Wikipedia Is a Central Intelligence and Woke Nest — Larry Sanger | Jerm Warfare

0:30Larry Sanger, thank you for joining me in the trenches for the first time on my UK Column Show. Well, it's good to be here. Take me through your background if you don't mind. Sure. Well, in the 1990s, I knew Jimmy Wales, and when he, to make a long story short, had the idea of new pedia, a new public-contributed encyclopedia, he asked me to basically start it on behalf of his company called Mama Sink. And so I did. And it was in the process of creating a new pedia that I had the idea for and launched Wikipedia. And so I actually helmed the project for the first 14 months, established a lot of the original policies.

1:39And that's essentially how it got started anyway. I was talking to my wife just yesterday, in fact, about the concept of Wikipedia. And it appears that the idea has turned out to be better than the reality. I think that's fair to say, right? It's just amazing. When you first hear about it, it sounds like total nonsense, of course. Anybody can edit any page. It sounds like it's going to be total chaos. Didn't end up being quite chaos, what people didn't realize in their early days was just how subtle the ways, the many ways in which it could be taken over influenced. And yeah, that's the thing that has disappointed me the most, ultimately.

2:42It's basically a big game and the wrong people have won the game. But I mean, if you think about it, Larry. So, I mean, an old school encyclopedia has put together, let's say, annually by a group of people in whom you put your trust. You go, okay, fine, that group of people, they doing all the homework and the book that I have in front of me must be reliable because I trust those 12 people or have a menu. It would make sense that something like Wikipedia is more reliable because it can be updated, not annually, but every minute. And it can be, it can be the updates can be held accountable by essentially the peers. It's effectively peer review, like in its best form. Yes. And to be fair, there's something to that. Even today, there's certain, indisputable facts that are perhaps not, no one really cares about them too much.

3:42And such facts are allowed to exist on Wikipedia and to be updated right away. And there are still people who do the hard work of actually finding those and updating them as soon as they appear. So, that actually is what makes Wikipedia as useful as it is. It's just the problem areas are what has turned off so many people, especially in the last five or 10 years. What are those problem areas? Oh, well, I mean, various kinds of ideological bias. So, it kind of depends on what country you're talking about. But let's not begin with the United States. Let's begin with, say, India. If you talk to a Hindu from India, you will get an earful. I have multiple times about just how biased Wikipedia is against the Hindus and in favor of the Muslim faction of Indian society.

4:57Not that I know anything about it, I don't. But that I am assured is a thing and a serious problem on Wikipedia. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict basically Wikipedia has decided that the Palestinians are the good guys and the Israelis are the bad guys and period. There's really nothing more to say. There's very little nuance. And then, of course, when it comes to US and Western news generally, the platform is essentially captured by the globalist left. So basically, whatever the left-leaning parties favor, that's popular on Wikipedia that is represented, sort of depends again on the country, the issue, whatever. So there is a very narrow over-ten window and it is definitely tilted to the left.

6:06The only sources that are permitted on Wikipedia now that are remotely conservative are the extremely establishment ones. So like the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph, and there isn't much more than that. That's pretty much it. So Fox News, the New York Post, all of the alt-rights or new media sources are basically not allowed. How did that happen, though? I mean, if it's open to all... Yeah, how does that happen? Well, there has been what is called institutional capture. So Wikipedia was one of the institutions that the left likes to march through and it has successfully marched through and captured it.

7:09How that's possible, being an open platform, that's a good question. I think there's sociological issues and psychological issues at work there. I think a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that conservatives and libertarians don't like to go where they don't feel welcome. And the left just loves to make anyone who disagrees with them not feel welcome. Clearly, there's a lot going on behind the scenes. You cannot see how the sausage is being made, really. I used to say, you know, when I gave interviews and looked in on Wikipedia as I have done consistently throughout the years from time to time. I used to say that if you want to see how Wikipedia articles come to be the way they are, you just need to go to the talk page and read the discussions.

