The world’s largest encyclopedia was overrun by bias and censorship—and pushed me out when I tried to fix it. //
Twenty-five years ago, I co-founded Wikipedia, arguably the most important encyclopedia in human history. On Monday, I was indefinitely banned from the site. The story of what happened to me is, in many ways, the story of our censorious times, in which independent thinking is seen as a threat rather than a virtue, and punished as such. //
How could this happen to a supposedly neutral encyclopedia that anybody can edit? It goes back to a fundamental problem with the site: Wikipedia has never developed a community charter. Instead, it operates under vague, collaboratively written rules that are interpreted by an all-powerful class of “admin” moderators beholden more to each other than to any constitutional framework. It is rule by an anonymous mob, and not even a large one; of about 800 administrator accounts, only about 400 are active. //
In one of life’s quirky ironies, two hours after I was kicked off the site I founded, I was at a gala dinner in lower Manhattan, accepting a Tablet magazine Sinai Award, which honors individuals who have acted courageously to promote freedom. What was the award for? Co-founding Wikipedia, and attempting to reform it.
In my acceptance speech, I told the story I have just told you. And as I said then, the last few days have been filled with a mixture of bemusement and shock. But my life has had a lot of controversies like this because, as a general rule, I stand on several principles, no matter who they bother:
- There is an objective truth.
- Knowledge is one of the most important things in life, and it ought to be made available for free, if at all possible.
- Knowledge projects must absolutely be neutral.
Wikipedia changed the world. But its tragedy is that it grew so large that it sucked most of the air out of competing projects and, even as it grew to dominance, it was taken over by ideologues and shills who co-opted it for propaganda purposes. For those people, the temerity to try to recruit people from outside their weird clique was an unpardonable sin.
Unfortunately for them, I don’t particularly care.
Over the past year, I have fought tirelessly to reform Wikipedia because its founding mission is more important today than ever before. Information is the most valuable currency in any society, and the ability of citizens to access, evaluate, and learn from a diversity of viewpoints is essential to a free civilization. Yet Wikipedia’s yearslong shift away from that principle—toward ideological gatekeeping and narrative control—undermines the very purpose for which it was created. //
In the long term, I’d like to archive all the world’s free encyclopedias, to make them available in a single format and share them across a truly decentralized network, like the old-fashioned internet. Wikipedia needs a competitor—or, perhaps, a system of competitors.
The company I created may no longer uphold its own founding principles, but people still want and need the kind of knowledge Wikipedia was built to provide. They deserve more than one place to look for it.
