New Delhi: Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, has weighed in on a fiery debate—the purported prevalence of “Wikipedia’s bias against India” — citing a “research paper” by OpIndia, a right-wing news outlet.
“There has been a lot of (as far as I can tell, well-justified) criticism about Wikipedia’s bias against Israel. There is less talk about Wikipedia’s bias against Hindus. But the evidence is there, too,” he wrote on X on 30 September, with a link to the OpIndia paper.
Ashley Rindsberg, who, according to his X bio, works on exposing the “Wikipedia crisis,” also weighed in— “The anti-India/anti-Hindu editing on Wikipedia is a major story I’m covering,” he wrote.
While his reportage on Wikipedia’s supposed anti-India and anti-Hindu bias is yet to be shared on his Substack, Rindsberg and Sanger are part of a collection of people advocating against what has been called the “ideological hijacking” of the online resource. Wikipedia has been built on a foundation of straightforward, open-access information, but they argue that a left-liberal bias is corrupting the editors’ framing of information on the online encyclopedia.
Sanger, who also has a PhD in philosophy, routinely calls out Wikipedia for its supposed entrenched biases.
“The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone,” he said in an interview with US right-wing outlet Fox News in February 2021. “Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work.”
The examples put forth by him were the Wikipedia pages on socialism and communism—which, said Fox News, is 28,000 words long but neglects to mention genocides and famines which took place due to communist revolutions, such as under Josef Stalin.
Also read: Why shouldn’t you be treated a publisher, govt asks Wikipedia after complaints of bias
‘The India bias’
Wikipedia is becoming a polarising affair in India as well. The article published by OpIndia claims to expose the encyclopedia’s anti-India leanings through the ties of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organisation.
“Wikimedia Foundation has intimate financial connections with the clandestine Tides Foundation, which is accused of funding the pro-Hamas protests in US Universities along with George Soros,” reads the report. “Wikimedia and Tides Foundation also fund several organisations, which specifically work against the interests of India and undermine its sovereignty on various levels.”
“Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has categorically stated as well that Wikipedia has a pronounced Left bias. In several interviews and talks, he has spoken extensively about how Wikipedia skews the scale of balance, leading to the information being an inaccurate representation of reality, ridden with Left bias,” writes OpIndia editor-in-chief Nupur Sharma in the introduction.
In fact, Sharma has also interviewed Sanger. In 2020, she hosted him on OpIndia’s podcast—Reality Bytes.
“Between 2015 and now, they’ve made a steep decline in terms of how biased they were,” he told her, also referring to how “closed a community it is.”
“They don’t even make claims anymore to be an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
An article in American tech magazine Wired looks at Wikipedia’s offshoots—right-wing organisations that have sprung from the same premise—in an attempt to create a fresh information source free of a “liberal” bias. This includes Conservapedia, Metapedia and Infogalactic. While the 2017 article suggested that these were yet to become mainstream, billionaire Elon Musk has just announced Grokpedia—which will be built on similar grounds.
“Join @xAI and help build Grokpedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia!” Musk wrote on X. “This will be available to the public with no limits on use.”
The accompanying image consists of an animated ghost brandishing a weapon, on the verge of attacking a Wikipedia-marked door. The ghostly head, of course, belongs to a grinning Musk—a photo of whom has been pasted on the animation.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
It would be useful to see this research paper. OpIndia is an extremely biased news source deeply cynical towards minorities. It has know to have verifiably published fake new and hate speech. Its research should be carefully examined before being accepted.
Wikipedia has been in the governments crosshair for sometime now and this seems more like an attempt to further denigrate it as a source of information.
That’s been pretty obvious. Wikipedia is a tool of the radical left and there are great investigative journalists who have exposed Wikipedia.
I mean “Al Jazeera” is considered a reliable source. So that should tell you everything.