For about the first five or 10 years, Larry Sanger recalled, "you could go to articles on the most controversial topics of the day and the culture war, and you would find all sides being fairly represented."
But about 10 years ago, he said, "as liberals made, or leftists made, their march through the institutions, Wikipedia became one of those influential institutions … and [the left] basically took it over."
By then, Sanger said, Wikipedia started getting rid of citations from conservative sources, "even conservative sources that were cited in order to explain the conservative point of view."
Sanger told Just the News that his new, forthcoming project, called "Encyclosphere," is a decentralized network of the world's encyclopedias, what he called "an old-fashioned, leaderless, ownerless network, like the blogosphere."
Sanger said just as there are no administrators in the blogosphere, "in the same way, I want to create a protocol that very loosely ties all the encyclopedias online together."
In a video posted to Twitter, Sanger announced the Encyclosphere, calling it "a free, giant, global knowledge commons without any central control."
Sanger said his Encyclosphere would be able to avoid an anti-free speech tilt "because freedom is built into the architecture, just as it is built into DNS (the web's basic domain name system) and, again, into the blogosphere. Different competing apps can restrict access to an extent, and governments can restrict access, but the network will never restrict access."
Sanger said his team has already done an encyclopedia meta-search project, started codifying standards, and talked to various encyclopedias. But for now, his first step is to start with "a free, long-term, graduate-level seminar" he said will be announced soon.