Wikipedia Cofounder Larry Sanger Banned From Site for 'Canvassing'
14 213Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger has been indefinitely banned from editing the site after editors concluded that he violated its canvassing rules, "or in other words, calling on his followers off platform in order to influence Wikipedia's content," reports 404 Media. Sanger says the ban proves Wikipedia suppresses ideological diversity, while editors argue he was trying to mobilize an outside audience to influence internal decisions and had ignored an earlier warning. From the report: The discussion that led to the decision to ban Sanger concluded with what an editor called a "clear consensus" to ban Sanger. "There is general agreement among participants that he has engaged in off-wiki canvassing and is not here to constructively build the encyclopedia," the editor said in a note closing the discussion. "There is also a significant concern shared by many editors that his actions constitute calls for outing."
While Sanger has been railing about bias on Wikipedia for years, the specific issue here is around his WikiProject Intellectual Diversity. WikiProjects are group efforts among Wikipedia volunteers to deal with certain issues on the site. [...] Sanger's WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, as its name implies, aims to bring more intellectual diversity to the site, mostly meaning more right-leaning perspectives. Sanger's WikiProject Intellectual Diversity and its goals alone do not merit a ban according to Wikipedia's policies. The problem, according to Wikipedia editors, is that during the discussion about whether to allow WikiProject Intellectual Diversity to become an official WikiProject, Sanger invited his 91,000 followers on X to influence that discussion.
Discussions about potential bans are supposed to remain open for at least 72 hours. While consensus that Sanger had violated Wikipedia policies was clear, Sanger was banned at some point before that deadline. He was then briefly unbanned, and then again indefinitely banned once 72 hours had elapsed and the discussion about the ban closed. "Wikipedia has become more of a mob-rule anarchy than ever," Sanger said in a statement sent to me by a spokesperson. "In the kangaroo court in which a mob ousted me, Wikipedia's administrators showed that they don't appear to value details like formal charges, a designated prosecutor, basic decorum, distinction between prosecution and judge, dispassionate adjudication, and so forth. They have no proper system other than triggering a mob to selectively enforce their hodgepodge of vague rules."
"Now that same mob has blocked me for trying to bring an intellectually diverse group of thinkers and editors to the site," Sanger continued. "Subscribing to their groupthink is now an official requirement of being a member in good standing. Something must change, and now. I only wonder if the system as it currently stands can even allow the discourse necessary to fix the system."
14 comments
Re:Indefinitely abandoned the original design (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @08:09PM (#66206922)
So your definition of a Marxist is somebody who doesn't believe in Marxism, and you can't see your mistake there? Marxists love to talk about the cultural side of Marxism pushing equality and minority rights, it's just that lots of fascists like to pretend that all minority rights are inherently Marxist (which is flattering to a Marxist, but stupid to anyone else)..
Re: Indefinitely abandoned the original design (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Himmy32 ( 650060 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @12:10PM (#66207850)
I find great irony in your creating a bad "modern Marxist" which is someone who creates strawmen.
Don't jump to conclusions (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @05:13PM (#66206654)
If you're not a regular Wikipedian and you're not familiar with Larry Sanger, I encourage you to read up.
His history speaks for itself.
Re: Don't jump to conclusions (Score: 5, Informative)
by fabiomb ( 5315421 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @10:48PM (#66207066)
you can't have just the "socialist" point of view, having a different aproach is not "Fox News", nobody outside the US watch that channel and we know a few things about socialism that americans don't (just because a lot of countries suffered that system and you never)
Re: Don't jump to conclusions (Score: 5, Informative)
by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @04:13AM (#66207272)
"Fox News" isn't about having a different approach. It's about artificially equalizing bullshit extreme viewpoints with mainstream educated viewpoints. American media (and American viewers) have suffered from this policy for decades now. It's why debates about flat earth, climate change, evolution etc exist endemically in that country.
Re: Don't jump to conclusions (Score: 5, Insightful)
by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @04:36AM (#66207306)
It isn't "bad mouthing" an ideology to clearly indicate the consistent ideological association of that ideology with state-sponsored genocide.
