No, Wikipedia isn’t biased, except toward reality

Wikipedia is a trusted, neutral resource for basic facts, with over 6 billion articles, and a quarter of a trillion page views in the last 12 months alone. Long gone are the days when it was considered a weak resource. And Wikipedia itself makes it clear that its written articles are not to be considered definitive, but strongly recommends going to the cited references. Studies have found that the more times an article is edited, the more factual and less biased it becomes, and that when comparing Encyclopedia Brittanica's articles to the equivalent length introductions to Wikipedia, they are equally unbiased.

Recently, right-wing media has been frothily pushing a story from a self-described co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger. Headlines have been blaring from Fox News and similar sites that "Wikipedia is a broken system" and that it "scrapped neutrality, and favors lefty politics". He published this in a blog post recently and right-wing media and right-wingers in generally have been leaping upon it. Questions are being asked about it in Quora, which brought it to my attention, not being a regular reader of right-wing propaganda.

But here's the thing. Sanger is a disaffected crank on the subject of Wikipedia. And he's a far-right loon: Trump lover, global warming denier, anti-vaxxer, quack medicine, fundie Christian, anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion.

Jimmy Wales disputes his co-founder status, something Sanger keeps trying to leverage for personal gain. Sanger was an employee. Sanger has tried to build a bunch of replacements to Wikipedia and failed every time. Sanger has been bitterly criticizing Wikipedia since at least 2004. He is the online information equivalent of Patrick Moore, who uses his false claim of being a co-founder of Greenpeace to get money to spout climate change denial.

Sanger's blog post makes it clear that he's fallen into #QAnon territory. He actually thinks #Obamagate is a thing as opposed to conspiracy ideation from Trump. He thinks Hillary's emails should be listed on Obama's Wikipedia page. He thinks the failure of a solar company should be listed on Obama's Wikipedia page.

Sanger is upset that Trump's impeachment gets a lot of coverage and that the Wikipedia pieces devotes a bunch of time to Trump's pathological lying, a defining characteristic of the man and his Presidency.

He gets his panties in a twist that the article on abortion doesn't castigate it and that the LGBTQ adoption article doesn't list all of the reasons why homophobes think it's a bad idea. He really hates the accurate, not dogmatic view of the life of Jesus, and the historically described process of the creation and editing of the stories of the life of Jesus.

Apparently Sanger is a climate change denier and anti-vaxxer as well, something that goes with the territory for right-wing cranks these days. He complains that articles on global warming and MMR don't reference climate change deniers or anti-vaxx arguments. This after protesting bitterly in the opening that Wikipedia had endorsed the 'utterly corrupt canard of journalistic false balance'. Yes, Sanger tries to butter both sides of that piece of toast. Typically, he's also upset that alternative medicine — homeopathy, naturopathy and the like — are described as pseudoscience. Sanger is a crank on all subjects.

A commenter on Quora described themselves as a co-alumni of Sanger's alma mater, private Reed College in Oregon. They report that the alumni message boards saw Sanger's vileness on full display, and that everything I've said above is accurate.

It's a wonder anyone would hire this guy for anything. He's so divorced from reality as to be a danger to himself and those around him. Of course, someone else pointed out the story of Norma McCorvey, AKA Jane Roe. She was the Roe in Roe vs. Wade, and famously became an anti-abortion protestor years later, featured in Christian anti-abortion rallies. Except her death bed confession in a documentary that aired recently made it clear that she did it for the money, something confirmed by multiple sources in the anti-abortion movement. She took the money and said what they wanted her to say. There continue to be no shortage of deep-pocketed right-wing sources of funding to cranks with credentials. Patrick Moore was mentioned earlier. He makes his living the same way, although a deathbed mea culpa isn't likely.

Wikipedia is an excellent, neutral resource. That Republicans and Trumpists hate it is actually indicative of its inherently factual basis. That's a fundamental point I made in the article, The Unreliable Narrator Perspective and Snopes, over a year ago.

The people claiming that Politifact and Snopes are not honest arbiters of truth have at best a tangential relationship to truth themselves. […] By the UNP measure, Politifact and Snopes are gold standard. They are only attacked by people who couldn't pick truth out of a police lineup consisting of truth, Satan, the Easter Bunny and Don Corleone.

The points I made about Politifact and Snopes apply equally to Wikipedia.

Based on Sanger's dyspeptic blog post, it's clear that he's an indicator of the merits of Wikipedia, not an indicator of its failings.

Once again, conservatives are complaining that reality has a strong liberal bias.