I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.
The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the matter?
I did not take his comment to mean “it’s an opinion whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning” but “it’s an opinion whether that qualifies him as a cofounder”.
> Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it."
That is essentially what he said. He called himself the founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it’s a dumb question, then said he doesn’t care, then said the interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said again that he doesn’t care.
He said what you think he should’ve said. He just didn’t use your exact words.
> The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)
What “basic facts” did he press on? I heard no facts or questions about facts. He used the word “facts” while pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the founder.
Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean.
The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.
The case if Tilo is quite specific, his interview style uses methods that are effective and uncommon and in part extremely unpleasant, but super effective in making people a accidentally confess to him whilst forgetting all their media training.
Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.
Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?
Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.
A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.
> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.
Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
> Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
The core arguments are "you shouldn't claim to be founder of a product" and "claiming to be founder implies sole founder". This is why I say it breaks down to mincing words.
Fair, but I do think the distinction between the company and the product is relevant. Wales’s claim to be the sole founder of Wikipedia relies specifically on muddying these two notions.
My recollection is that Wales has claimed that Sanger doesn’t qualify as a founder because he was an employee. OK, except Wikipedia is not an employer. If Jimmy Wales qualifies as the founder of Wikipedia specifically because of his ownership in the company that initially funded it, then the other founders of Bomis would seem to also be Wikipedia cofounders.
On the other hand, if being a founder of Wikipedia actually means being instrumental in the creation of the product, then Sanger seems clearly a founder.
Mixing and matching across two different definitions to uniquely identify Wales alone seems very self-serving and inconsistent.
To be clear, I’m not really disputing anything you said here. Just kind of griping about Wales’s self serving definition of founder.
> I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
I don't think that he was claiming to be sole-founder and I don't think claiming to be founder implies you're the sole founder. The choice of "the" over "a" though does have some implication, and his intentional choice to use "the" might have been to avoid broaching the subject of Sanger. It's clearly a touchy subject for him.
And at the same time if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were introduced as the founders of their respective companies I personally wouldn't think much of it.
At the end of the day, the Wikipeida pages on Wikipedia and Sanger credit Sanger appropriately so the it's not as if Wales is exerting his will to erase Sanger or his contribution. He just gets pissy when you bring it up.
If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.
He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.
Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.
Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.
If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.
From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.
It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.
If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.
Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.
There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).
Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.
This is why you need to use different sources.
But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts.
> or the impact of certain wars
Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests.
> for example questioning homosexuality
I don't know what you have to question about this.
>If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.
All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something.
>This is why you need to use different sources.
Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences:
- your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.
Many different options.
There is asymmetry here:
We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.
- You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc)
- I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me.
- Consequence: Your truth is going to win.
The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.
You appear to be using unusual definitions of "fact" and "truth", more akin to "assertions" and "vibe". I'll stick with the traditional definitions.
[1] https://patriotpolling.com/our-polls/f/greenland-supports-jo...
According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States.
57.3% wants to join the US.
According to a Danish poll (conducted through web interviews) among 497 selected citizens in Greenland.
85% do not want to join the US.
If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.
Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
My favorite is: "Numbers are fragile creatures, and if you can torture them enough, you can make them say whatever you want"
A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer) is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or what people are basing their decisions on these days, is orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and truth is hard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and always subject to change based on new data, so lots of people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit up and confirms biases.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
Wikipedia is ideological. Even when the articles stick to the facts (which they often don't), editors will selectively omit inconvenient (but factually true) information to push their ideology.
As a recent, first-hand example of this, witness the highly ideologically motivated Wikipedia editors actively suppressing discussion of Hasan Piker's dog abuse/shock collar scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hasan_Piker&...
> In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity
Yes, because it's not overt. Nobody says that when they're doing it. What's happening is claiming that the story is not notable so it can be removed because it's bad publicity for him:
> This is a nothing story and not encyclopedic.
> it seems to be "drama" amongst the terminally online
Then it turns out that it's notable because some sources are reporting it, but the editors make every effort to discount all of those sources:
> The Australian is noted as a center-right newssheet. I think there has been no rfc on it, but it seems an opinionated source.
> WP:NEWSWEEK has been noted to have had some quality decline according to RSP.
> WP:DEXERTO states not to use it for BLP and that its very tabloidy.
> WP:DAILYDOT also states its highly biased and opinionated. It seems rather tabloidy as well.
> See WP:TIMESOFINDIA but its not reliable enough for this
...and this is used as a reason to not even put a single-paragraph summary at the end of his article, despite the fact that the event is extremely notable as part of his career, and is exactly the information that someone reading the Wikipedia page would want to know.
> I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits.
Yes, I see some of those people too. But, in response, the editors are reverting the changes and locking out the topic. An impartial editor concerned about the truth and curating a useful encyclopedia would not do that - they'd create new changes to remove specifically only the offending unsourced material and rewrite sourced material to be neutral.
> if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it
Along with the other sources listed in the talk page that the editors did their best to discount, The Guardian wrote about it - that certainly counts as a "major news outlet".
Nobody wants a ton of drama on Wikipedia, but this clearly surpasses the threshold of "drama" given that (1) it's still being discussed months afterwards (2) it has transcended the cultural circles around Hasan (which is the main metric for "drama") and (3) it's received reporting from many news outlets, including large and reliable ones like The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/11/i-love-when-...
Not that I expect much from folks who edits their comment to cry about fake internet point
I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.
The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source.
Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
Or is that something you made up?
In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds
some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)
Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.
Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.
But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.
For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
This knife cuts both ways.
What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn company.
Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.
Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.
I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)
---
That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia", and interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight.
(You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)
It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.
What an interview! I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!
As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
Exactly. Kudo to the wikimedia community!
So Wales can write Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia, despite evidence strongly showing that Sanger originated the idea, the name, the policies, and indeed that Sanger was the primary driving force for years. And everyone’s is supposed to accept this historical revision because who created it is a “silly topic”.
Is it also a silly topic when Wales claims credit? Or only when someone questions his assertion?
In fact, journalists should be less deferential to every CEO. Those should be treated with the highest degree of scrutiny.
[...] For a long time [...]
It would also be better for Wikipedia to not have any "public face". I don't want fake-heroes; I want accurate, objective content.
Sad that he has to play that role, but this is where we are at the moment.
What context may also have been lost is that the interview format is self described as somewhat naive and simple. I think the “who are you” question is his standard opening move. The interview series literally advertises to be for the “disinterested” sure you can hate it but you cannot feel tricked…