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May 19, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:39:32

Sidebar with Wikipedia Co-Founder, Larry Sanger - Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	There will be no intro tweet tonight.
	No intro Twitter video.
	Because I didn't have one lined up.
	And I didn't tweet any interesting videos today.
	But my goodness, people.
	Wait until tomorrow.
	Let me just hit my mic.
	Wait until tomorrow.
	By the way, I'm trying out another shirt.
	Who, what, when, where, why?
	Who, what, when, where, why?
	We're trying it all out.
	I'm going to be doing a live stream tomorrow, and it's not going to be Johnny Depp.
	How's my audio, by the way, before we even go further than this?
	How's the audio?
	Tamara Leach, the woman who was accused of being the organizer of the Ottawa protest, locked up for two and a half weeks before she got bail release terms, which were, to call them constitutionally onerous, would be the...
	Constitutional understatement of the history of the Constitution.
	She has had such onerous bail terms imposed on her so that she could at least breathe fresh air pending her trial on mischief-related charges related to that protest.
	She made a motion to reconsider some of the bail terms, which are being argued to be...
	Excessively, unconstitutionally, totally unjustified.
	And the Crown of Canada came in, and if you're on the vivabarneslaw.locals.com community, you would have already seen the notice of application for bail review.
	The Crown, I don't know, strategically, maybe to potentially punish her for having the audacity of asking that her bail terms be reconsidered.
	They put in a notice to basically accuse her of having violated her bail terms, and they want to put her back in jail.
	And they want to put her back in jail because they're arguing that her having been nominated for the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom's Freedom Award, Justice Award, named after, I forget the name of the individual who it's named after, Jonas, I want to say, an individual who escaped Eastern European communist authoritarian governments.
	And came here and became an influential figure on freedom and, you know, the ills of communism.
	The JCCF wants to give her the George Jonas Award, I think it's called.
	And they're now alleging that by virtue of the JCCF having said that she's going to get that award at a gala, that she breached her bail terms and they want to put her back in jail.
	Presumably seize her $20,000 bond.
	I think that's what she put out.
	The crown is the state in Canada.
	It's the crown is the royalty of government.
	They want to put her back in jail because they argue that her having been offered, granted, you know, pledged this award, pledged by the JCCF, put her in breach of her bail and therefore she should be re-jailed until her trial.
	And they had a hearing on it today and it's going into tomorrow.
	And apparently, it was wild, the hearing.
	Wild and nuts.
	And so there's going to be a webinar-type broadcast where you can access and view the hearing.
	I'm not going to be able to rebroadcast any portion of the audio, video, screen grabs, whatever.
	But I'm going to listen to it and tweet with my mouth updates as this goes down.
	Because apparently the Crown Prosecutor...
	Was so out of line today with the judge.
	The judge said to the Crown Prosecutor, you better cool it.
	You better take the pause to calm down.
	Think about your behavior and come back.
	And we'll start from scratch.
	And apparently when the Crown Prosecutor came back, that's not how he...
	He did not start from scratch.
	So that's it.
	That's what we're going to be doing tomorrow.
	So tune in for that because that's going to be...
	Phenomenal.
	I'm going to maybe start at 9.30, go over the articles.
	CBC had an article.
	Canadian Press had an article.
	Go over the notice of application for the bail hearing.
	And it will be no Johnny Depp nonsense, although I still don't think the Johnny Depp stuff is nonsense, but tomorrow.
	Tamara Lich, day two of her bail rehearing, which she initiated, and the Crown said, thank you for daring to challenge us.
	In order to thank you for that, we're going to try to put you back in jail on the basis that you being given an award by the JCCF puts you in breach of your bail conditions.
	And people still think Justin Trudeau still, you know, wants to judge Putin for kicking out journalists from Russia when he acts worse than, you know, like the worst dictator in Canada.
	Okay.
	Viva, what does a zombie vegetarian eat?
	Grains!
	I get that one.
	I get that one.
	Standard disclaimers.
	Thank you very much, Jonathan Bailey.
	Superchats.
	YouTube takes 30%.
	If you do not like that and you don't want to support YouTube, we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
	Rumble has Rumble Rants, the equivalent of a superchat.
	Rumble takes 20%.
	So it's better for the creator, better to support a platform you like.
	But if you want to support us, best place, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	No legal advice, no medical advice, no election fortification advice.
	I hear kids screaming.
	In the background, they're fighting over slime.
	Doesn't matter.
	Tonight, we have Larry Sanger.
	For those of you who may not know, Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia.
	Wikipedia.
	What do I wear?
	He's the co-founder of Wikipedia who left Wikipedia because he thought...
	I don't even want to say what I think Larry thought.
	We're going to let Larry say it for himself.
	It's going to be an amazing discussion.
	I'm going to take as many questions as you have that I do not get to in the chat, so put them in there.
	And Barnes will be joining us sooner than later.
	I hope I gave him the links.
	I'm sure I did, because I have them.
	Let me bring in Larry.
	Larry, coming in hot.
	Sir, how are you doing?
	Good, good.
	Thanks for having me, sir.
	Chat, let me know if the audio...
	I think I may have to bring up Larry's audio, so let me know.
	Give a mic check, one, two, or the elevator pitch, Larry, for those who don't know who you are.
	First, is it this one?
	Is this the one that's working?
	Or is this the one that's working?
	Oh, no.
	I think it's the one on your computer.
	No, that one's working.
	That one's working.
	This one right here?
	There you go.
	Okay.
	All right.
	That's why.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	So, what's the question?
	Sorry.
	Well, let's see.
	Elevator pitch before I delve into your deepest childhood memories before we come back to the present with Wikipedia.
	Okay.
	Elevator pitch.