Yet another person doesn't know what Socialism is. May I suggest reading the Wikipedia entry instead of Fox News?
Re: Don't jump to conclusions (Score: 5, Informative)
by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @09:24AM (#66207550)
Those policies aren't Socialism, and the countries you're thinking of are Democratic-Capitalist Republics.
Re:The Hive mind (Score: 5, Insightful)
by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @11:28PM (#66207086)
Seems pretty factual and unbiased to me?
People keep thinking truth and science should be "balanced" and "fair" , but reality doesn't work by that. A scientific truth doesn't have sides and it doesnt function by debate. A thing is true or it isn't, and while the scientific process is a fundamentally statistical beast, its always been a process of pushing the knowledge curve against well defined asympotes. Its never had an obligation to pay attention to the opinions of the illeducated or dishonest. Because science doesnt deal with opinions, it deals with experiments and results.
Debates are for social media not scientific discourse. Sure there are robust exchanges of conflicting papers and studies where uncertainty exists, but it bears no resemblance to the shouty name calling and exchange of thought-terminating cliches that dominate social media. Science doesnt debate, and neither does wikipedia. The truth is not democratic.
Re: Don't jump to conclusions (Score: 5, Interesting)
by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @10:30PM (#66207054)
Science is intrinsically progressive and anti-conservative. It is used to develop new knowledge that overturns existing knowledge. Inasmuch as progressive=left and conservative=right, truth has a left leaning bias. That said, left does not always equal progressive and right doesn't always equal conservative.
Re:Just to clarify one point (Score: 5, Informative)
by ObliviousGnat ( 6346278 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:48PM (#66207026)
Indeed, but we must be diligent in being intolerant of the intolerant or we will lose our freedoms. [wikipedia.org]
Re: Sanger's Wikipedia page (Score: 5, Insightful)
by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @11:05PM (#66207076)
Couple-three answers:
1. No, of course not.
2. More and more it describes where Republicans are being let by the nose, away from traditional conservative topics, which _certainly should have a place in any informed and putatively neutral discussion. Why the right has turned to bullshit sauce lately is beyond me. They used to have ideas worth discussing. Not just lies, hate and bigotry. Look at the leaders. They're flacking this.
3. These lunatic topics (including climate change denial, which someone else was kind enough to point out) are what's being excluded when someone plays the "left-wing-bias" tune. For people making this noise "left-wing-bias" is stiff that looks like factual science-backed fairly neutral reporting. Y'know, like we used to have before the world went nuts.
Wikipedia functions as a tyranny of the dedicated (Score: 5, Interesting)
by AIXadmin ( 10544 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:07PM (#66206984)
Wikipedia’s governance is fundamentally broken, operating less like an open meritocracy and more as a tyranny of the dedicated. The platform purports to represent a massive global community of editors, yet its most critical systemic policies are routinely captured by a fraction of a percent of that pool. A stark case in point is the ratification of the English Wikipedia's binding AI content guideline (WP:LLM), which was enacted following a Request for Comment that closed with just 44 votes in favor out of tens of thousands of active contributors. This structural failure stems from an intense "time tax": navigating dense internal bureaucracies and litigating talk pages requires a massive, asymmetric availability of free time. Domain experts and casual contributors are systematically filtered out, leaving policy-making to a self-selecting oligarchy of hyper-active insiders. Ultimately, the system fails because it treats sheer endurance as a proxy for consensus, allowing the rules of the web's primary reference engine to be dictated by whoever has the bandwidth to outlast everyone else.
Just make your own website. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by SlashDotCanSuckMy777 ( 6182618 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:12PM (#66206992)
Unfortunately every time Conservatives try this it turns into a shit hole, and no one uses it. Or it becomes like twitter - also a shit hole.
Reality is left leaning and no amount trying to distort it will change that.
Re: Does anyone trust Wikipedia? (Score: 5, Informative)
by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @10:38PM (#66207060)
Wikipedia is far more reliable and unbiased than a typical search results page. Your crazy politics are glaringly obvious.