Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#91

Post by postflopclarity » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #60

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often mention anecdotes like that when Wikipedia is discussed, but I made a few changes to pages over the years and never had any issues. I took care to follow the rules, and the changes were usually accepted; when they weren't, it was always for reasonable reasons, even if I didn't always agree with them.

That was my initial experience, too. As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text. Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with…

indeed. the field I was trying to improve tend to attract a lot of cranks and trisectors. the topics are not "contentious" in the typical political sense but the pages are closely guarded by very stubborn and uninformed retiree flatearther types.

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#92

Post by JdeBP » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

There is a long history here, and if you are looking at just the WikiProject and the community ban discussion, you are missing a Hell of a lot.

Very short background:

Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2003.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/707321

Sanger went on to set up Citizendium, a wiki encyclopaedia project organized the way that xe thought one should be organized, with an extensive rulebase and 'constables'. Sanger's edits on Wikipedia were sporadic from 2004 to 2023, and were almost exclusively focussed on Jimmy Wales's account talk page, the articles on Sanger and Wales, the article on Citizendium, and the articles on the history and criticism of Wikipedia. There was also a whole debate on whether Sanger was a co-founder or an employee.

Citizendium died 15 years ago. (Yes, you can see it now. It was resurrected in 2022, everyone having to start from scratch with new accounts.) I actually thought of getting an account there in its early years, but for several years prior to its effective death it sported an announcement that the new accounts process was temporarily not in service, come back later. The writing was on the wall for a long time.

Sanger re-gained interest in Wikipedia in 2025, but still far more interested in how an encyclopaedia should be governed, which motivated the creation of Citizendium in the first place, than in actually writing one. In the intervening years, xe had done a lot of punditry from the sidelines, concentrating everything through a lens of U.S.A. politics.

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#93

Post by ieie3366 » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #67

afh1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, banned by the status quo for trying to disturb it. Wikipedia is nowadays highly politicized and more time and energy are spent on politics than on actually contributing with any useful knowledge. I've stopped contributing years ago after a decade of writing because of how bad things had gotten. It's a lost battle, all that remains is scorched earth filled with toxic editors trying to push their POV and banning e…

Yes agreed, for example, there was an interesting table on the starlink page I used to check every so often showing which countries had access to starlink as it was rolled out. Was interesting to see the expansion. Of course, some editor decided it was 'marketing' for starlink so it got deleted despite loads of people protesting. It was the only source I could find easily for showing which country got starlink when.…

And the worst is the cycle:

1. There is incorrect information on wikipedia.

2. Legacy news publishes an article, using wikipedia as source (of course).

3. Now the incorrect information is essentially canonized

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#94

Post by postflopclarity » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:29 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #82

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often mention anecdotes like that when Wikipedia is discussed, but I made a few changes to pages over the years and never had any issues. I took care to follow the rules, and the changes were usually accepted; when they weren't, it was always for reasonable reasons, even if I didn't always agree with them.

I haven't done a whole lot, but I've also never had a bad experience editing on Wikipedia. I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages. Which, yeah, discussing controversial stuff on the Internet is a recipe for having a bad time. The other strong possibility is they are lower quality editors than they think they are. You notice they almost never…

I am confident that my edits were high quality and improved the mathematical accuracy and clarity of the page.

unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#95

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #52

Sweepi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there is a lot more, e.g.: After that, Larry Sanger remarked: "What people don't realize, actually, is the number of people who are actually at work on Wikipedia on any given day is not really that enormous. It's more in the hundreds or low thousands, not in the millions. Well, there's a lot of people in India. There's a lot of educated people in India, right? There's a lot more educated people in India than the…

Ok, saying things like "The left marched through this institution. There’s no reason we can’t march right back" is pretty bad. To be clear: it would be equally bad if you swapped left and right in that sentence. I don't know if his assessment of the issues with Wikipedia is correct, but his solutions aren't what you propose if you want to make Wikipedia more neutral

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#96

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #92

There is a long history here, and if you are looking at just the WikiProject and the community ban discussion, you are missing a Hell of a lot. Very short background: Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2003. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/707321 Sanger went on to set up Citizendium, a wiki encyclopaedia project organized the way that xe thought one should be organized, with an extensive rulebase and 'consta…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#97

Post by Aurornis » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #79

wongarsu wrote: post #31

So to summarize: he resuggested "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", a group with the goal to make "Wikipedia more intellectually diverse" and "ensure fair and open decision-making and governance, broaden the range of permissible sources, reinforce genuine neutrality, rein in over-aggressive blocking while holding the powerful to higher standards of accountability", etc, with the implied undertone of preventing Wiki…

An interesting procedural detail is how an admin decided to just close the discussion and ban the user before the mandatory discussion period was over, and got a lot of pushback for the sloppy decision making process. This was overturned, only for another admin to reach the same conclusion seven hours later, after the discussion was online for the mandatory 72 hours (with no consideration for the two hours between th…

Having a labyrinth of rules to follow and then applying them asymmetrically is a classic way to build power for the ingroup and exile outsiders.

The ingroup knows the rules well enough that they can wait until an enemy crosses one of the rules, then they have an excuse to punish them. The more rules on the books, the more opportunities to use them against your enemies.

When someone inside breaks the rules, it’s treated as a misstep, handled internally, and then forgiven after a short ceremony to make it look like order and procedure are still being maintained.

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#98

Post by postflopclarity » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

zaik wrote: post #61

postflopclarity wrote: post #7

trying to contribute to wikipedia was the most miserable experience in a "collaborative" process I've ever had in my life. Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one. in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't…

> sooooo much technical misinformation Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?

it was in the computational social choice sphere which attracts a lot of amateurs interested in electoral reform and "voting theory" (which of course is not the typical term used for the field but is popular among these amateurs).

these contributors tend to have some kind of unrelated engineering / technical background, though never in econ or social choice itself, are often retired with lots of free time, and _always_ have incredibly stubborn and strong opinions. the demographic matches the [trisector](https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...) very closely

if you look around on these pages in social choice and voting algorithms you will find plenty of inaccuracies, vague assertions about strategic manipulability, misunderstanding of the formalization of certain electoral axioms, and other misinformation.

Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#99

Post by throwawaypath » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #83

wongarsu wrote: post #31

So to summarize: he resuggested "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", a group with the goal to make "Wikipedia more intellectually diverse" and "ensure fair and open decision-making and governance, broaden the range of permissible sources, reinforce genuine neutrality, rein in over-aggressive blocking while holding the powerful to higher standards of accountability", etc, with the implied undertone of preventing Wiki…

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Re: Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

#100

Post by postflopclarity » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

TZubiri wrote: post #38

postflopclarity wrote: post #7

trying to contribute to wikipedia was the most miserable experience in a "collaborative" process I've ever had in my life. Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one. in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't…

>in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them. As someone that has battled with…

I think one of the last straws for me before I quit trying to help is when I "lost" some disputed edit (and the page was subsequently locked) because the original author provided an external citation for their claim.

The problem was, if you actually go read the content being cited, it did not at all conclude what the page author was asserting it did. In fact, it concluded the opposite. So the citation was "real" but the way it was being used with the implication that it supported the author's position was pure misinformation.

I tried to point this out and petitioned to unlock the page, but I was told that "consensus has been reached, and edit warring will not be tolerated" ...