	My elevator pitch would be actually for the Encyclosphere.
	Basically, I think that what the world needs if we're going to improve on Wikipedia is to network together all of the other encyclopedias and make it really easy for other people who are writing encyclopedic content to publish their articles according to an open standard, an open encyclopedia standard.
	So it's called the Encyclosphere.
	Because it's like the blogosphere, just like the blogosphere uses RSS, we're adopting a new standard for encyclopedia articles.
	And by doing this, this is going to make it possible for new kinds of search engines in general, but certainly encyclopedia search engines that are going to rethink.
	Change the way that people get their reference content.
	You're not going to be tethered to Wikipedia to easily quickly find the best articles on everything.
	It will actually open up the competition to state the general definitions of every topic to the entire world, not just the people who can get along with Wikipedians.
	Okay, now I've lowered your volume, upped my volume.
	Everybody, let me know if this is good enough.
	Larry, I think I saw, I was watching some of your prior interviews today.
	You're in Ohio now?
	Yes.
	So where are you from, born and raised?
	How many generations?
	American?
	What did your parents do?
	What was your childhood like?
	Not too long, but just so we can try to understand who you are as a human.
	Okay, I think I can do that.
	I was born in Bellevue, Washington.
	I went to Redmond Elementary School before Microsoft was there for a short time.
	Then I went to, well, my dad was a marine biologist.
	I studied seabirds.
	So we went to Anchorage, Alaska.
	And I grew up there from the age of 7 to 18. And then I went to Reed College, which is one of the most liberal colleges in the United States, and studied philosophy.
	And then I went off to Ohio State and got two more degrees in philosophy.
	And then I decided I didn't want to be a philosophy professor after all, so I started working on internet stuff.
	Longer after that, Jimmy Wales, who I had known in the middle of the 1990s, he hired me basically to be basically the founder of something he called Newpedia.
	And that evolved into Wikipedia.
	And then so two years after I got involved at that, I quit.
	Essentially in Disgust.
	We can talk about that if you like.
	And I've been working on a variety of, you know, education and reference, mostly nonprofits ever since.
	And I'm the poorest founder of a top 10 website alive, as far as I'm aware.
	What triggered the initial interest in philosophy?
	Well, I've been interested in philosophical questions since I was a kid.
	I remember car rides going to church.
	We went to Missouri Synod Lutheran Church until I was about 12 or so.
	And I remember asking, because I'd been hearing these...
	Words floating around.
	What exactly is the difference between the mind and the soul and spirit?
	And, of course, my parents, not having any sort of philosophical or very little sort of theological training, really couldn't answer those questions for me.
	And I found that interesting of how, why can't they answer these?
	I mean, they're using the words.
	Seems like, and they seem to...
	They think it means something.
	So, yeah.
	That's just an example.
	I could give other examples from my childhood, if you like.
	Well, you mentioned church.
	So I thought maybe your name was Singer, but changed to Sanger.
	So were you brought up religious?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	Until, as I say, until I was about 12. And then, you know.
	Well, my parents got a divorce and we stopped going to church.
	And I lost my belief in God when I was about 15 or 16 or so.
	And it's actually one of the reasons, again, also why I started studying philosophy and just thinking about philosophy a lot.
	About the same age.
	And did any of your philosophical explorations change or revise your religious beliefs?
	Well, I believe in God again as of a couple of years ago.
	And it wasn't...
	I mean, I taught philosophy of religion for a couple of quarters at Ohio State, so I'm familiar with the issues.
	And I had read a lot of the Bible, but I never read it all the way through.
	So it wasn't really philosophy, per se, that changed my views.
	It was actually reading the Bible all the way through and thinking hard about and looking up the most plausible answers to all the questions that I could think of as I was reading it just gave me...
	New insights on all of the old arguments that I remember teaching in philosophy of religion.
	It just gave me an entirely new perspective.
	I actually think that it's more rational now to believe that God exists than that he doesn't.
	Let me ask you this, not to get too theological, Larry, but if you say you now believe in God, how do you define God?
	I like the, at least as long as we're talking about what the philosophers call natural religion, I like the nature of God to fall out of the arguments for the existence of God.
	So, for example, one of the most basic sorts of arguments for the existence of God is that there needs to be an explanation Of why there is something rather than nothing.
	There needs to be an explanation of why the constants are as they are and not some other value, why the laws are as they are and not something else, why there was a certain amount of matter and a certain sort of configuration at the beginning of it all, and so forth.
	And if you accept that there's an explanation of that, then all of those things are You know, constrain your understanding of what God is because basically God then is that which created time and space and therefore God cannot exist as part
	of time and space.
	He created it.
	And that is then what it would mean to say that God is atemporal or eternal, perhaps.
	God's eternity might mean something else in addition to that.
	But you see what I'm saying?
	You go through the arguments for the existence of God, and that gives you insight on what the concepts that are sort of built into the arguments, what they mean.
	But unfortunately, it's...
	I mean, I could give you the typical philosopher's definition of God, and I could say that God is a spirit or a soul which is the creator of the universe, and list off a few other things like that.
	But it doesn't really help very much.
	I think of...
	Now I think of God more as basically the subject of the Bible.
	That's actually more helpful.
	Yeah, you described what philosophers are trying to explore as part of the reason that my brother entered philosophy, philosophy of religion, and then all the other studies.
	He thinks I understand it, but it's not always easy because it gets a little esoteric and academic at times with its own arcane language internally.
	Though he has a good book we'll be discussing this Friday at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	It's called How Do You Know?
	Which is how do you know anything?
	How do you figure things out?
	I never get the word right.
	Epistemological.
	Okay, yeah.
	Yeah, that's it.
	So he does that.
	He teaches philosophy and all that jazz.
