be included or not, and so on (all of which has been catalogued in an article on Wikipedia itself). Many of these kinds of criticisms are fair, and I — and many others, including some of those active on Wikipedia — think that it's important for the site to be as diverse in its viewpoints as possible, not just politically but in every other way possible. But anyone who thinks that controversial topics or alternative views on those topics don't get enough play on the site has clearly never spent any time on the talk pages of those kinds of articles, because the debate is often fierce. For all of its flaws, it is the closest to an internet-driven, crowdsourced, factual, consensus-powered compendium of facts as anyone has come. Musk's fans can spend their time on his biased spinoff if they wish, but they will be the poorer for it.
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