8:13And there is still something to that. You really can't understand why it reads the way that it does unless you look at that conversation. But there are points in such conversations on the talk page. This is the page that everybody goes to when they're negotiating about what the article will look like. And there are some points that in such conversations when everyone seems to agree on a point that seems very much unreasonable and not proven. And it's almost as if there were a lot of back channel backroom deals being made or perhaps people are just in a lot of habits that allow them to settle on common understandings without having to make such deals.

9:16But generally speaking, we know that there are a lot of back channels. There are a lot of, well, the vast majority of people who work on Wikipedia are anonymous. And so they can talk to each other off wiki and you will never know that they are doing so. So it's the actual coordination of what's going on on Wikipedia, including who is getting paid to write what. It's all very opaque at this point. And it wasn't like that what first five years, ten years? It's hard to say. I think people started getting paid to work on Wikipedia probably within the first few years of the project. But I think the number of people who are secretly under the table getting paid is has grown. I couldn't even tell you what the percentage is today because there's really no good way of knowing.

10:21Am I correct in saying that only about 14 or 15% the most powerful 60 or 65 users on Wikipedia are give the real names. That's right. That's right. So I counted up a group of people they call the power 62 and that these are spread across three groups. The arbitration committee, which is like the Wikipedia Supreme Court, the bureaucrats as they're called, which have the ability to promote people to administrator hood and administrator has the ability to kick people out of the project. So these are the ones who bless the administrators. And then there's a third group that escapes me at the moment. And so these sort of represent the most powerful people on Wikipedia, 85% of those people are anonymous.

11:21We don't know who they are. They don't share their real name. They don't have an identifying picture. We don't know where they live, like even the country in many cases. And that's the most responsible people on the project is very weird. If you think about it, if people just, if you ask them, I have discovered, like if you just go up to a random person. So you know about Wikipedia, right? Of course, did you know that 85% of the people with the most power on the platform are totally anonymous. You don't even know have any idea who they are. They said, no, that's how can that be Wikipedia is supposed to be this open democratic place. How is that even possible? Well, part of the thing that has made it as active as it has been over the years is precisely the fact that people can write what they want without any consequences on the platform.

12:27And because it's anonymous, I'm not actually arguing against anonymity as such, but in my nine thities, which I imagine we will, we will get to. I promote the idea that those power 62 or the people who will be in their positions, they should not be anonymous. We should know who they are. They should take real world responsibility because they are, after all, the editorial leadership of the most powerful media platform in the world, information platform anyway, as long as we're not talking about search engines and perhaps a few other things. So you referred to the nine thities as what the Hail Mary proposal. Yes, right. Which means that there's not a lot of chance that it's going to be adopted, certainly not all of the nine thities.

13:35Perhaps one or two will see, but the jury is not out to change the metaphor. You know, we're still talking about it, not as actively as we were last fall, but. The proposal is in generally, I, I posted a set of nine thities, as I called them, like the 95 thities of Martin Luther on Wikipedia and they rolled it on the door. That's right. That's right. So I virtually nailed the nine thities on the door of Wikipedia and invited people to comment, put them also on my blog. And I've been doing a lot of interviews about them since then, essentially trying to get support for this thoroughgoing, the world's first thoroughgoing reform proposal for Wikipedia.

14:36Nobody has ever, people have proposed a lot of piecemeal reforms, you know, like you should change this or you should change this. But this is an attempt to actually make some realistic and extremely reasonable reforms to Wikipedia that will change it for the better in various ways. Well, let's talk about some of them. Sure. The ending of consensus. I'm a big fan of that. Sure. You're a big fan of consensus or ending it. Ending ending it. Yes. So let me explain then how difficult editorial questions are decided on Wikipedia. Right. So here's a good example. When Israel after the October 7th bombing, not bombing, but attack on Israel, after that, Israel just wreaked devastation on Gaza as everybody knows.