	But it's interesting what you described as similar to his curiosity in the first instance and what led him to explore it.
	Now, from that, what led you to want to be interested in a global internet encyclopedia?
	Well, you know, originally, I just thought that it would be cool to be employed as an editor of an encyclopedia.
	And then when Jimmy Wales basically gave me the opportunity to start, to be hired on, and my job description was, here, start an encyclopedia.
	It's like, wow, that sounds awesome.
	So that was my job.
	And when I did that, that just gave me a new set of goals and actually a new set of skills.
	And I've since worked on all kinds of other encyclopedias in various capacities.
	So, yeah, I'm now a large part of my motivation for education.
	You know, continuing to work on encyclopedias, encyclopedia projects.
	I'm not working on an encyclopedia anymore.
	I'm working on an encyclopedia network.
	It's different.
	Anyway, yeah, I mean, I want to solve the problem that is Wikipedia, basically.
	Wikipedia has all sorts of problems, and I feel a bit responsible.
	For that, for unleashing it on the world.
	And I'm also, I think I'm in a position, due to my history and due to my abilities, to actually do something about the problem.
	At least try.
	So I've been trying.
	Larry, I'm an idiot.
	I see the word wiki in a bunch of places, and I don't know what it means.
	You have Wikipedia, Wiktionary, what is it, the FanWiki, WikiLeaks.
	What is a wiki?
	Wiki is just a website that, at least in principle, anybody can edit.
	So you can, the most wide-open wikis, like Wikipedia in principle, you can go in without even creating an account, start editing the page, hit enter, save, and your latest...
	Version of the article will be overwritten, the one before it.
	And it becomes, what is known on that topic?
	Of course, wikis don't have to be encyclopedias.
	A lot of people think that, but wikis were around for five years before Wikipedia, and they were not really encyclopedias before that.
	It was more of a kind of discussion and, you know...
	Feeling the community out for the sense of their notion about some software topic.
	That's what it was basically before that.
	What was your original objective with Wikipedia?
	Well, to create the biggest, most useful encyclopedia.
	More topics than had ever been covered.
	That was open to everybody in the world.
	And that was neutral.
	In other words, that fairly represented a really broad collection of views.
	So that a rational person could read an article about a topic.
	And come away with the tools that they would need to at least begin to form a good judgment on the topic without being propagandized, you know?
	Okay, so I'm still picturing whenever I think about a startup tech company or something like I go to Facebook, I think of kids in a garage or wherever.
	How does Wikipedia start?
	What does it look like when it starts?
	And how do you write that first line of code that then becomes what Wikipedia is?
	Well, I wasn't a programmer.
	I mean, I learned a little programming afterwards.
	And that wasn't my job.
	And the code was already written, at least the first version.
	We used something called UseModWiki in the first version.
	But anyway, yeah, I drove across the country to Jimbo's office.
	And he had a, I guess, what?
	Four or five people working there already.
	And it was a very small sort of thing in Pacific Beach, San Diego.
	And, you know, we just sort of hung out and talked about what the basic requirements should be of a general free public participatory encyclopedia and started it out relatively quickly on a series of I don't know if you remember these, mailing lists.
	Back then, 20 years ago, there were mailing lists.
	And it's basically a discussion that happens via email that could involve up to hundreds.
	Even the biggest ones had thousands of people subscribed.
	And yeah, that's how it all started.
	And then we wrote software.
	For that, I'm talking about Newpedia.
	And then after a year, basically, we adopted wiki software, at my suggestion.
	And then Wikipedia developed out of that.
	Yeah, then it was just a matter of me filling out the basic pages, explaining how wikis work and, you know, with the basic requirements of an encyclopedia article and so forth, and looking at the contributions that people had made and giving them feedback, that sort of thing.
	How did Wikipedia, how quickly did it take off, or was there something that was really an event that made it?
	Kind of what it is today in terms of popularity.
	Well, the predecessor of Wikipedia was very, very slow to take off, which is actually why we started Wikipedia.
	So Wikipedia was really the second version of what the parent company of Wikipedia came up with.
	The first version was called Newpedia, and the parent company was Balmus.
	And Wikipedia...
	Yeah, it was just a matter of installing some software and getting busy and announcing to all the couple of thousand people that I had collected to work on Newpedia, just letting them know that they could work on Wikipedia.
	And it just took off right away because there were all those people that in the previous year we had...
	We had gathered together and they were really motivated.
	So by the end of the first month, we had, I forget how many articles, there's hundreds.
	Most of them were very small, like one paragraph.
	There were a few that were longer, but that didn't matter because everything just kept getting bigger and bigger.
	Okay, so just describe it.
	I mean, when you have the Wikipedia format.
	And what is the Wikipedia format?
	You initially had it so that anybody could edit an article, anybody could post, and it would be the aggregate knowledge of the internet that would keep it truthful and accurate?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	I can tell that you're having trouble wrapping your mind around the idea that just anybody could edit it.
	And that was the normal reaction for most people for the first five years or more.
	And yeah, the idea, it's amazing that it works.
	But it does, basically.
	There are more people who are interested in making a great encyclopedia than who want to tear it down.
	And so, like, vandalism and nonsense tends to get reverted.
	And reverting was very easy.
	In fact, it was very quickly made significantly easier than Vandalizing a page in the first place.
	I'm not sure if that answers the question entirely.
	When did some of the editorial control start getting concentrated?
	I had a profile up on Wikipedia very early.
	It stayed pretty stable until I became more...
	Politically active, I guess, perceived as such.
	2014, 2015.
	Then all of a sudden I started seeing...
	And before that it was just, you know, people I used to do business with would come in and try to edit it to take credit for things that I did.
	Stuff like that.
