A founder of Wikipedia who calls himself the “ex-founder of Wikipedia” and has been a critic of the site since he left it over 20 years ago has been barred from editing its articles.
Wikipedia can be edited by nearly anyone, but the changes are then vetted by others. The site’s editors formed a consensus this week to restrict the access of the co-founder, Larry Sanger.
The reason given was not any of Mr. Sanger’s broadsides against Wikipedia, which he has long criticized over what he sees as a left-wing bias, but something procedural. He had been canvassing an outside audience to sway internal policy votes, a Wikipedia Foundation press officer said on Wednesday.
Days before the decision was voted on, Mr. Sanger submitted a proposal called “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.” His goal, he said, was to have more diversity in viewpoints on the site.
Mr. Sanger publicized his project to his 93,000 followers on X, and this was ruled a violation of canvassing guidelines. He was declared “not here to build an encyclopedia,” another serious violation.
Mr. Sanger went back to X after the punishment, writing, “There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law.”
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Mr. Sanger and Jimmy Wales, and it has always operated as a nonprofit with a decentralized system of editing by mostly anonymous volunteers from around the world.
Those volunteers develop and enforce policies “through open, transparent discussions and consensus-based decision-making,” a press officer said on Wednesday. “These policies apply uniformly to all contributors, regardless of their affiliation or history with Wikipedia.”
Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and last June he called the website “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.” He then returned last fall “with the aim of helping Wikipedia in various ways to reform,” he said.
Wikipedia exists in nearly 300 languages, and each language version has its own rules, according to Dariusz Jemielniak, who wrote “Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia.”
The English-language site has long allowed its volunteer administrators to remain anonymous, said Professor Jemielniak, of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
“He has been very against anonymity,” Professor Jemielniak said of Mr. Sanger. “People in power should identity themselves, he believes.”
“When you’ve done enough edits, you can become an administrator,” said Professor Jemielniak, who gave a firsthand account of the community in his book and later served on the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees for a decade. “After a couple hundred edits, you’re there to create Wikipedia.”
“What I find surprising is when he came back, he wasn’t editing, he just started to boss around,” he said.
Mr. Sanger did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
It is common for Wikipedia to block users from editing in certain circumstances “to prevent damage or disruption.” “Blocks are used chiefly to deal with immediate problems,” according to its policy.
But a site ban, which is what was imposed on Mr. Sanger, is a formal retraction of editing privileges on all of Wikipedia.
On multiple occasions, people or groups have been barred from using Wikipedia for public relations, self-promotion or whitewashing a personal or corporate narrative.
One of them was Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia U.K. board member who was revealed to be using his status to promote the government of Gibraltar via Wikipedia’s “Did You Know” home-page feature while being paid by Gibraltar’s tourism board. He resigned from the board in 2012.
A blanket bar was issued in 2009 of all I.P. addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology after it was found to be using internal computers to aggressively rewrite articles about Scientology, its critics and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, to reflect its preferred doctrine.
Still, nearly 250,000 volunteer editors contribute to Wikipedia every month without much in the way of controversy.