15:50And then the question became, should that have been called, should that be called a genocide or not? All right. So that actually goes to the very name of an article, Gaza Genesage. Is that what, what the thing should be called? Well, there is an article on Wikipedia called Gaza Geneside. And there is a particular process that you're expected to go through to arrive at what they call a consensus. Now, if you ask me, it's just nonsense to say that anyone could arrive at a consensus on an issue like that. I mean, it's over a hot war, so people are going to disagree. And emotional. And exactly very much so people are shooting at each other over, over this disagreement. And so it's, it cannot really be called a consensus, regardless of how you arrive at it.

16:57What it ultimately means in Wikipedia space is it's a consensus of everyone who thinks the way that they do. And that's all it means. And the way it's arrived at is simply they look at what they consider to be reliable sources, which has we discussed earlier excludes basically all conservative sources and excludes other sources that are unpopular with the leadership about that area of the world. So Al Jazeera, that's totally green lit. You can use it. The anti defamation league comments about the geopolitics of Israel is absolutely disallowed. Isn't that strange? It's like you can use Al Jazeera, but you can't use the some of the most official opinionizing about the place that it concerns you should at least be able to cite what they think about what's going on.

18:04Exactly right. So I mean, there shouldn't be about your own personal position. If you are truly looking for something that is true, you should consider all arguments. Right. Absolutely. That's actually just what neutrality is originally consensus in the see this has happened over and over again. Read my nine thesis and the accompanying essays. You will see it looks like a cargo coat to me. So the original version made sense, but the version that we're left with now has been twisted out of recognition of what it what it used to be. So originally working toward consensus simply meant trying to get everybody to agree on an expression of the description of all the different views on a subject, which is very much controversial.

19:19So they had to agree on basically given that others had to have a say, right. And everyone needed to be treated fairly. And that was essentially what consensus was built on what the consensus was about was not a particular position. The consensus was about whether this is a fair representation of all positions given that everyone had to be treated fairly. And we see this, for example, in climate science, they will argue that consensus is science and it absolutely is not. It was falsely attributed to Einstein, but there was something on the lines of nine out of 10 scientists might agree, but I'm only interested in that one scientist that doesn't agree. That's right. I mean, a lot of the progress in science, all the important progress in science,

20:21it begins with one dissenter. And yeah, we're a very small group of dissenters. In the case of climate science, there's controversy even about what the supposed consensus even is, who to count when you are counting heads. And then they generally don't even take account of the fact that people are very much influenced within their own fields, right. Climate science as a field is paid for by competing sides. There's those who want to be able to influence government through climate policy.

21:23And then there's those who want to allow oil companies and other polluters to do whatever the hell they want and others in between. What is a singular thesis? Would that be a singular? Is an abling competing articles? Now I like that very much also because that creates accountability. Well, I suppose that's true. And so far as if you allow even one alternate article and it has a lot of facts that are not revealed in the first article that makes the first article look a lot worse, doesn't it. And I think this has got to be one of the main reasons why anyone who uses Wikipedia as an ideological platform does not want competing articles. Generally speaking, they interpret this as being a proposal to make Wikipedia biased when really all they are demonstrating with the pushback here is that they want Wikipedia to have exactly the bias that it does have.

22:48So I characterize the bias of Wikipedia and I think I have nailed it on the head. So I use an acronym GASP, G-A-S-P, and that stands for globalist academic secular and progressed. Yes. So these fourth quality is maybe individually that have their place, especially academic in an encyclopedia, of course. But it's the way that they come together that gives Wikipedia its unique flavor. So globalist, this does not mean a kumbaya peace loving open platform. It means the platform in which multi national organizations are imposing their will on the whole globe from places like Geneva and New York City and London, or Washington DC.

23:57And as far as academics ago, of course, I'm not saying that academics should not have a special say. In fact, I'm kind of infamous for taking the position that in Wikipedia academics should have a special say, at least in approving articles, at least in some sort of review system. But the problem on Wikipedia is that there are academics and then there are academics and they will approve only certain views that can be found in academia. And the rest of the views and the disfavored medical research about COVID, for example, was right might as well not exist as far as they're concerned. I remember in 2020, I was trying to figure out like all of us what was going on. And suddenly these articles about the effectiveness on masks were appearing on Wikipedia.

