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Wikipedia

Wikipedia Drama Goes Mainstream (msn.com) 237

Larry Sanger, who helped launch Wikipedia in 2001 before being ousted by co-founder Jimmy Wales a year later, has spent years arguing the online encyclopedia has abandoned its commitment to neutrality. Leading conservatives in the second Trump administration are now amplifying his critique. Elon Musk announced plans to launch an AI-powered alternative called Grokipedia this week, calling Wikipedia "hopelessly biased." Senator Ted Cruz sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding answers about what he termed "ideological bias." House Republicans opened an investigation into possible platform manipulation.

Sanger published "Nine Theses" on reforming Wikipedia and appeared on Tucker Carlson's show. His arguments circulated widely among conservatives, including Trump's AI czar David Sacks. Sanger recently converted to Christianity and voted for Trump in 2024. He is working to recruit hundreds of conservatives to become active Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales maintains that neutrality remains the site's core policy.
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Wikipedia Drama Goes Mainstream

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  • Fuck these MAGAts. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:03PM (#65748128)

    They are not conservatives, they are radical right raging retards.

    • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @02:36PM (#65748340)

      The demands of these people and the Taliban are near identical.

  • If one of these neo-Confederate turd-tossers actually builds an AI Wikipedia without training it on Wikipedia itself, I'll eat a hat in any style you care to name.
  • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:13PM (#65748152)

    If you are not looking at anything political, about history, many medical topics, current events, the weather, several branches of science, and a few other things.

    It's no different than Reddit in that sense. I love Reddit for things like game hints and obscure IT fixes and other hobbyist things. But it's useless for anything else. Just like slashdot, actually. Bias, trolls, liars, people who abuse the system to push their agenda. Standard internet behavior for the last 10-15 years, at least. All social media is the same. Toxic shitty people piss all over it without the self awareness they're the cause of why their shoes are wet.

    That being said, I still love social media. Without toxic social media like Wikipedia, Reddit and slashdot, I'd still be working like the rest of you. But knowing how it works behind the scenes is why I don't use social media more than trivially.

    Ironically, the best way to ruin a good thing like the social internet is to let people use it.

    • I'll agree with the post title...not sure about the rest.

      I use Wikipedia weekly, basically to look up stuff I see/hear/read elsewhere. For example somewhere I read about the "Great Unconformity". Go to Wikipedia there is a very detailed article, images, links, etc. just what I need. And importantly it clarified a mis-representation in the original source I read.

      So yeah, for people who are looking up other people. especially political figures, or ongoing geo-political conflicts in Wikipedia . Yeah goo

  • by timeOday ( 582209 )
    Look how twitter got destroyed as a common medium for communication, with no replacement. X (right) and Bluesky (left) together are not a replacement for what twitter used to be. Now wikipedia as a store of knowledge goes the same route? Can't we just have one reality, but have different opinions about it?
  • Tribalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:16PM (#65748164)

    The core tenet of conservative philosophy is that some people are innately better and more valuable than others. That thinking thrives on the constant identification and blaming of pariah groups. Even if it achieves the goal of destroying the currently identified pariah groups, they will quickly divide within themselves and destroy each other. Conservatism and tribalism are parasitic mind virus.

    • Re:Tribalism (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:47PM (#65748246)

      The core tenet of conservative philosophy is that some people are innately better and more valuable than others. That thinking thrives on the constant identification and blaming of pariah groups.

      The belief, especially on the Right, and Trump specifically, that everything is a zero-sum game and there must be winners and losers doesn't help. More people having equal rights and opportunities or being able to be married doesn't take anything away from others

      Even if it achieves the goal of destroying the currently identified pariah groups, they will quickly divide within themselves and destroy each other. Conservatism and tribalism are parasitic mind virus.

      MAGA seems to operate this way - an ever smaller circle of who's "MAGA enough".

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:58PM (#65748276)
      The core tenet of the right wing, which we constantly confuse with conservatives because the right wing are extremists and they would very much like you to think of them as being conservative and therefore safe, is a unflinching belief in the benefits of the hierarchy.

      It's not just that there are some people who are better and some people who are worse. That is absolutely the case but it's also that there is a natural hierarchy which everyone slots into.

      This goes all the way back to the origins of the right wing as the party that sat in the right side of the French assembly supporting the monarchy.

      What I find for a lot of modern right wingers it's literally just that they have certain people who give them the ick and they just don't like on some personal or emotional level and they are really really upset that they have to show those people respect.

      That could be scientists or queer people or black people or women or whatever..

      But there's also the desire to have somebody above you. Somebody who is on your side and has everything under control.

      This is why the right wing always turn to authoritarianism.

      They don't understand the world and even if they did the world is a scary and random and chaotic place.

      So they want to use the hierarchy to enforce some kind of simple order on the world that they're capable of understanding.

      The people above me are taking care of me and the people below me have to do what I say without questioning or respect.

      That's the bargain you make when you become a right winger. The downside is you basically have to give up all of your possessions and your political and civil rights to anyone above you.

