Wikipedia co-creator reveals how the CIA hijacked entries

Wikipedia's co-creator has revealed the moment he learned the CIA and other intelligence agencies were hijacking public entries for their own benefit.

Larry Sanger appeared on Tucker Carlson's podcast to claim Wikipedia had lost its way and began censoring accounts which held right-wing or conservative views.

'There is a whole army of administrators - hundreds of them - who are constantly blocking people that they have ideological disagreements with,' he said.

'Over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out.'

While Sanger maintained he was unaware if there were 'puppet masters that were controlling the process', he did admit that sometime between 2006 and 2007, he began asking questions about intelligence agencies interfering with the entries.

'Virgil Griffith did Master’s research,' he revealed, speaking of the American programmer who served a five year prison sentence for North Korea with evading sanctions.

'He came up with a tool called Wiki Scanner that enabled people to look up the IP addresses of people who had done edits and like, who had edited which articles. And so they were able to find a whole bunch of edits coming from Langley.'

Langley is often a term used to describe the CIA, the unincorporated community of Langley in Virginia, where the headquarters is based.

'The way that intelligence works now is that of course there’s the old fashioned cloak and dagger spying going on, but a large part of the remit of intelligence today is to manipulate public opinion in various ways,' Sanger said.

'Wikipedia is like just a gold mine for the intelligence agencies of the world because it’s like a one stop shop.

'You can just like type in the things that you want people to believe. Now how that works, like which agencies are involved, how. How the heck should I know?'

Carlson had claimed Wikipedia has become 'a weapon of ideological, theological war, used to destroy its enemies.'

The former Fox News host said he once 'really believed in Wikipedia' and donated large sums of money because he was 'so thrilled by its existence.

'Now it’s like the leading source of dishonesty, or, I would say, disinformation,' he said.

Sanger said he first recognized and began to describe Wikipedia as 'propoganda' in 2020. Prior to that, despite having his reservations about the direction the website had taken, he said he would not have used the same word.

He was only working for Wikipedia for two years, helping to launch the project and 'set a lot of the original policies' before exiting the brand in 2002. 

Carlson questioned whether he ever considered at the time that 'intel agencies could get involved and start changing the way people understand what they did', to which Sanger said never in his wildest dreams.

'Not in 2001, in 2000, in 2002. I was a babe in the woods. It wasn't until like, I think it was 2006, 2007.'

Sanger has since reached out to both President Donald Trump and former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, urging them to 'investigate what United States employees were actually editing Wikipedia.'

'Maybe there’s reasons, legitimate reasons for government employees to do this, but at least Elon Musk did retweet that and got a lot of support.' 

To Sanger's knowledge, no such DOGE investigation took place, but he has since learned 'now there is a congressional investigation.

'I don’t know if my tweet had anything to do with the start of that,' he said.