He co-founded Wikipedia. Now he’s inspiring Elon Musk to build a rival.

For years, Wikipedia’s lesser known co-founder has decried what he sees as the site’s liberal bias. Suddenly, some of the country’s most powerful people are listening.

Larry Sanger, ousted from the online encyclopedia by co-founder Jimmy Wales a year after he helped launch it in 2001, argues that Wikipedia has strayed from its commitment to neutrality. He says the site is mismanaged and has a penchant for defaming people. And he sees in its coverage of hot-button issues such as crime, religion and climate change a leftward slant that he believes is contrary to its founding principles.

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“Wikipedia is like a bus careening down the highway without a driver and slamming into innocent people,” Sanger said.

Sanger’s long-standing criticism is finding fresh traction with leading conservatives as they push in the second Trump administration to reclaim cultural institutions and information sources that they argue have been captured by the left. Billionaire Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and pundit Tucker Carlson are among those calling to reform or supplant a website that has become one of the country’s last bastions of shared truth – and a bedrock of factual information for the AI systems that increasingly answer the world’s search queries.

Earlier this month, Cruz sent an open letter to Wikipedia’s parent nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation, demanding answers about what he called its “ideological bias.” In August, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into possible manipulation of the platform by what they called “hostile nation-state actors to expose Western audiences to pro-Kremlin and anti-Western messaging.” And Musk has said he is set this week to launch his own, AI-powered alternative to Wikipedia, called Grokipedia.

The efforts amount to a high-stakes bid to shape the world’s most influential reference source toward what conservatives consider a more balanced approach. Defenders of Wikipedia say it’s a partisan assault on a precious cultural resource that is built to sift fact from propaganda.

“We are running out of reliable sources of information,” said Amy Bruckman, a professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech and author of the book, “Should You Believe Wikipedia?” Those who criticize the site’s coverage, she said, are “yelling at the truth.”

Arguments over facts and framing are nothing new to Wikipedia. In fact, they’re at the heart of the project.

Unlike a conventional encyclopedia, Wikipedia is written and edited entirely by volunteers, most of whom are anonymous. Anyone can hop in and draft a new article or propose revisions to an existing one, as long as they cite their sources. But the power to resolve disputes and police the site is reserved for a more select group of editors who have a track record deemed reliable by their peers.

“It’s really important to remember that 99.999 percent of the content is, like, sports scores and plant classifications and what we call ‘yogurt’ in different languages,” said Maryana Iskander, the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief executive.

Various studies over the years have tried to ascertain Wikipedia’s political leanings, with some suggesting it leans moderately left in the context of U.S. politics, while others have found it to be generally down the middle. Studies also have indicated that articles tend to become more neutral over time as editors work on them. (Wikipedia itself has a page reviewing the evidence.)

A decade ago, a prevailing critique of Wikipedia was that its editors were mostly white men from wealthy countries, leaving the majority of its global audience underrepresented in its coverage. The Wikimedia Foundation encouraged a series of “edit-a-thons” to get more women to edit stories, in a bid to broaden the site’s lens at a time when 90 percent of editors were men.

Now some conservatives say they want to broaden it in an entirely different way.

Last month, Sanger published “Nine Theses” on how to reform Wikipedia, echoing Martin Luther’s 95 theses on the Catholic church, which helped launch the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Among his proposals: strengthen the site’s neutrality policy, unmask its most influential editors and abolish what he calls “blacklists,” referring to sources Wikipedia has deemed too unreliable to cite.

Carlson hosted Sanger on his weekly show, clips of which circulated widely among conservatives on X, including President Donald Trump’s AI czar, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks.

“Wikipedia is hopelessly biased,” Sacks posted. “An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”

Musk shared Sanger’s post of his “Nine Theses” with the caption, “Some good suggestions from the co-founder of Wikipedia.” The same day, Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, was developing an alternative encyclopedia, called Grokipedia. “Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” the billionaire said.

Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is fielding a string of inquiries from Republican congressional leaders about its neutrality policies, security policies and ties to left-leaning nonprofits.

Cruz, who chairs the Senate’s powerful Commerce Committee, cited several of Sanger’s arguments in an Oct. 7 letter requesting “information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation.” Reps. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), who chair the House’s Oversight Committee and Oversight subcommittee on cybersecurity, respectively, announced in August an investigation into reports of coordinated efforts to manipulate Wikipedia for propaganda purposes, such as to spread anti-Israel viewpoints.

As an example of liberal bias, Cruz cited a debate around a Wikipedia article about the August stabbing of a white woman by a Black man with a criminal record on a train in Charlotte. A video of the killing went viral on X, where Musk and others on the right portrayed it as a symptom of Democrats’ alleged failure to crack down on crime.

Cruz noted that some Wikipedia editors sought to have the article taken down, arguing that an individual street crime wasn’t notable enough to merit its own page. Cruz’s letter didn’t mention that their push was unsuccessful: Other editors voted to keep the article and it remained on the site, as does a page that records editors’ internal debate over the decision.

Not all of Wikipedia’s would-be watchdogs are Republican. In May, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) joined Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) in a bipartisan letter seeking answers about antisemitic and pro-Hamas content.

