Does he have a point about some Wikipedia articles having a “liberal” or left-leaning bias that obscures or fails to provide a full and fair version of the truth, though? Yes. Just look up the “COVID-19 Lab leak theory” entry as an example. Despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans in a 2023 study by YouGov and the Economist said they believed the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory and not, as originally thought, a wet market, this is described in the second sentence as a “highly controversial” claim, while it is stated that “many scenarios proposed for a lab leak are characteristic of conspiracy theories” — as if there were not legitimate and non-conspiratorial reasons for believing in it.
Indeed, last month one of the website’s two co-founders, Larry Sanger, wrote a long essay arguing that some of the standards that the site — which uses thousands of volunteer editors — was founded upon were being “sacrificed in favor of ideology”, and suggested nine ways to fix it.
But funnily enough, none of Sanger’s suggestions included setting up an AI-powered, low-quality, barely readable Wikipedia rip-off with a peculiar penchant for Musk and his worldview. And yet that’s what we have in the shape of Grokipedia.