	No biggie.
	But now it was all of a sudden crazy stuff would start popping up and then somebody would go in.
	I didn't even know about any of this.
	They would tell me about this externally.
	And now I think I'm back up.
	For a while they took me down.
	For a while, it was just taken down entirely because apparently people were waging war without me knowing about it.
	It's not like I'm a controversial, alt-right political figure from Canada or anything.
	That warrants all of the fighting over these links.
	When did some of that editorial...
	How was it at the beginning?
	You just described it that there were more people that were concerned so they stopped than the vandalizer.
	How did it start to transform where it felt like all of a sudden there was a small group of people that had disparate control over whether your page existed and what was said on your page?
	Yeah.
	Let me just give you a broad overview of the decline of Wikipedia, basically.
	In the first couple of years when I was working on it, it was still relatively small.
	And people were committed, like, philosophically to neutrality.
	And the notion that there would be any sort of cabal of specially privileged people would have been anathema.
	I mean, that'd be really frowned upon.
	By 2005 or so, I would say you started seeing certain articles having a A definite slant, but they tended to be in science.
	So, like, the Global Warming article in 2005 already had, you know, an alarmist slant to it.
	But a lot of the political articles were still not really quite biased.
	Some of them were, I think.
	But even by then, there were, you know, people who spent All their time, as far as we could tell, on Wikipedia.
	And there needed to be a class of administrators of some sort to rein in the legitimately bad actors.
	That's never going to go away.
	And those people didn't start actually really clearly abusing their authority, as far as I could tell, until some point between 2004 and 2010.
	But by 2010, then the whole thing had an obvious left-wing bias.
	At least it was obvious to me.
	Some people would disagree.
	I would describe its bias as that of the BBC at the time.
	So it was pretty establishment-oriented, but it still made an effort to state the alternate points of view.
	And the whole notion that Fox News, for example, or conservative blogs...
	Couldn't be sighted.
	That wasn't even on the radar, I don't think, by that time.
	That didn't come out, you know, until like 2015.
	Then you started seeing basically the wokesters taking over in force.
	And between then and now, it's just become more and more radical with articles becoming, you know, year by year, just observably more just...
	Propaganda mouthpieces.
	And where they'll take pride even in the fact, will announce, not try to hide, take pride in the fact that basically conservative news media cannot be cited as a source.
	And for that matter, you can't cite most original, important.
	Books, monographs, because that's original research.
	In other words, you have to have books or articles that comment on other books, that summarize the information.
	And that just really narrows down the sort of stuff that can be talked about on Wikipedia.
	And so all of those changes, this narrowing of the scope and the bias of Wikipedia.
	That really came about in the last 10 years, and it really accelerated in the last five years or so.
	One quick question.
	When did you leave Wikipedia, and how long were you there for?
	I left here in 2002, so March 2002.
	I got it started in January of 2001.
	I started working on the projects in January of 2000.
	But I've been...
	Following the project closely and started and helped various competitors of Wikipedia along the way.
	So I'm extremely conversant with what's going on.
	And now, just so Wikipedia can go update your entry with the far right accusation, politically speaking, how do you align?
	How did you align?
	I was thinking that because of what Wikipedia has become, you...
	We're more left of center.
	But how would you define yourself politically if anybody wants to write you off for any sort of political bias?
	Oh, well, I've never made any secret of this, and I've always been very open.
	You know, when I was starting Wikipedia, I called myself a libertarian.
	And since then, I've, like in the last, say...
	Five years or so, I would describe myself as more conservatarian.
	So I've actually changed my views about some of the defining issues of libertarianism, but not too much.
	I haven't really changed my views all that much.
	What are the hurdles for people trying to compete with Wikipedia who want to have a substitute for its origin?
	Of the original purpose that In fact, collective knowledge of the crowd, of those who truly care to curate information, I consider the idea of Wikipedia a very democratizing idea, that you can challenge the concentration of power, elite credentials, and all the rest as the sole guardian.
	It was at first.
	Exactly.
	The sole guardians of truth.
	And it was that at first, now it's shifted.
	How hard is it for someone to try to recreate an honest Wikipedia today?
	Yeah.
	Very hard.
	Very, very hard.
	And the reason is that basically Wikipedia sucks the air out of any competing project.
	It's really depressing to work for hours and hours on a really high-quality encyclopedia article and then just never see it on the first page of results on Google.
	And that's what's going to happen if you go right for most other encyclopedias.
	Now, there's other competing encyclopedias that have always come up high, depending on the topic, if you search for your topic plus encyclopedia, right?
	And Britannica actually will show up in search results quite often, right?
	That's all right.
	But there's so many other encyclopedias.
	And, of course, a lot of people have, you know, spent hundreds of hours, thousands of hours on Wikipedia only to leave and then start their own competing encyclopedias.
	And they just don't take off.
	I put a lot of time into Citizenium back in 2006 and 2007.
	The model was similar to Wikipedia, but we required the use of real names.
	We required that people endorse a sort of community charter, which got rid of a lot of the nonsense.
	And we had a special role approving articles for...
	For experts.
	But the experts weren't in control.
	So that's just an example of something that I've worked on.
	And I actually gave that away to one of the old...
	Contributors a couple years ago, and she's actually been working on it.
	So it's still out there.
	And I think what we need to do now is just to make it possible to reach down into the long tail of all of those other encyclopedias and make it easier to find the articles.
	And you can actually find a good representative idea.
	Not an exhaustive notion, but get a rough idea of what that would be like if you go to encyclosearch.org and encycloreader.org.
	So those are two basically meta-search engines for encyclopedias.
	And there are a couple of projects that we've been working on at the Knowledge Standards Foundation.
	And they're going to get only better and better.
