I Founded Wikipedia. Here’s how to fix it.

Wikipedia was founded on an idealistic mission to provide all the world’s information for free—and to do so democratically. But, as we’ve reported before in these pages, the site has been hijacked by ideologues.

Anonymous editors who are supposed to be committed to the truth instead edit articles to suit their ideological priors. And that has made the site harder to trust than ever—especially on some of the most controversial and important issues of the day.

Today, we’re honored to publish one of the site’s founders, Larry Sanger.

Larry has been a vocal critic of what the site he built has become. In his vital essay for us today, he offers a remedy, or as he calls it, “my Hail Mary proposal to reform Wikipedia.” He does so, he writes, in the spirit of Martin Luther, who posted his famous 95 theses “out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.” His proposals have been edited and condensed for clarity. —The Editors

I launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, alongside Jimmy Wales, then the CEO of dot-com company Bomis. It was designed as a freewheeling public successor to the peer-reviewed Nupedia, which we’d founded the year prior.

For the next 14 months, my task was to transform a completely empty, blank wiki into what would soon become the largest written resource in the history of the world. I oversaw the establishment of several fundamental standards, including rules about neutrality and verifiability.

I left Wikipedia in 2002. In the 23 years since, and in the last few years in particular, the standards that inspired the company have been sacrificed in favor of ideology. The following nine theses are my Hail Mary proposal to reform Wikipedia. I do this, as Martin Luther said when he posted his famous 95 theses, “out of love for the truth and the desire to elucidate it.”