When I read that Sandi Toksvig, the television presenter, is raising money for an alternative to Wikipedia, my heart soared. It’s ‘deeply biased’, she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, explaining that her new version – to be called Mappa Mundi – would be produced in collaboration with Cambridge University. It would be ‘a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted’, she said.
She’s absolutely right. Wikipedia has long suffered from a left-wing bias, something documented at length in a report by David Rozado for the Manhattan Institute in 2024. Using a research methodology that Wikipedia itself acknowledges was robust, he found a ‘mild to moderate tendency’ to use more negative terms when discussing right-of-centre public figures than left-of-centre public figures.
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, went further, telling UnHerd in 2021 it had become a spigot of left-wing propaganda. He pointed to the fact that left-wing sources such as the Guardian and the BBC are treated as sacrosanct by the site’s editors but right-wing sources as beneath the salt. ‘You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues… It’s banned,’ he said.
You only have to look at the entry about me to see how biased it is. It’s an unending catalogue of my sins. It even gleefully mentions how often I’ve ‘edited’ my own entry – a vain attempt to correct some of the errors, which I’ve now abandoned – as if I’m some vainglorious nincompoop. Contrast this with the fawning entry about Toksvig, who was the co-founder of the now defunct Women’s Equality party. Read the two entries side by side, and it’s nothing short of scandalous that this selfless public servant is still toiling in relative obscurity whereas I’ve been elevated to the Lords.
So hats off to her. Unlike my grumbling about Wikipedia, hers cannot be written off as self-interested. More power to her elbow, I thought.
Then I dug a bit deeper and discovered that when she calls the encyclopedia ‘biased’ she means it’s not left-wing enough. Apparently, the editors are ‘mostly white middle-aged European men’ with a ‘patronising attitude to women’. The ‘knowledge’ that’s been ‘sidelined’ is not the fact that this white middle-aged man co-founded a school that is now the best comprehensive in the country, according to the Sunday Times – god forbid that that should appear in my entry. No, Toksvig wants more guff about women you’ve never heard of who’ve supposedly made vital contributions to science and literature. It’s not sufficient that these minor figures have been shoehorned into reading lists at universities at the expense of overrated ‘dead white European males’ like, er, Chaucer. We must go further to elevate these also-rans. Mappa Mundi might as well be called All’n’Sundry.
Toksvig wants more guff about women you’ve never heard of
One of Toksvig’s reasons for embarking on this project is that Wikipedia is used by the big AI companies to train large language models (LLMs), so the editors’ biases end up being embedded in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. ‘If we leave it alone, it will set down the sum knowledge of information leaving out 50 per cent of the world’s population,’ she said. In fact, roughly 20 per cent of the biographies on the encyclopedia are of women, having increased from 15 per cent in 2014. In some fields, such as female biologists at US research universities, women are more likely to have Wikipedia entries than men. The ‘correction’ that needs to take place is not to train LLMs on even more woke content, but to start training them on less. Ask ChatGPT to name a prominent living poet and it comes up with Carol Ann Duffy. Delete the word ‘living’ and up pops Shakespeare. Oh no, Sandi! A European male.
The feminist campaigner also complained about ‘poisonous social media’, blaming it for the unwillingness of young people to stand up for gay rights. Has she set foot in a school recently? You can barely move for rainbow lanyards. Does this mean her next project will be yet another woke social media platform to rival Bluesky? TikToksvig anyone?
Thankfully, the alternative to Wikipedia I thought she had in mind already exists – it’s called Grokipedia and is owned by Elon Musk. Was that the sound of a tree being felled? No, it was Sandi Toksvig fainting at the thought that the right-wing bogeyman has beaten her to it. It’s pretty good too. I looked up myself and found this: ‘His work emphasises empirical challenges to prevailing orthodoxies in areas like Covid-19 policy and higher education, reflecting a commitment to open debate over enforced consensus.’ That’s more like it.
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