	So come back and visit them in a year and you'll see a lot of progress, I think.
	I got one practical question, one just question for my own knowledge.
	Did Wikipedia ever get an offer to be bought out by a big tech company?
	Like, was there ever an offer to go public or to be bought out?
	If there was, Jimmy Wales never told me about that, and that would have been possible only in the first, like, 30 years or so, because they made Wikipedia into a non-profit in, I think it was sometime in 2003.
	So that's when the Wikimedia Foundation was born.
	But originally, yeah, it was a.com, not a.org.
	And it was for profit.
	We were going to run ads and so forth.
	And let's just say that the volunteers rebelled at the notion.
	But that was Jimmy Whale's original business plan for Wikipedia.
	The second question was...
	Sorry, go ahead, baby.
	In terms of...
	We'll get into a solution to Wikipedia.
	Why cannot they just outright ban, based on ISP or whatever, ban the clearly activist vandalizers of otherwise decent entries?
	Why can't they kick out the activists to try to bring back some sort of neutrality?
	Oh, but the activists are in control at every level.
	So they would never do that.
	That the inmates have taken over the asylum long ago.
	And how does that work, that they're able to take over?
	In other words, is there something, is it the foundation that says this group of people will have final editorial control?
	No, no.
	I mean, basically...
	That's a good question.
	I mean, there's a lot to say on that question.
	I mean, the bottom line answer is, I don't know.
	Yeah, I mean, what I would say is, it looks organic, but it might not be.
	Let's put it that way.
	The whole process seemed to be an organic development where the people who were left, who did not just abandon the project in disgust.
	happened to be left wing.
	And they ganged up and drove out the people who were more right wing and libertarian.
	And yeah, and that's where we are.
	And ultimately, those people elected people to the board of directors, which was sort of mostly bottom-up.
	And yeah, and that's pretty much how it happened.
	But I actually think that I mean, let's just put it this way.
	Once it looked like this would be an influential organ of public opinion, then the spy agencies and the PR firms would have been fools not to put in a lot of money buying up people who had the most...
	Clout in the system, setting them to work full-time, consolidating their influence, and working on behalf of the highest bidders, essentially.
	I actually think that's what has happened.
	Larry, do you have any idea what the annual budget of Wikipedia is now from the donations?
	Well, okay.
	Look, you have to understand, when we talk about Wikipedia, we're talking about a volunteer project where, at least in theory, most of the people who work on it aren't getting paid.
	And they certainly aren't getting paid by the Wikimedia Foundation.
	Now, the Wikimedia Foundation has a budget, but their job is not to write or edit Wikipedia at all.
	I mean, it's funny, but it's true.
	But one legitimate function that they have is to pay for and run the servers.
	So they've got to do that.
	But there's all kinds of other people who have, as far as I can tell, I just describe it as make-work jobs and get paid like $150,000 a year to do it in the Bay Area.
	What can I say?
	I can tell you what the budget is.
	I think they're spending tens of millions of dollars a year.
	I think it might be like $50 million.
	And they raise over $100 million per year now.
	But are they actually spending all that money on...
	The development of content?
	Well, a little bit, yes.
	They have some grants that they give out to people who actually do work, but they're not employees of the foundation.
	How much of their market dominance is due to Google manipulation versus just being first out, first up, and thus they just developed an organic market monopoly?
	Well, it's very common for people to say that it's not organic, that it was like Google from the beginning.
	Google realized that this is something that they ought to push.
	And for all I know, that is true.
	That could be true for sure.
	We know that...
	Now that Wikipedia, or that Google rather, is more than willing to put their fingers on the scales.
	But generally speaking, if Wikipedia has the only substantive article on a subject, then...
	When people are just looking for a general introduction to the subject, of course, that's going to rise to the top organically and probably should for any encyclopedia.
	And I think that will explain a lot of their market dominance.
	So, I don't know how much of it, though.
	Like I say, I actually think that probably Google has had their thumb on the scales because Google is, basically, people use Google to find Wikipedia articles, like, what, a third of the time when they're searching.
	So, I don't know.
	Larry, I mean, Robert, if you guys know.
	Either of you know, who are the biggest donors?
	Are there government entities or interested parties, or is this purely like grassroots Bernie Sanders type donations?
	They have a lot of grassroots donations, and they have, but they've also had an increasing amount of support from Google and others.
	But yeah, it's...
	They're a 501c3, so they have to report that sort of information.
	I haven't looked in a while.
	But yeah, they do get some big donations from power players in Silicon Valley, which, again, they can't directly control.
	The editorial goings-on on Wikipedia because the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't directly control the goings-on on Wikipedia.
	But I would assume that anyone who really wants to influence articles, they'll just be paying off, buying up the influential people on Wikipedia.
	I imagine there's, to a certain extent, there's a bidding war going on.
	I can't prove it.
	To some extent, I can, actually.
	But, yeah.
	Well, maybe we could look up an example.
	Do you want to pull up David Freiheit?
	Oh, no, forget that.
	We did that one earlier today.
	Let's pull up...
	Let me just get up...
	Well, I just actually had my wiki there, but it hasn't been edited since April 11th.
	Let's pull up...
	Robert, Alex Jones?
	Sure.
	Let's see Alex Jones.
	Oh, we don't see it yet.
	Sorry, hold on.
	I thought we were looking at my screen.
	I just put in Alex Jones and didn't even put in Wikipedia.
	And lo and behold, it's the...
	By and large, the Wikipedia result is always the first result to come up of anything.
	Alex Emmerich Jones, I like that middle name, is an American far-right...
	Radio show host.
	I love how they added far right now.
	Of course.
	And now I want to go down and see it.
	An interview with Alex Jones, America's leading and proudest conspiracy theorist.
