Aco-founder of Wikipedia is launching a competing website as a free-speech-friendly alternative to what he views as the increasingly monolithic left-wing bias of his former organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last May, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote an op-ed on his personal website<\/a> titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” claiming that Wikipedia’s neutrality policy \u2014 known as “NPOV,” or neutral point of view \u2014 “is dead.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, when schoolchildren visit the Wikipedia website to look up answers to questions about the meaning of socialism, “they’re going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject,” Sanger told “Just the News AM” television program. “And that’s really problematic. That’s not education. That’s propaganda.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sanger referred to a Fox News report<\/a> last week by Maxim Lott,<\/a> which noted, “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wikipedia’s socialism page<\/a> claims, “The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century,” Lott reported, but it “ignores a man-made famine<\/a> in which Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin commandeered the food from regions like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, leaving millions to starve to death even as the Soviet Union exported grain to foreign countries.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The press office of Wikepdia’s non-profit parent, Wikimedia Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First launched in 2001, Wikipedia was initially “truly committed to neutrality,” said Sanger. For about the first five or 10 years, he recalled, “you could go to articles on the most controversial topics of the day and the culture war, and you would find all sides being fairly represented.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n But about 10 years ago, he said, “as liberals made, or leftists made, their march through the institutions, Wikipedia became one of those influential institutions \u2026 and [the left] basically took it over.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n By then, Sanger said, Wikipedia started getting rid of citations from conservative sources, “even conservative sources that were cited in order to explain the conservative point of view.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n