      But for a lot of people the comfort that comes from believing that the world has order and structure is worth it.
    • It's a race to the bottom of who is MAGA enough. Dinesh D'Souza recently experienced this when he proclaimed several years ago to be "one of the good ones". Fast forward to today and he's the target of MAGA for not being white. https://www.hindustantimes.com... [hindustantimes.com]

      D'Souza appears completely flabbergasted on how MAGA can spew such rhetoric.

      But don't feel too bad though. I guarantee who D'Souza will vote for in the next election.

      • People like Dinesh will hand power over to people who see no value in people like himself. It's about, as Elon says shifting the "Overton window". Slowly shift everything over to the right. A key step is to first cherry-pick and amplify legit instances of wrong. For example, historically there are 4000 large truck fatal collisions in the US. Yet when an Indian Sikh truck driver causes a death they immediately broadcast that. 20% of truck drivers are Indian, so we can surmise that all things equal, (4000 * .

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:17PM (#65748168)
    This is right wing extremists trying to take over every single possible media outlet in order to warp reality.

    There's the old joke, reality has a liberal bias.

    The right wing is extremely good at taking action because they are backed by billionaires who pay people to take action.

    So when reality disagrees with the right wing they pay people to change reality.

    I mean not really. You can't actually change reality. But if you have total and complete control of all media outlets you can do the next best thing.

    Now for us non-billionaire peons sooner or later reality comes calling. Your trans kid blows their head off because of the pressures. You get measles and you die. Screw worms kill millions of cattle and you can't afford hamburgers anymore let alone steak. You lose your job because Wall Street crashed after deregulation. Your 401k gets looted. Medicare gets cut and you die of a heart attack. Your daughter dies in childbirth because she couldn't get reproductive healthcare.

    I can go on and on and on. You can ignore reality for a very long time. Especially when you have an incentive like getting to act like an angry teenager.

    But sooner or later reality comes calling.

    And again the right wing knows this and they know that their policies and beliefs do not work in the real world so they have to deny reality as much as possible.

    Go look up Russian science fiction books. Not the Soviet ones that were cool and subversive but the ones put out by Putin now that he has absolute control of all media and russia. They are so weird and fucked up and they are not fun they're just fucked up propaganda.

    And if none of that gets your attention they're coming for your video games.
    • This is right wing extremists trying to take over every single possible media outlet in order to warp reality.

      This has always been the case for a very long time. The main difference now is that the right wing extremists are in power. To the victor goes the spoils, and the greatest spoil of them all is the truth. The right wing extremists also know that whoever yells the loudest gets to define truth to the uneducated masses.

      The right wing extremist have done very well in that they realize that the definitions of extremism are necessarily relative. So, yelling louder allows them to shift the perception among the

    • Agreed.

      There's the old joke, reality has a liberal bias.

      Perhaps because reality treats everything and everyone equally and that doesn't sit well with "Conservatives" and those on the Right, especially those, like Trump, who believe everything is a zero-sum game and there must be winners and losers.

  • by hamburger lady ( 218108 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:31PM (#65748212)

    >>Senator Ted Cruz sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding answers about what he termed "ideological bias." House Republicans opened an >>investigation into possible platform manipulation.

    why the fuck is a senator demanding answers from a private website about "ideological bias"

    • So he has something to distract his constituents from why he fled Texas when the people were freezing to death due to Abbott's and Ercot's incompetence.

      Also, because the Wikiepedia article about the battle at the Alamo explicitly states, "About one hundred Texians, wanting to defy Mexican law and maintain the institution of chattel slavery in their portion of Coahuila y Tejas by seeking secession from Mexico, . . ." To him, telling the truth is "liberal" bias.

    • Why is Ted persecuted?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    • Let's start referring to him by his given name Rafael Edward Cruz

  • Archive (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RevRagnarok ( 583910 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:33PM (#65748216) Homepage Journal

    Time to download your personal copy I guess.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Years ago I had an alternate OS for a clickwheel iPod that had it. That was something else!

  • by Grady Martin ( 4197307 ) on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:34PM (#65748218)

    What, is Slashdot too good to plug its own web site [slashdot.org] now?

    Sanger even links to Slashdot in the Nine Theses [larrysanger.org] mentioned (but not linked) in the summary.

  • It will be just like that, but this time with AI!

    They are not conservatives. They are cultists insisting that everyone accepts the reality that they made up in their minds. Whoever refuses to do so will have "consequences." That is all.

    • by caseih ( 160668 )

      Ha I essentially said the same thing a while back and someone came out of the woodwork to say i cosplay as a conservative! So bizarre. It really is 1984 where words have now taken on opposite meanings. War is peace, freedom is slavery. Doubleplus good.

  • Haha the comments are a -1 wasteland. Wonder if the admins are getting involved?

  • I'm out of popcorn. Could you guys hold on a couple minutes while I make more?

  • The less bias there is, the more extremists believe the only bias is in favor of their opponents.
  • definitely not in my lifetime and I'm pretty old

  • ...describe something as "biased", what they really mean is "they're telling everyone about all the stupid, evil things we're doing."

No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.

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