	Oh, for God's sake.
	I can't even stand it.
	Oh, wow.
	He's got a long one.
	Now, when was it last edited?
	We can go down to the bottom.
	First of all, what is the difference between this one and mine, which has red in it?
	Are there different tiers of Wikipedia pages?
	That has red in it?
	You mean like it has red links in it?
	No, red is sort of...
	Here, David Frey, I can't even spell my own name.
	If you look at mine, it has red on the side.
	Right, right.
	And it looks like it's less official in a way than Alex Emmerich Jones.
	It's just a different info box.
	That's the only difference.
	So the info box that you're using or that is being used for your article has a different styling.
	That's all.
	Okay.
	So the box on the right side is called an info box.
	Yeah.
	So we look at this.
	I mean, I guess we go to the important part are the footnotes or the citations.
	What is the most important part of assessing any individual Wikipedia entry?
	That's a good question.
	Generally speaking, nobody gets past the first few sentences.
	Certainly, they don't get past the first two paragraphs, so I would say that.
	I think for a researcher, of course, the footnotes are very important.
	Although there's been some attention given to, you know, just how well the, what is, you know, the content of a footnote, what it's supposed to support, and the actual contents of the article in the footnote, or the book in the footnote.
	A lot of times they're just misused, that the footnoting is actually really bad.
	To the extent that it has substantive, roughly correct footnotes, that's useful for researchers.
	But for the average, everyday person, what we need to look at is the info box and the first couple paragraphs, especially the first sentence, the definition of the article.
	Hold on.
	Let's just go back and see.
	So we saw the first.
	Definition is Alex Jones is a far-right conspiracy theorist.
	I believe the far-right is a recent addition, but I don't know as of when.
	I doubt it.
	I bet it's been there for years because of who he is.
	I just read an article about Google.
	When it says auto-populate, it does not...
	Oh, so never mind.
	I was mistaken because there was another article saying when Google auto-populates the subtitle...
	Here it says, American radio host, and it doesn't say conspiracy theorist, but that's a totally separate problem for another day.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Well, if you look at the search results, it actually appears in Google, right?
	I mean, just look at the first two lines that it has there in the blurb about the article, right?
	It says, Alexander Emmerich Jones.
	Blah, blah, blah, is an American far-right radio show and prominent conspiracy theorist.
	So it's already got the dismissive language in the article.
	So they tell you in the first paragraph or the first sentence even of the article, they tell you what to think right in the beginning.
	What does it say about like Rachel Maddow?
	Look it up.
	It'll be interesting.
	Look at this.
	Conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Let's go see what Rachel Maddow.
	Let's see what Rachel Maddow.
	Yes.
	When other explanations are more probable, it concludes.
	Yeah, exactly.
	American television presenter.
	It has to be implausible.
	Let's just see this.
	To be a conspiracy theorist.
	Oh, wait.
	Oh, God.
	What am I doing here?
	I don't want to look at that.
	Here's an interesting point.
	Notice Maddow's MSNBC site comes up.
	Up until a couple years ago, if you typed in Alex Jones, Infowars came up.
	Google now suppresses all of that so that his Wikipedia is what comes up first.
	That's right.
	She's second, and she is 49. She is liberal.
	She is called liberal, so that's something.
	Otherwise, she's a program host, liberal political commentator.
	Hosts the show on MSNBC.
	She received multiple Emmy Awards for her broadcasting work and a Grammy Award.
	Wow.
	Hey, is Alison Morrow up on there?
	Because she's an Emmy Award winner too, so I'd be curious.
	Does Alison Morrow have her own Wikipedia?
	Come on, let's see.
	Am I going to put it in Wiki?
	Dog hair all over me.
	I don't even know who.
	This is...
	Oh, she's a...
	Well, a former...
	Oh, yeah, there you go, Wikipedia.
	Former...
	No, no, that's not it.
	So that's not a Wikipedia.
	No, it isn't.
	I think this Alison Morrow might not actually be in Wikipedia if it's not coming up in the first...
	Well, that's what's fascinating.
	For a period of time, I disappeared from Wikipedia.
	Yeah.
	So I've been up there for almost a decade or however long it was.
	Then all of a sudden it was, and so someone let me know, you're no longer up.
	And I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
	And so somebody looked into it.
	I was no longer a public figure.
	I was like, hold on a second.
	I've been a public figure for a decade.
	I'm more public now than ever before.
	And I'm somehow no longer a public figure.
	That was their first way of trying to handle it.
	Hold on.
	Chat just said, pull up Jimmy Dore.
	Let's see how this works now.
	Jimmy Dore, Jommie Dore.
	Okay, guys, forgive me.
	Okay, here we go.
	Wikipedia.
	Well, it's not an unflattering picture.
	That's already a start.
	He's 56. Well, he hides it well.
	Good for him.
	James Patrick Anthony Doerr is an American comedian, political commentator, and YouTube personality.
	Okay, very neutral.
	He is the host of the Jimmy Doerr Show.
	Okay, it looks good.
	I guess we've got to go to controversy.
	Is there any controversy?
	Political views?
	It's going to be more...
	What you're seeing is almost anybody...
	I think Glenn Greenwald will probably still treat fair.
	No way.
	I disagree.
	Try it.
	Let's take a look at that then.
	Let's play the wiki gambling.
	So his Twitter comes up first.
	Interesting.
	Glenn Greenwald.
	Okay, here we go.
	Glenn Greenwald.
	Very flattering.
	That's what he looks like?
	Yeah, that is how he looks like.
	Dude, another young-looking dude.
	Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and lawyer.
	Very good.
	In 1996, he founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation.
	He began blogging on National Security.
	Looks decent.
	I stand correcting.
