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I did not watch the interview, but it seems that Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia essentially since a little before his departure. He called it “broken bey

I did not watch the interview, but it seems that Sanger has been critical of Wikipedia essentially since a little before his departure. He called it “broken beyond repair” in 2007, mentioning that it doesn’t respect authority or expert opinion enough (yes, I read this on his Wikipedia entry).

Tomte 5y ago
He founded an alternative encyclopaedia that was focussed on experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium Very interesting concept, but it went nowhere.
- s_dev 5y ago
  Like Nupedia -- the predecessor to wikipedia. Founded by Wales and Sanger too.
arp242 5y ago
I knew it was going to be Sanger based on just the title. "Trust but verify" is a good strategy for Wikipedia; the idea that Wikipedia as a whole is "partisan" is kind of ridiculous, but there's no denying that it's not uncommon to be out-edited by someone with more zeal and spare time on their hands, and these people are not necessarily always there with the best of intentions. This has always been the case, since day 1, and these slants exist in all directions. If you read the accompanying article[1] Sanger wrote then it's plenty clear that he's coming at this from a very partisan stand; that's not necessarily a bad thing, although personally, I think Sanger's anger that Wikipedia doesn't give equal merit to Tucker Carlson's unhinged conspiracy theory that the Jan 6th riots were organised by the FBI to be ... well, unhinged. He's also angry it only presents the "Established" view on climate change. We can discus the merits of what he's saying at length, but at the core it points to a fundamental problem: people have profoundly different views on reality that are impossible to unify. This has always been the case to some degree; any article will have to curate the information, or you'll end up with the weirdest quackery in any medical article. But things have moved so far apart that you'll soon become Adolf Stalin: for the left you'll be Adolf Hitler and for the right you'll be Joseph Stalin. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. It's unworkable. Interestingly, Sanger's entire Citizendium project was based around this fact: "give due weight to the experts", but now he's criticizing that Wikipedia is only reporting "the facts from The Establishment". Hmmkay. Personally I mostly see Larry Sanger as Wikipedia's Eric S. Raymond: once did some okay-ish work, now an unhinged conspiracy theorist not worth paying too much attention to, but still riding on the glory of this thing he did 20 years ago. [1]: https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-than-ever/ https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
- myWindoonn 5y ago
  Yeah, Sanger's gone batshit, and it makes me regret ever contributing to Wikipedia. What's really interesting is the pattern: First he was skeptical of WP's ability to crowdsource its editing, then he felt that WP's NPOV was biased but wouldn't explain how, then he tried to get some sort of special paid editors to be even more neutral somehow? And now we're here, where it turns out that his complaints about neutrality were smokescreens for latent delusions and politically-motivated departures from reality. Maybe Sanger couldn't handle the fact that a community can produce thousands of free Featured Articles (community-verified high-quality WP articles) while he ran out of money trying to produce a few dozen.
  - arp242 5y ago
    > Sanger's gone batshit, and it makes me regret ever contributing to Wikipedia Sanger left Wikipedia over 20 years ago, he only worked on it in its first first year from earlier 2001 to early 2002. Besides, Sanger has always been a bit of a cook, on CZ he just outright rejected feminism as an academic field because it was too left-wing, never mind his love for all sorts of pseudoscience on CZ. It's hilarious, because he started an entire site based on expertise, and then just rejected this expertise if he didn't like it in all sorts of fields. This is the man that's we're supposed to take serious when he talks about Wikipedia? Pull me another one. Wikipedia has its fair share of issues, but CZ was outright and openly partisan in a way that Wikipedia never has been. A lot of it was scrubbed of nonsense after he left, but by then he already managed to chase off most experts he had initially recruited and the project was pretty much dead (I'm amazed it's still online today though, although the only real edits in the last 30 days is one person editing the Peter Jackson page).
vcavallo 5y ago
Why are you commenting if you didn’t take in the content of the link? The little fact you drop here for some reason is right there in the video description.
- stillbourne 5y ago
  There's this little thing called prior history. This video may be new but the opinions espoused by Sanger are not. SirensOfTitan mentions as much in his comment. You only need to watch the first few seconds to realize his opinion hasn't changed. Sanger complains about trolls on the site but Sanger himself is a bit of a troll as he once reported the wiki commons org to the FBI for hosting child porn, it turned out to be depictions of child abuse but not actually porn. Many accused him of doing this simply because his own wikipedia alternatives were failing at the time.
  - vcavallo 5y ago
    What's your point? I'm saying that SirensOfTitan's comment adds nothing that isn't already present in the linked video (and he freely admits that he didn't watch it) and therefore really serves no purpose (other than to boast, "I know things about this topic already _and_ I don't even need to watch the video".) Your defense of SirensOfTitan's comment's supposed utility is to make your own tangential point which does nothing to argue that the original comment is valuable. So I maintain: What was the point of SiresOfTitan's comment?
    - stillbourne 5y ago
      The point is when someone has already established themselves as an idiot its pretty easy to dismiss them. The utility SirensOfTitan's comment is informing us that the person in question has already established himself to be an idiot. It is therefore relevant because anything the video says is already suspect, it can easily be dismissed. You don't have to go far in the video to establish this as the first statement in the video is a balance fallacy.
      - 5y ago