25:09And I mean, that is completely nonsense. I learned in school, you know, the effectiveness of masks. And now suddenly, this is obvious, kind of medical imposition happening on Wikipedia. Yes. Yes. No, absolutely. Well, I mean, it was, it was obvious when Fauci just did a complete 180 within the space a few weeks. Oh, you did multiple 180's. Yes, exactly. He was dancing. He was doing so many. Right. Right. So what else? We were going through gasp. We talked about globalism and academics secular here. Again, you would think what's wrong with taking with a secular point of view. Well, of course, there should be a secular point of view represented on Wikipedia. That's very important. But it is a secular point of view that is actively imposed by Wikipedia articles. And, and basically any sort of confessional point of view is disallowed if the secular academics have to say something on the subject.

26:28So, for example, the ordinary view of God, for example, is that the personal name of God is Jehovah or Yahweh. The tetragramaton in Hebrew represents four letters represents the name of God. And this has been essentially squatted on by people who insist the only position that can be allowed that should be allowed on Wikipedia is that of unbelieving scholars who think that Yahweh was originally the head of a polytheistic pantheon. And the article is all about that premonotheistic deity. So, right. So it's it's like it's as if there were still Zeus worshipers. And this article was about Zeus of ancient times.

27:39So that's what they're trying to treat him like because they maintain, although this is actually false, they maintain that this is the only mode in which he is discussed in academia. So, these things shade in, right. They use the academic orientation of Wikipedia to shore up the supposed requirements of secularism on Wikipedia. So, what it what it means is basically you can't actually say even in the first few paragraphs of the article where Christians and Jews got the idea according to them of Yahweh. They think that Yahweh announced what his name was in Exodus chapter three, I think it is, right. And that's that's the origin. That's where we got the name.

28:39But anyway. So that I mean, that creates again an ideological bias. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, in this case, it's the ideology of religion or lack thereof. Yes. For sure. And then the last letter in your acronym is progressive, but I think I mean, that's quite obvious. Yes. That's going to lead to men can be women. That's a good example. There's a lot of examples like that. You know, anything having having to do with socialism. The notion that there is a body count or a death count for communism is difficult to honor on Wikipedia last I checked, buried anyway. So, yes, a lot of the people who write for Wikipedia, if they reveal anything about their politics, they will say,

29:46I am a Marxist or I am a socialist. And they're they make no compunctions, compunctions about it. They tend to reveal relatively extreme positions. Like they don't generally say, you know, I am a centered centrist Democrat or whatever. One or two of your other theses has effectively been covered by our conversation. Like, for example, I've got them in front of me. So, like, reviving neutrality. I mean, we've spoken about that as well as abolishing the source black lists, which is as you were talking about earlier, allowing in alternative sources. That's right. Yes. So that's that's very important, obviously. Wikipedia, because it has this black list page, it's a literal black list. It doesn't call itself that. But you can look it up on your search engine of choice, just look up perennial sources, Wikipedia, and it will come right up.

30:55And it's just fascinating to browse the list and see what's allowed and what's disallowed on Wikipedia. It's not obvious, actually. And in some cases, you can understand why they take the position they do on grounds of sort of establishment, respectability. You know, I guess that's why they allowed the New York Times, Washington Post, and the, say, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, the BBC, Le Monde, all these things are allowed. So a lot of things that are take radical positions routinely that are also fully allowed. So I can't think of all the examples Al Jazeera is certainly one of them. So the nation. So it's, it doesn't make sense is what I'm saying.

31:58And meanwhile, it's not possible to cite pretty much any source of conservative opinion. Maybe some of them have the yellow background, which essentially means you can use it, but use sparingly if there isn't a better source. But that usually means that it can't be used at all. You certainly can't use, yeah, you certainly can't use, let's say smaller websites or blogs or something as, as reliable information. And yet, they could be. So there's an interesting diagram on, I don't know if you know the website Swiss policy research or Swiss. I forget now what the title of the website is, but it's, it's basically about figuring out propaganda around the world. And they've got a diagram in which they, it's just a guide, rough guide, they show how to approach media. And they, they basically say the closer the media outlet is to a source of power, let's say Fox is quite close to the White House when there's a Republican president and CNN is quite close to the White House when there's a democratic president.

