The honeymoon period was short-lived: by 2002, Sanger had left the project. He expressed skepticism about the fully participatory model and maintained – in line with the original intuition behind Nupedia – that intellectual authority remained necessary. Already, he was alarmed to see that certain administrators were assuming undue authority over occasional contributors and setting themselves up as a knowledge caste simply because of their mastery of the platform.
In the beginning, the ambition was revolutionary: to allow everyone to contribute to a global encyclopedia while demanding strict adherence to “neutral point of view”. This principle does not imply that all opinions are equally valid; it requires that they be presented fairly when they are seriously defended and properly sourced.
That was the true originality of Wikipedia. The encyclopedia was not meant to tell readers what to think, but to present the current state of knowledge and ongoing debates. Twenty-five years later, Larry Sanger believes that this principle has all but disappeared. He is the most prominent victim of a machine that has run amok.
Censorship ran rampant against him when he sought to create the WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, a group aimed at reintroducing conservative, religious or pro-Israel viewpoints that he believes have been marginalized by a “left-wing mafia” that has seized control of Wikipedia. For announcing this initiative on X and inviting his followers to participate in the debate, he was accused of attempting to exert outside influence on an internal discussion and ultimately banned from his own platform.
Sanger sees his ban as a knee-jerk reaction from a system that has become hostile to any challenge to its dominant narrative. He is not alone in this situation. In March, Samuel Le Goff, former president of Wikimedia France and a contributor for nearly 20 years, also announced his departure and denounced the “toxic” dynamics of the French-speaking community.
In an interview he gave to the French weekly Le Point, Sanger went so far as to call on donors to suspend their financial support for Wikipedia until its governance has been thoroughly reformed.
Wikipedia's New Priesthood
The problem is not so much the presence of activists online – which is hard to avoid – as the role of moderators who control the platform and enforce the official line. The English-language version has millions of users. But only 833 administrators have extensive rights, and a mere 62 accounts hold the most sensitive roles: conflict resolution, technical identity verification and the appointment of administrators. Only nine of them display a full name – the others are anonymous: this is the “mafia” denounced by Sanger.
Gradually, a veritable editorial aristocracy has taken shape, even though officially no one runs Wikipedia. In the collective imagination, Wikipedia remains a space where anyone can freely correct errors.
The reality is quite different. On sensitive topics, edits are closely monitored by a handful of particularly active contributors. Internal procedures have become so complex that they discourage most newcomers. Decisions are based on endless discussions in which seniority, mastery of the rules and informal networks often carry more weight than simple common sense. This concentration of power is all the more troubling because it largely escapes the public eye.
The Politics of Acceptable Sources
But what Sanger criticizes is not just the power wielded by a select few. Wikipedia’s lock-in today also stems largely from the central issue of how sources are treated and prioritized, which places the encyclopedia at the heart of the battle for information.
To be considered valid, a Wikipedia article must cite sources from major news outlets. This effectively outsources the encyclopedia’s neutrality to the mainstream media. What is permitted in major newspapers will be permitted on Wikipedia, which has set in motion a formidable machine of ideological conformity, preventing any debate or controversy from taking place on a sound basis for discussion. Unorthodox arguments therefore stand no chance of emerging in the face of a barrage of criticism against what is viewed as a conspiracy theory.
Controversial issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden affair and the death of Charlie Kirk have laid bare this formidable system of bias. Wikipedia has had the effect of cementing consensus around a single authorized narrative and thus, paradoxically, of radicalizing positions.
Larry Sanger asserts that the encyclopedia now systematically presents controversial topics from a progressive worldview. Immigration, gender identity, climate change, religion, populism, racial issues: on all these topics, he believes that certain positions are implicitly considered legitimate while others are relegated to the margins, even when defended by recognized researchers, intellectuals or political leaders.
The Authority of the Encyclopedia
Of course, Sanger’s critics have their own take on the matter. They can point to evidence of the generally high quality of Wikipedia’s work. As early as 2005, a study by the journal Nature, comparing 42 scientific articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica, concluded that the two sources contained a similar number of errors. Across a wide range of fields, Wikipedia maintains an extremely respectable level of reliability. Nevertheless, Wikipedia cannot escape the dynamics of power and power struggles.
After all, should this come as a surprise? In the years leading up to the French Revolution, the heart of intellectual France beat to the rhythm of the publication of articles in the Encyclopédie, a colossal undertaking to compile human knowledge led by the philosophers Diderot and d’Alembert. But their goal was not merely to make the knowledge of their time accessible to all. It was, above all, political: to denounce royal absolutism and to shake the foundations of the thousand-year-old French monarchy through polemical articles such as “Political Authority”, “Power” and “Tyranny”.
A Cognitive Monopoly
Wikipedia has become a political force whose influence cannot be ignored. With its hundreds of millions of readers, its duty to remain impartial has become increasingly demanding, and it has failed to live up to its promises. Wikipedia has become a major cognitive infrastructure for millions of people – more than traditional encyclopedias ever had.
Its articles feed into Google, voice assistants and artificial intelligence engines and are cited daily by journalists, students and even some public officials. An error on Wikipedia is no longer just one error among many, since it can instantly reverberate throughout the entire digital ecosystem. Under these circumstances, even the slightest editorial bias takes on considerable political significance.
This is precisely why Larry Sanger’s ouster constitutes a major event. An institution truly committed to pluralism would have welcomed its co-founder’s criticism as an opportunity for self-reflection and would have agreed to reexamine its procedures. It chose a different path – that of excluding the critic – a disastrous choice that confirms precisely what observers of Wikipedia’s evolution have been denouncing for years: an organization increasingly unable to tolerate dissent when it challenges established ideological balances.
Wikipedia’s paradox is ultimately that of the betrayed promises of the liberal world and modernity: having begun as a bold champion of free speech, it has ended up unable to tolerate dissent.