	I stand corrected.
	There really isn't...
	Well, it's gotten better over the last year or so.
	There's been some improvement because they were getting so political in ways that...
	How do they define me currently?
	I assume it's just a lawyer.
	Wiki Roulette.
	Who should we pull up next chat?
	You can try to pull me up.
	Robert Barnes, lawyer.
	There's a Robert Barnes that was a preacher who got hung in the tower.
	He's a namesake ancestor.
	That's one of the other ones that's up on the...
	And then there's the Washington Post reporter.
	Wikipedia is second.
	There it is.
	Okay, boom.
	No picture.
	What is all that, Larry, at the top there?
	This.
	Right.
	Well, that basically is notice.
	It's supposed to be aimed at the...
	At the readers, it really helps the people who are working on it more.
	And yeah, it just uses a sort of standard template and it makes it easy for them to track what they consider to be problems with the article.
	In this case, it's a multiple issues template.
	They're okay.
	At the beginning, and at the very top, it's now apolitical.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com Because anybody can contribute to Wikipedia still, right?
	Well, theoretically.
	Theoretically.
	The thing is, a lot of people report The experience of going in, trying to edit an article, and regardless of how well supported their edits are and innocuous the edits are, they're just instantly reverted.
	And either without an explanation or with a really unpersuasive, unhelpful Yeah, it is a mess.
	You can't really participate, especially on anything controversial, unless you are playing the game very well.
	New people are not welcome on any but very obscure topics, and even there, maybe not.
	Larry, here's the question.
	I mean, how do you repair Wikipedia to the extent it can be repaired?
	And alternatively, if it can't be, how do you turn it into MySpace?
	How do you end Wikipedia as any sort of source, let alone a reliable source?
	Because I don't think people think that.
	So when you say, how do you repair it, do you mean how do you make Wikipedia better, like more neutral, for example?
	Yeah, or return to its origin.
	To return to its origin of being a democratizing source of influence that seeks out the objectives that an encyclopedia did, which was to be as neutral as possible.
	I don't see how that can happen at all.
	And basically, Wikipedia is self-governing.
	And self-governing, self-selecting online organizations are inherently, I mean, once they get started, once they reach a certain level of critical mass, they can't...
	They can't really change radically from where they are at that point.
	Basically, people who don't like the system as it is, they leave in disgust.
	People who like it tend to get awarded with more and more authority in the system.
	So it's an inherently conservative system.
	Yeah, I suppose.
	I'm going to put up 2020 election.
	Wikipedia.
	And by the way, we'll see if this gets this video flag.
	No, I'm having, I have an issue with Viva Clips channel.
	A nine-month-old video just got a terms of, a community guidelines.
	Okay.
	I think this might be one that I referred to in a blog post that I've written.
	I wrote a couple of blog posts in which I do what you guys are doing.
	I basically go through a bunch of different articles and then...
	I make observations about them.
	Well, listen, Larry, do it in real time for us, but don't say anything that gets us in trouble here.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	The 2020 U.S. presidential election was the most secure election in the history of America, and challenging it is a criminal offense.
	Sorry, that's not what it says yet.
	It was the 59th quadrennial presidential election.
	This is so objective.
	It lacks objectivity.
	In a competitive primary that featured the most candidates for any political party in the modern era of American politics, Biden secured the Democratic nomination over his closest rival, Senator Bernie Sanders.
	It's interesting how they define Kamala Harris.
	Kamala Harris is defined by her identity.
	Hold on, did I see it?
	How do I do this?
	It was right where you were at.
	Kamal Harris?
	Harris became the first African-American, the first Asian-American, the first...
	Oh, now I lost.
	This is my bad.
	What am I doing?
	Stop it, David.
	Okay.
	Here.
	Harris is introduced in the second...
	Briefly in the first one, but in the second paragraph, where it says Harris became the first African-American, the first Asian-American, and third female vice presidential nominee on the party ticket.
	So everything's about her gender.
	Not United States Senator, former Attorney General, that it's, oh, she's black and she's Asian and she's a female.
	Well, Robin, you heard the new press secretary came out.
	I didn't even know these things, and it's none of my business.
	Black, gay, immigrant, and as she said, the first one to embody all three of these elements for the new press secretary.
	She won the Identity Olympics.
	She's got extra benefits.
	If she changed genders, then she would have got another plus.
	Apparently, that's what LBGTQVV whatever plus means now.
	Do you got the plus?
	Do you got the plus?
	Hey, I changed genders.
	Does changing races constitute a plus?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	It depends which way.
	Justin Trudeau is going to be the most...
	I'm just putting in this word which we don't need to say.
	60 times.
	Mostly alleged.
	Okay, okay.
	What you're going to find, you look through that article, and a lot of times it sounds really, really neutral.
	And there's all kinds of articles, even on political topics, that in particular sentences and paragraphs and so forth, you really can't find much wrong with it.
	But when it matters, like you started searching on fraud, it's going to have a really obvious...
	So basically, if you look for the hot button issues, the really controversial points of view across a variety of articles, like I was looking for commentary about the riots in 2000.
	What does it say about BLM?
	Does it include the most recent information about?
	BLM's founders spending money in interesting places.
	Yeah, who knows?
	That's a good question.
	I'm just going to put it in BLM Wiki, and then hold up.
	Let me bring up the share screen.
	I like this game.
	It's called Wiki Roulette.
	We can just leave it.
	Let's see.
	Wikipedia, and now you can see what I see.
	Black Lives Matter.
	It's a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism.
	They're starting out so that whatever their founders did don't really matter because it's decentralized.
	It's totally decentralized.
	Somebody was getting those checks.
	They weren't decentralized.
	The people getting the checks were decentralized.