Iskander said the Wikimedia Foundation is taking the inquiries and critiques as an opportunity to better explain to both lawmakers and the public how Wikipedia operates.

“It is an encyclopedia that relies on underlying sources, that gets fixed in real time, and that is constantly changing, and the sources are constantly changing,” she said. “There’s no bias on Wikipedia if one understands how it works.”

Every article is the product of a push and pull among volunteer editors who often disagree and must back up their edits with citations to credible sources of information. By policy, articles must be written from a “neutral point of view,” explaining competing arguments without taking sides. And while editors can remain anonymous, all edits are public, so their work can be reviewed by anyone.

Wikipedia is “meant to inform, not to persuade,” Iskander said. And if an article is biased, “the pieces are there for the system to self-correct.”

Sanger contends those mechanisms for self-correction have broken down.

A longtime libertarian and agnostic who attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and got a PhD in philosophy at Ohio State University, Sanger recently converted to Christianity and said his views have grown more conservative in recent years. He voted for Trump in 2024.

He has been working on alternatives to Wikipedia off and on since 2006, when he founded a rival encyclopedia called Citizendium that never took off. He later joined another site called Everipedia, then launched a project in 2019 to develop an “encyclosphere” that brings together all the world’s different encyclopedias. Atop the project’s homepage is a quote from Sanger: “No small group of elites deserves the power to declare what is known for all of us.”

Sanger said he never saw a big financial windfall from Wikipedia’s success. “I’m the poorest founder of a top-10 website, and that’s something I pride myself on,” he said.

As Sanger has drifted toward the right, his critiques of Wikipedia have coalesced around his concern that its most influential editors impose on the site a worldview he dubs “GASP”: globalist, academic, secular and progressive. For example, he cites the entry for “Yahweh,” which is written through a historical rather than religious lens.

Underlying the site’s biases, Sanger argues, is a list maintained by Wikipedia editors that categorizes commonly cited information sources according to their reliability.

Sources deemed “generally reliable” include mainstream media organizations as well as some left-leaning outlets, such as the Nation and Mother Jones, as Sanger has pointed out. (While it’s true that both are listed as generally reliable, the entries for both point out their liberal bias and urge editors to attribute their claims rather than simply stating them as fact.)

On the other end of the spectrum are what Wikipedia calls “deprecated sources,” which editors are discouraged from citing in support of factual claims. Those include not only state-controlled media outlets and notorious propaganda sites, but also some popular right-leaning news outlets, such as the New York Post and the Daily Mail.

As Sanger put it on Tucker Carlson’s show, that means that if Carlson is widely criticized in liberal outlets but defended only in conservative ones, “then you won’t be defended in the [Wikipedia] article about you, and they will call the article about you ‘neutral.’”

Musk, once a self-professed fan of Wikipedia, has soured on the site for similar reasons. In 2023, he posted on X that he would donate $1 billion to the site if it would change its name to “D**kipedia.” (The Wikimedia Foundation declined the offer.) More recently, he has taken to calling it “Wokipedia,” a reference to “woke” or left-wing politics, and said its liberal bias is infecting the answers his Grok chatbot offers.

He had planned to unveil the first version of “Grokipedia” on Monday but postponed it to Friday, explaining in an X post, “We need to do more work to purge out the propaganda.”

In a video interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Wikipedia co-founder Wales – who now sits on the Wikimedia Foundation’s board – said he has “skimmed” Sanger’s nine theses and is always open to ideas for how to improve the site. He said one of Sanger’s proposals – to let the public rate the quality of articles – could be worth exploring further. But he said the idea that Wikipedia should treat all sources as equal is a nonstarter.

“Clearly we don’t treat crackpot, random websites as being the equal of the New England Journal of Medicine, and that’s fine,” he said.

Wales described his own politics as “boring” and “centrist” but also “not that important,” because he and other Wikimedia Foundation leaders have no authority over the site’s content.

“Neutrality is still the core policy of Wikipedia,” he said. “That has never changed.”

Wales and Iskander said that while they take critiques of the site seriously, they’re not particularly concerned that Wikipedia is vulnerable to being co-opted by a partisan pressure campaign from either side.

Noting that Wikipedia is blocked in China and has clashed with the governments of Russia and Turkey, Iskander said, “This is only unprecedented because it is happening in the United States.”

Bruckman of Georgia Tech says Wikipedia’s open editing process makes it “arguably one of the most reliable sources of information ever created by humans.” Far from biased, she said, it is remarkably accurate, including on complex scientific topics.

Sanger said that while he welcomes Republican leaders asking questions about Wikipedia’s policies, government intervention isn’t his preferred solution to the site’s shortcomings. Instead, he said, he is working to enlist hundreds of conservatives in the United States and abroad to become active Wikipedia editors, working in concert to revise articles on such topics as the Israel-Gaza war, Hindu nationalism in India, the safety of vaccines and the causes of climate change.

“Nothing is stopping us,” Sanger said. “All of us who feel like we have been shut out of Wikipedia, driven away over the years – I think it’s a good idea that we spend a few months, a season, on Wikipedia and see what can happen.”

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