Tomte 5y ago

He founded an alternative encyclopaedia that was focussed on experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium Very interesting concept, but it went nowhere.

s_dev 5y ago
Like Nupedia -- the predecessor to wikipedia. Founded by Wales and Sanger too.

arp242 5y ago

I knew it was going to be Sanger based on just the title. "Trust but verify" is a good strategy for Wikipedia; the idea that Wikipedia as a whole is "partisan" is kind of ridiculous, but there's no denying that it's not uncommon to be out-edited by someone with more zeal and spare time on their hands, and these people are not necessarily always there with the best of intentions. This has always been the case, since day 1, and these slants exist in all directions. If you read the accompanying article[1] Sanger wrote then it's plenty clear that he's coming at this from a very partisan stand; that's not necessarily a bad thing, although personally, I think Sanger's anger that Wikipedia doesn't give equal merit to Tucker Carlson's unhinged conspiracy theory that the Jan 6th riots were organised by the FBI to be ... well, unhinged. He's also angry it only presents the "Established" view on climate change. We can discus the merits of what he's saying at length, but at the core it points to a fundamental problem: people have profoundly different views on reality that are impossible to unify. This has always been the case to some degree; any article will have to curate the information, or you'll end up with the weirdest quackery in any medical article. But things have moved so far apart that you'll soon become Adolf Stalin: for the left you'll be Adolf Hitler and for the right you'll be Joseph Stalin. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. It's unworkable. Interestingly, Sanger's entire Citizendium project was based around this fact: "give due weight to the experts", but now he's criticizing that Wikipedia is only reporting "the facts from The Establishment". Hmmkay. Personally I mostly see Larry Sanger as Wikipedia's Eric S. Raymond: once did some okay-ish work, now an unhinged conspiracy theorist not worth paying too much attention to, but still riding on the glory of this thing he did 20 years ago. [1]: https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-than-ever/ https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...

myWindoonn 5y ago
Yeah, Sanger's gone batshit, and it makes me regret ever contributing to Wikipedia. What's really interesting is the pattern: First he was skeptical of WP's ability to crowdsource its editing, then he felt that WP's NPOV was biased but wouldn't explain how, then he tried to get some sort of special paid editors to be even more neutral somehow? And now we're here, where it turns out that his complaints about neutrality were smokescreens for latent delusions and politically-motivated departures from reality. Maybe Sanger couldn't handle the fact that a community can produce thousands of free Featured Articles (community-verified high-quality WP articles) while he ran out of money trying to produce a few dozen.
- arp242 5y ago
  > Sanger's gone batshit, and it makes me regret ever contributing to Wikipedia Sanger left Wikipedia over 20 years ago, he only worked on it in its first first year from earlier 2001 to early 2002. Besides, Sanger has always been a bit of a cook, on CZ he just outright rejected feminism as an academic field because it was too left-wing, never mind his love for all sorts of pseudoscience on CZ. It's hilarious, because he started an entire site based on expertise, and then just rejected this expertise if he didn't like it in all sorts of fields. This is the man that's we're supposed to take serious when he talks about Wikipedia? Pull me another one. Wikipedia has its fair share of issues, but CZ was outright and openly partisan in a way that Wikipedia never has been. A lot of it was scrubbed of nonsense after he left, but by then he already managed to chase off most experts he had initially recruited and the project was pretty much dead (I'm amazed it's still online today though, although the only real edits in the last 30 days is one person editing the Peter Jackson page).

vcavallo 5y ago

Why are you commenting if you didn’t take in the content of the link? The little fact you drop here for some reason is right there in the video description.

stillbourne 5y ago
There's this little thing called prior history. This video may be new but the opinions espoused by Sanger are not. SirensOfTitan mentions as much in his comment. You only need to watch the first few seconds to realize his opinion hasn't changed. Sanger complains about trolls on the site but Sanger himself is a bit of a troll as he once reported the wiki commons org to the FBI for hosting child porn, it turned out to be depictions of child abuse but not actually porn. Many accused him of doing this simply because his own wikipedia alternatives were failing at the time.
- vcavallo 5y ago
  What's your point? I'm saying that SirensOfTitan's comment adds nothing that isn't already present in the linked video (and he freely admits that he didn't watch it) and therefore really serves no purpose (other than to boast, "I know things about this topic already _and_ I don't even need to watch the video".) Your defense of SirensOfTitan's comment's supposed utility is to make your own tangential point which does nothing to argue that the original comment is valuable. So I maintain: What was the point of SiresOfTitan's comment?
  - stillbourne 5y ago
    The point is when someone has already established themselves as an idiot its pretty easy to dismiss them. The utility SirensOfTitan's comment is informing us that the person in question has already established himself to be an idiot. It is therefore relevant because anything the video says is already suspect, it can easily be dismissed. You don't have to go far in the video to establish this as the first statement in the video is a balance fallacy.
    - 5y ago