33:11But both sources are close to power. Therefore, you need to treat both with, with a degree of suspicion and skepticism and you might want to triangulate what you're eating from them. And the way to do that is to perhaps find media sources that are further away from, from sources of power. And, and, and potentially put more faith in those, not doesn't mean they're going to be right or accurate or whatever, but there's a greater chance because they've got skin in the game. And there's a greater chance that, that their reliability will be more than that from let's say CNN or, or, or Fox or whatever. Sure. Well, you can't assume that the smaller sites are uniformly further away from power because, you know, that's also true for them. You know, sometimes the investors, the owners are private and, and therefore, you know, they might be owned by the CIA or something like that. There's any number of organizations of that sort that have been accused of being front for intelligence and that sort of thing.

34:16Around 2008 or 2007 when it was revealed that a whole bunch of Wikipedia editors were basically at the CIA and FBI. Well, the, the story at the time. So this was researched by Virgil Griffith and his wiki scanner project simply fed the IP addresses, which were generally available. A lot of people made edits to Wikipedia without signing in and therefore their IP addresses were logged publicly. And so all he had to do was look up the IP addresses and where they were located and there were a bunch and Langley West Virginia or Langley Virginia. In other words, the CIA and then there were a lot also in IP addresses that were owned by Microsoft and other major corporations and so forth.

35:19The point being that it looked like employees of various influential organizations, public and private were editing Wikipedia. So I wouldn't say that this proves that the CIA owns Wikipedia or is controlling it or anything like that. I've never made that claim, by the way. I have no idea what the ultimate power structure of Wikipedia is like. It's very unlikely that any one organization controls it somehow. I suppose it's possible though. I just, I just don't think so. Well, I mean, there have been any number of, of different people and organizations that have been accused for accused of, of abusing Wikipedia. There is, I'll take another example. Basically, there is this fairly large PR corporation called WikiPR. I don't know if they're still in business or not.

36:25That has edited Wikipedia over the years and they do so pretty openly is my understanding. And I believe they were accused about, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, of doing a lot of anonymous editing, which is a big no-no on Wikipedia. So paid editing that is not actually confessed and admitted upfront on Wikipedia. So yeah, so I found the, the Bell Pottenger reference. So the Bell Pottenger scandal exposed how major PR firms systematically manipulate Wikipedia for corporate clients. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that Bell Pottenger made hundreds of alterations to Wikipedia entries about its clients, adding favorable comments whilst removing negative content. And then further down, yeah, it says this and this.

37:28In 2023, investigators discovered that Saudi Arabia had installed 16 agents as Wikipedia administrators who not only controlled political articles but revealed the identities of independent administrators to Saudi authorities. That's precisely what you're talking about. Right? No, absolutely. And I'm sure this, this Bell Pottenger scandal is, is just an example, right? I mean, it's, it's only one of many, many over the years. So it's a widespread problem that has, it's well known to exist. On Wikipedia, if you, if you look at it, it, they don't go all the way as far as they ought to in, in discussing the ramifications of the problem. They simply say paid editing is bad. Like this is supposed to be an amateur, you know, truth loving project. And here you are going after filthy lucre.

38:39That's not actually what the objection is. If there really is anonymous paid editing, a lot of it going on. And if the people who are anonymously paid for their editing, right? And again, we don't know which of all the editors those are. If they're being paid by extremely wealthy, extremely powerful people and organizations, then what are we to make of that? Then what you're saying is public opinion about Israel is being controlled by Saudi Arabia. Maybe, for example, right? Or public opinion about the trans, transgenderism or whatever you want to call it is actually determined by a bunch of left-wing think tanks that are pushing a certain point of view.

