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Larry Sanger Quotes (1968-)
About Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is the co-founder of Wikipedia. He left Wikipedia in 2002 after becoming critical of the project and has founded or worked for other online organisations.
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βThey have no class.β
βIt's mob rule and it has been basically since I left.β
βThe best thing we can do basically is to supply alternatives and make them better and better and better.β
βA few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated.β
βThey seem not to realize that it is possible to dispute what the facts are, as if they were in all cases absolutely obvious.β
βWikipedia is so ironic. We wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but what emerged was one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.β
βI actually think that the mechanisms just of people acting like jerks and driving off decent people who want a neutral reference, that's enough to explain the biasβ
βI wish they spend it in more sensible ways like they could be adding ... a feedback system for the public that does not require the public to actually interact with these insane wikipedians, that would be a start.β
βThere is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length.
Man makes plans, and God laughs.β
Man makes plans, and God laughs.β
βWikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated).β
βOne thing that i would recommend, go to Everipedia, edit the article about the Delhi riots: that would be really interesting if you do that, once it is developed give me a link to it and I would be curious to see how the article differs from the Wikipedia article.β
βIt's become both opaque and centralized, centralized in the sense that the authority to participate in Wikipedia has been greatly restricted. You can be completely anonymous and even be a top-ranked Wikipedia user with administrator rights. So, they could be working for various corporations, various government spy agencies, maybe for criminal organizations.β
βFalse balance... according to which on some topics the facts are known and if you actually try to let people make up their own minds by themselves by presenting one side and then another side in a balanced fashion then you are committing the sin of false balance, and wikipedia has absolutely abandoned the neutrality policy by endorsing that journalistic canard.β
βJimmy Wales is right. We did originally adopt the neutrality policy to foster "a culture of thoughtful diplomatic honesty." In other words, the way to keep the peace among a radically diverse set of contributors is not to declare winners and losers. But that is only one reason we adopted the policy. There was another key reason: as I have explained, no one has a right to make up your mind for you, especially in an open, global project.β
βBasically, the Left tends to invade open institutions, it's been their modus-operandi for the last hundred years. Basically, invading open institutions and subverting them, dominating them, and freezing out anyone who dissents their views. I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious 10 years ago, now it's just embarrassing... Now there is an official view about pretty much everything...β
βIf you are an admin, or if you just have a lot of pull because you are popular because you have a lot of views and stroke the right backs, if you are in the in-crowd then you have a lot more authority in the system. It is mob rule and it has been since I left. Although it was become more organised in many ways. There is a veneer of rather strict bureaucracy β a set of rules and functions applied in an arbitrary way. You can detect a pattern, but itβs a political pattern. Not a principled pattern.β
Larry Sanger Quotes by Topic
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Larry Sanger on Wikipedia 11 quotes
βWikipedia is so ironic. We wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but what emerged was one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.β
Larry Sanger on Citizendium 3 quotes
βCitizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia.β
Larry Sanger on Truth in Numbers?
βNot too bad, from what I saw.β
Larry Sanger on Wikisource
βThe hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? We'd want to complement Project Gutenberg--how, exactly?β
Larry Sanger on Knowledge
βI draw [a] distinction between knowledge and information. You can find information online very easily. Knowledge is another matter altogether. Now, this is not something new about the Internet [but] a basic feature of human life that while information is easy, knowledge is difficult. There has never been a shortage of mere data and opinion in human life. Itβs a very old observation that the most ignorant people are usually full of opinions, while many of the most knowledgeable people are full of doubt. Other people are certainly sources of knowledge, but they are also sources of half-truths, confusion, misinformation, and lies. If we simply want information from others, it is easy to get; if we want knowledge in any strong sense of the word, it is very difficult.β
Larry Sanger on Arbitration Committee (Wikipedia)
βIt is more than just a mob now. It is a mob in the sense that there is real internal political authority being wielded and no regularised fair, democratic way of determining who should have that authority. The arbitration committee elections are a joke. You cannot know, announce, reveal the identities of the most of administrators on Wikipedia... you don't know who those people are and if you don't know, there is no accountability. It is a self-contained system. If it just so happened that one of the leading administrators on Wikipedia is a convicted paedophile, sitting in prison right now, in some prison where they let prisoners use the internet, that does not make any difference because there is no way of finding that out. That bothers me. That does not make it a mob. What makes it a mob is the combination of lack of a fair democratic process of determining who those in charge would be and lack of a fair application of rules, there is no rule of law in Wikipedia. They try to make it look like there is since they keep citing these alphabets soup of acronyms which is short for policies, but the way in which these policies are applied is arbitrary.β
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About Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (born July 16, 1968) is the co-founder of Wikipedia. He left Wikipedia in 2002 after becoming critical of the project and has founded or worked for other online organisations.