Music Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. Guys, you're in for a real treat. We have the co-founder of Wikipedia, the guy who coined the term Larry Sanger. Larry, you've been on a tear recently about the issues with Wikipedia. You've called it as Beyond Repair. You recently took a page from Martin Luther's book and put your thesis about what's wrong with the site. I, let me, before we get started, I'll tell you my personal issues with that affected me in my life personally. First of all, it currently says right now that I am a Fox News contributor on my Wikipedia. I am not and have never been a Fox News contributor. This is a paid position and it will be very easy for someone looking at that to be like, oh, you're saying this because you work at Fox News, which would be a fair criticism. It's not the case. That's a very easy one. Another one was, and people watched the show know, for years it said on the show that my dad worked at Goldman Sachs. And when you followed the link, there was a hyperlink, you know, citation needed, right, the citation was an interview I did on Rogan talking about how I worked at Goldman Sachs. So it's not even ambiguous. And people came at me for a long time. Oh, your dad's funding the Ukraine war. You come from money. He worked at Merrill Lynch. He was a systems analyst. I don't even know what that is. The only reason I know the term is because on the Simpsons, when they did, you know, what jobs the kids would get is grown up. Martin, the nerd was sitting there going systems and all systems and all systems and all and he got systems and all things all

excited. So those are two little ones, a few little ones. I'll tell you a very funny one because it's just exciting to be able to tell you this story. My second favorite author is Stike and Favorite Public Speaker, rather is Friendly Boots. She's been in New Yorker for many years. She wrote two books of one the 70s, one in the 80s. And on her Wikipedia, it said that during the 70s, she

ghost wrote a gay porn novel. So on her Wikipedia, it said that during the 70s,

she goes throughout a gay porn novel.

So I'm like, all right, I'm going to track this book down. I tracked it down. It was not easy. There's not that many copies floating around. And due to my OCD, if I own a book, I will read it. So I read it. And she came here to Austin and I was so excited and this woman doesn't have a cell phone,

a computer or a typewriter. She's a huge lot. I very famously and I go up to her this woman doesn't have a cell phone, a computer or a typewriter.

She's a huge lot, I'd very famously.

And I go up to her, I'm all proud. I'm like, hey, am I the first person to ask you about this? And she goes, you're the second, I didn't write this. And I go, what do you mean? I go, it's on your Wikipedia. And you know what she did? And labor with us who does not have a computer

or a cell phone left in my face.

Because even she knew how stupid it was of me

to use Wikipedia as a source Right she signed it. She signed it house of leather. It was quite the read. There was a good plot Is he gonna escape the house of leather? I'm not gonna spoil it. There's like one copy for a thousand dollars on the internet I't pay that much. Point being people understand that Wikipedia is extremely flawed, and yet they still rely on it. So this disconnect is to me extremely troubling, especially as more and more people are outsourcing or thinking to things like that. So I would let you have the floor, because I'm sure have a lot of thoughts on this issue. People are using AI in the same way now, too. Thinking is hard, of course. I know this because I used to teach thinking as a college philosophy instructor instructor and yeah, yeah, the freshman are just really resentful of you making them, you know, actually figure out what they believe about difficult questions. And it's annoying. So, of course, we basically offload that responsibility to things that are at least proxies for authority, reliability, we hope that we could be the as right about this, you know, well, it's right about most stuff. For most people. Yeah. And it's the same way with chatbots. So I'm not really sure what you want me to tell you there other than that it is obviously especially today. If matters you have to check your sources and not just check that Wikipedia claims that there is a source but it's actually important that you you actually check the source itself. I mean I myself when I'm doing research I write about theology now. It'll give me direct quotes of some old ancient theologian. I won't trust it. I'll click on the link. I'll actually find the text itself on the page. If I'm not sure about that, about the translation or whatever, I'll look another one. And unfortunately, that takes a lot of effort, as I say, and we are lazy. So this is not to say anything about the bias or the reasons why Wikipedia has the problems that it does, but more to point the finger at us. And that's a good way to begin, I think,

to acknowledge that we actually bear a lot of responsibility. Well, I don't know about we, but let me ask you this. You were there at the very beginning. So can you please tell people what the vision was and how it kind of started going off the rails from your personal perspective. So, the original vision, I'll actually first tell you the assignment that Jimmy Wales gave me, right? So it was my job to start new pedia and then in the process of starting new pedia, I started Wikipedia. So this was my job. Jimmy Wells was managing many other things for bombists, which is the parent company. But he gave me instructions. So the instructions were, this should be a free encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to generally speaking, but we want it to be credible. That was certainly one of the requirements. And so we'll find experts and motivate them in various ways. I was told to read a lot of the theory behind open source software.

So I was told to read the cathedral and the bazaar, which you can look up. It's actually pretty important for internet history by Eric Raymond, who I follow on X, who is still like holding forth there. And very good essay and a good book that he developed it into. And it basically argued that when people work together online to build a good software, they actually can produce under the right circumstances. If they're organized in the right way, they can produce really great stuff. So the idea then was we would take the concept behind open source software and apply it to building an encyclopedia. So that was the very basic idea. And then my notion of it was Wikipedia was going to be ultimately enormous. I wanted it to be really big. I wanted to be very detailed. I wanted the articles actually, unlike as the case now, I wanted them to be checked by experts. This does not necessarily mean that they had to be approved by experts before they were posted online, but I wanted them eventually to be checked by expert and they'd get a little green check mark if they had been pure reviewed but someone. And I also wanted the end result to be, of course, open source. I've already mentioned that. And maybe as far as the theoretical ideals, the most important is neutrality. So, Newpedia began with this policy on lack of bias lack as we call it, and that became NPOV neutral point of view on Wikipedia. So the neutrality policy in a nutshell is if you can identify a point of controversy in an article, then it should be impossible to tell whether or what side of the controversy the authors at the article are on. So that's the rule of thumb. Wikipedia does not live up to that now in my opinion. So that was the idea. Okay. And I think it got about, I would say, halfway there. It got huge, that's for sure, but it wasn't very reliable. It was full of a lot of useful facts, that's true. And it does have a lot of expert-sourced information. It's not approved in any way by experts. And now, rather than being quite neutral and being a nice fair representation of the broad range of opinion from all around the world, which is the real goal of neutrality, Wikipedia tends to express what I would describe as the establishment point of view, not the neutral point of view. How and or rather when that really started happening, I mean, I think you can trace it back to events in the very first year of the project in the first couple of years. The first time when an article actually took a particular side on a culture war issue that I can remember was the article about global warming in 2005 when it simply said in Wikipedia's own voice that global warming was a fact and that it was created by human activity, by dumping carbon and the atmosphere. By 2010-2012, as I have been saying, and I think this is right, Wikipedia resembled in tone and outlook the BBC, the New York Times, that kind of thing, which at that time was already quite biased, but it wasn't

as biased as something like MSNBC or Fox News. But then in 2016, that's when I put it down to basically during the Trump's first election season and Brexit basically the word went out apparently to the media properties in the West at least that they were all to start opinionizing and telling people what to think in ways that they had never done before and Wikipedia followed suit. So Wikipedia became not just biased on one side, it actually in 2018 codified list of unapproved sources a list of unapproved sources from, and basically most conservative sources are not allowed. You can look that up on Wikipedia on the so-called perennial sources page.

So it's a list of sources that are essentially allowed and not allowed. It's all color coded. So I don't think things have gotten much better since then. I don't think they've gotten a lot worse in the last five years, but they I don't think they've

gotten a lot better. Wikipedia continues to basically reliably mouth whatever the Wikipedia

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