39:41That are trying to normalize a certain set of opinions. That's, that's very interesting, right? If you look at it that way, then it's no longer a threat on the, the amateurism of Wikipedia. It has very little to do with that. It has to do rather with the fact that Wikipedia is, well, it certainly looks like it's being controlled secretly. By any number of deep pocketed organizations, and we have no way of knowing what they are. I think my favorite thesis is the one about letting the public rate articles. I find that so it's so intuitive because the rating system is what is what helps you decide on something from Amazon or whatever.

40:42Absolutely, right? Exactly. So there are some articles. I have no doubt whatsoever would be very low rated on Wikipedia. And some would be rated very high. People would have no problems with them at all. And if we had access to that information, then we would read Wikipedia differently, wouldn't we? But I think they, a lot of Wikipedia just don't like that idea. They don't like the idea of their work being rated at all by outsiders. The thing is, if you really care about truth, right, at the very least, especially if you, you know, take a gasp point of view, then why don't you make a gasp board and have them rate the Wikipedia articles or something like that, right?

41:44But they don't even want that. They don't even want a panel of experts to, you know, create a review system. They don't want anyone to rate the articles. They want the whole thing to appear to be as equally authoritative as everything else on the platform when it clearly isn't. The potential downside, though, is you can get orchestrated attacks on particular articles or products, for example, where large sums of trolls and bots are sent to give it thumbs down. And I think that's one of the reasons why YouTube decided to remove the number of people giving thumbs down. What's the plural? Thumbs down. I don't know what the plural is. Downvotes. Downvotes. There we go. Downvotes. So they removed that number. So you've got no idea how heavily downvoted a video is.

42:44And that is a risk, though. Right. Right. So obviously any rating system can be gamified. And there are various ways to fight that. What I propose is that considering the actual real world importance of having reliable ratings of an encyclopedia, that Wikipedia should just undertake the expense of creating a system that identifies one person, one vote that actually requires that somebody know the identities of each of the voters can be some third party, which is under legal obligations to keep the information entirely secret from everyone, et cetera. And that would be, you know, one way of doing it. There are other ways of doing it without anyone revealing their identity, but then it becomes much harder.

43:47So I simply think at the very least what they need to do is create a system in which academics can declare their institutional affiliations and treat Wikipedia articles as articles for review and leave actual reviews. That's why Wikipedia has never done that and simply made an academic peer review system of Wikipedia articles. I really don't understand. It doesn't make any sense. What is this one more that I'm trying to find here? Oh, so you talk about adopting a legislative process. Right. On Wikipedia, there is nothing like an editor in chief. There's no editorial board. There's no elected officials that determine any sort of policy.

44:53There are, you might say, elected groups, publicly approved groups like the administrators as group that that would be the largest of those sorts. I guess there's an even larger one. I forget what it's called. Anyway, but the point is that these don't they are not specially designated as legislators in the project. Set new policies that can't establish new projects. There is no way, in fact, on Wikipedia of determining any new policy or project direction. So no official way of blessing anything. There's a lot of ways that are kind of unofficial and accepted as being good enough. But as a result, Wikipedia changes very, very slowly.

46:04I might say, okay, that doesn't sound bad. But sometimes it needs dramatic change. I think we have actually come to the point now where it's just obvious that Wikipedia needs some pretty dramatic change. There is no process whatsoever of making dramatic change on Wikipedia. So what I'm proposing is simply Wikipedia create a body of overseers of editorial overseers, you might call them. But what I what I call them in the proposal, and this is thesis nine is the editorial assembly. So a legislature of Wikipedia Wikipedia has a huge body of rules and these semi rules called essays. And the essays are routinely cited as if they were in fact policy when they're not, but they're treated that way by a lot of the rank and file.

47:12And the ordinary user, if you actually wanted to actually read all of the policies that just that the plain policies without the extra essays, it would be like reading a couple of books and with the essays, that's a whole library practically. It's crazy. So this is basically policy creep that needs to be rained in by someone, but there's no way to to rain it in unless there is some designated organization like editorial assembly to do the raining in. So I think that Wikipedia needs to actually meet face to face in a representative body and start deciding the hard questions. How can AI play a role in Wikipedia?

48:15They're generally they do not like AI on Wikipedia, like it certainly it is an enormous no no to use Wikipedia to write articles and I would say that's that's actually the correct position. It's a very bad idea to use AI to write articles that are supposed to be expected to be written by human beings. So if you want to have an AI written in psychopedia, like Grakipedia, fine, you can work on that, but Wikipedia should not involve that. What I would say is that AI can be used to do automatic ratings and feedback on Wikipedia articles and why Wikipedia hasn't done that is a little obscure to me. I think that again, they just have this sort of official contempt of LLMs. And of course, everybody knows, though, it's just a fact that LLMs are incredibly useful.

49:25They give you all sorts of information. Of course, you have to sort through the good from the bad. And as you do all information after all, you know, especially Wikipedia articles, those things are not reliable at all. So yeah, generally, I think Wikipedia should use LLMs to get feedback a lot more on their articles and they haven't been doing that officially. I think LLMs could actually give a letter grade to each article, and it wouldn't be a terrible resource for that. I've actually proven that to my own satisfaction. I've tried that with several articles, a few dozen articles altogether, gone through the process of engineering, the prompt. So it gives me just the sort of feedback that I want goes to work on long Wikipedia articles, divides them into chunks, rates, the subparts, and so forth.

50:29And they are totally capable of doing that sort of work. So having said that LLMs themselves fall into the same ideological trap. Well, of course, yeah, especially in so far as they are to a great extent, not exclusively or anything, not at all trained on Wikipedia. But you might think doesn't this mean that like if I were to use chat GPT to rate a Wikipedia article, it would be like Wikipedia rating Wikipedia, but it's actually not the case. So the big repeatable LLMs are all pretty much, they've got a lot of information beyond Wikipedia and a lot of information that allows them to comment critically on Wikipedia articles.

51:30It's an eye opener for people who don't actually know about a topic. You just feed in the introductory section more than that. It's probably too much. Feed in the introductory section of a Wikipedia article and just ask the LLMs to review it from different points of view. Just tell it, give me a review of this article from a general point of view. It might give glowing praise. But if you actually ask it to dig, do an in-depth fact check from different points of view, that will reveal all sorts of things that are not in the article. At the beginning of our discussion, I said that the idea of Wikipedia might be better than the reality. And I'm wondering Larry, without being too cynical, are your 9th thesis not just moving chairs around on the Titanic?

52:34It's a good question. I think, let's put it this way, the reputation of Wikipedia has taken an enormous hit in recent years. But that damage is mostly done at this point. I suppose it could get worse. But I don't think Wikipedia is going anywhere. It's possible that Wikipedia will be bigger. I'll be known that it's going to be bigger. That's for sure. In terms of article count. That does not mean that people are going to turn to Wikipedia instead of Wikipedia. We'll see. It's possible. But I don't think we can rule out Wikipedia for the very simple reason that writing an encyclopedia with an LLM is a very tall task. We don't know how long it's going to take before it can really compete with even Wikipedia. And like competing with professionally written encyclopedias, it may never be able to do that.

53:46But you say that. But as far as I know, and it's been a while since I've been at any tertiary institution, but as far as I know, many simply do not accept Wikipedia as a source. Oh, of course. Yes, yes. That's right. What doesn't stop people from using it, though, right? It's still one of the most popular websites in the world. It actually has declined a little bit in traffic in the last couple of years. And it is speculated that is because of LLM's. But I mean, people are using chat GPT, for example, for searching more than Google. Right. Exactly. I do. Despite the ideological issues also. That's right. Well, of course, you can always tell the LLM, especially chat GPT, I find, to answer from a certain point of view, and it will dutifully comply.

54:47So it doesn't do a terrible job at that either. I don't know about you, but I don't use Wikipedia for anything. I haven't for years. In actual fact, my search engine is corgi.com. I think a couple of the guys were from Brave and MIT, and it's very privacy-oriented search engine, and it's premium. So you get what you pay for. But nice thing, a big one. I didn't know about that. I didn't know that that corgi existed. I'll have to check it out. It's a phenomenal search engine. I've been using it for about two and a half years, and what I'm telling you this is, you can manipulate your search results. So I've told it to put Wikipedia at the bottom of my search. So Wikipedia notoriously comes up at the top of every search engine just about. And so in corgi, you can either remove it entirely, which I've done with most mainstream news, but Wikipedia sometimes I want to check something, but I put it right at the bottom of the page.

55:47That's what automatically does that. Right. Interesting. Yeah, no, that's what that sounds like. How search engines generally should operate, but you know, when it comes to the freeze search engines, you are the product, you're basically being manipulated, and that's the whole point. So Larry, we're going to come in for the final lap here. Your prognosis for Wikipedia. Is it optimistic? Yeah, I, if they don't make some serious changes, I think they are on the way out. How quickly I can't say, at this point, we don't know. The big competitor of Wikipedia is, is not just a media, although that's a great new competitor on the scene. And the encyclosphere, which combines all the encyclopedias together is also a good idea if I may say so myself since I came up with the idea.

57:06Nevertheless, I think Wikipedia is going to remain dominant, even more than Grocapedia, until Grocapedia is more of a proven quantity. Right. And the problem, the thing that will stop people from using Grocapedia and sticking with Wikipedia, even if they know that Wikipedia is not that great, that it has its problems, is that with Wikipedia, you know that a human being has written it. And if they have made mistakes, it has made human sorts of mistakes. Whereas with Grocapedia, it could be hallucinating. And that, that means making mistakes in patterns that no human being ever would. There's a real problem with that, you see, as far as I'm concerned, you actually have to solve the problem of hallucination in order to have a really reliable encyclopedia that will be used by a lot of people.

58:20Now, I could be wrong. It's entirely possible that people will just switch to Grocapedia as soon as it has more articles than Wikipedia, for example. That won't be long. That could be tomorrow for all I know. Like in the next few days, literally, it's possible. Go on to Grocapedia and do a search for Wikipedia. Right. Right. I've done it. And there's a whole section on biases and political influences. It's worth reading. Interesting. Yes. On that, it's very interesting. Wikipedia used to have a very fair and pretty devastating self-criticism when it came to that topic, you know, Wikipedia's biases and so forth. It allowed its critics to speak quite openly and not changed. In the last few years, Wikipedia now has managed that information in a way that promotes Wikipedia, which is really not surprising, but it's also kind of disappointing.

59:33They really did turn a page about five or ten years ago, and they decided, basically, Donald Trump is so evil and so bad. Basically, I think this is the thinking so awful that we have to do something to manage the misinformation. And like, well, that means that Wikipedia has just got to start telling people what to think and don't like give them any doubts about their own reliability or anything like that. It's sad and it's ultimately undermines our ability to deal with the truth as rational adult human beings properly. Do you think Jimmy Pay, I almost said Jimmy Page, do you think Jimmy Wales is compromised? I don't really want to speak to that. Let's just say it's not my place to apply and about such things.

1:00:43Well, having said that, I almost said Jimmy Page, I certainly do not think he's compromised, probably one of the best guitarists ever. I think that's pretty, pretty compromising, if you ask me, I don't know. I didn't want to lose it for. Well, okay, sure, but I mean, Led Zebblin, we're a pretty good band in a time. Yes, yes. Okay, so Larry, how can my audience follow you? Well, you can go to x.comlSanger.org, my blog. I'm going to be blogging a lot, actually, and I am going to have a subscription service starting for the first time in over 15 years. I've been blogging for a long time, and it's always been 100% free. I'm still going to be, if anything, creating more free stuff, but I'm going to just be doing a lot more blogging.

1:01:49I'm going to try it out at least for a few months, so that should be fun. A lot of theology stuff. So we'll see how that goes. And then encyclosphere.org, if you want to follow the news about the encyclosphere. But lately, it's been down to a skeleton crew essentially working on the Knowledge Standards Foundation. And mostly what I'm doing is what I have been doing for the last year, which is to criticize Wikipedia. Yeah, it's not just that. We've been doing a few other things, but that's a lot of my own work. Larry, thank you for joining me in the trenches. Absolutely.