	That was centralized storage when the checks came in.
	Listen to this.
	When its supporters come together, they do so primarily to protest incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people.
	The movement and its related organizations typically at typically.
	It's an interesting choice.
	Advocate for various policy changes considered to be related to black liberation.
	While there are specific organizations that label themselves simply as Black Lives Matter, such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the overall movement is decentralized, as I remind you guys, network of people and organizations with no formal hierarchy.
	Interesting.
	The slogan Black Lives Matter itself remains untrademarked.
	That's an odd thing.
	That's because it's not trademarkable.
	By any group, despite being characterized by some as a violent movement, the overwhelming majority of its public demonstrations have been peaceful.
	Let me just see this.
	Mostly peaceful.
	Multiple sources.
	Of course.
	I mean, all liberal.
	Now, you were mentioning earlier that now...
	That conservative sources don't count as credible sources.
	Yes, that's right.
	You can find some, there's one page in particular that has a big long table of different news sources and it's color-coded, you know, green, red and orange, I think, basically saying whether a given source is usable.
	If you want to look it up, it would be something like Wikipedia media reliable sources, perhaps, or Wikimedia.
	All that I know, by the way, is that mansions did not come up once.
	It might come up if you...
	Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on a reliable...
	This is Wikipedia...
	If you go to that article, it'll be linked from there.
	Why do they say secondary sources?
	From a historical perspective, primary sources are always preferred.
	So why did Wikipedia make the choice to go to secondary sources?
	Yeah, it's...
	It's rooted, the thinking is rooted in something that's very legitimate, which is that you don't want people publishing their own original research within what should be just basically summaries of what is known.
	But then people have...
	Basically, they say that if you cite too many primary sources, then you are essentially doing original research about that.
	You know, like if I cite, you know, I don't know, The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater, then that's a problem.
	Even if I'm writing about Goldwater, I should be citing someone who is...
	Who is citing the contents of a conservative or writing a book about Goldwater?
	Because then it is more objective or something.
	I don't know.
	I'll give an example of this as to where Wikipedia can have real weight is also in the area of foreign policy.
	So if you look up Vladimir Putin, you're going to find that Wikipedia all of a sudden is a big fan of conspiracy theories.
	Every crazy, kooky conspiracy theory ever about Vladimir Putin is pretty much in there.
	Hey, I can see the Ghost of Kiev at the Wikipedia link.
	Let's see this here.
	Ghost of Kiev.
	They do acknowledge now to a fictitious flying ace.
	Oh boy.
	Someone asked, does Wikipedia have its own Wikipedia entry that can be edited by anybody?
	Oh yeah, right there.
	It was right there.
	You had it at the top.
	Wikipedia.
	Go back.
	Yeah, there it is.
	But this looks just like the...
	No, no, no.
	It's right at the top.
	It's the top of that page where it says, Welcome to Wikipedia.
	Click on Wikipedia.
	Ah, there it is.
	There we go.
	A multilingual, free online, written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system.
	Is there anything, if you go down, is there anything about controversy concerning Wikipedia?
	Of course.
	That's been part of it from the beginning.
	But the thing is, I'm probably known as one of the most public sources of...
	I have criticism about Wikipedia, one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia.
	I have been for a long time, but there's been this debate recently over whether I can be cited on the page about bias on Wikipedia, even though that's one of the things that I talk about, and I'm the main author of Wikipedia's neutrality policy.
	And despite the fact that I actually written the only long article length discussion of defending neutrality in encyclopedias, journalism and education.
	So despite these things being true of me, there's this really, really active debate.
	You can look it up.
	It's called Wikipedia bias or bias, criticisms of bias in Wikipedias.
	Something like that.
	It's part of what I see as a broader phenomenon of what happened to the internet that could democratize information and influence.
	And there's been a counter-coup for at least the last five years in particular.
	But beginning before then.
	And not letting YouTube have its natural algorithms search and locate data.
	Not letting Google have its natural algorithms get actually the information or sources that people want.
	Not letting certain broadcasts even happen on social media, Facebook or Twitter.
	And Wikipedia's been part of that.
	Taking this independent democratization of the idea of an encyclopedia and converting it into another gatekeeping institution that's masquerading as an open-sourced informational source.
	Yeah, well, amen, brother.
	I mean, basically, that's what I've been saying for the last few years.
	And, oh, yeah.
	So, Larry, what are you working on that can be the next?
	Well, first of all, back it up.
	What can you do to prevent any new entity that will give Wikipedia a run for its money now from turning into Wikipedia, left or right?
	I would not feel any better if it were as much of a right-wing bias infiltration as left-wing.
	So what's the cure to the problem, not rather the cure to this particular problem?
	That's actually one of the questions I asked myself when I was refining the idea that I'm pursuing right now.
	Because I agree, you don't want any solution.
	To basically be co-opted by the powers that be.
	So how do you do that?
	Well, the internet has a solution to that in general.
	And that is to have truly decentralized, technically neutral networks.
	So think about how the blogosphere works.
	If you have a blog...
	Or a news organization that syndicates its articles using RSS, you can put out your content using this standard, and then others can aggregate that content, news and blogs, in what are called news readers or feed readers.
	And the whole thing, you know, you can't really say that it's biased or unbiased because it's the Internet, right?
	It's just a window into a part of the Internet called the blogosphere, right?
	It's defined by the fact that all of those different sources use RSS, which is a technical standard.
	It doesn't have any sort of means in it whatsoever that would enable it to be...
	To become ideologically biased, right?
	Well, we should do the same thing with encyclopedias, basically.
	We need to make a decentralized network of encyclopedias.
	And after the blogosphere, I call it the encyclosphere.
	And in order to make that happen, basically, there's actually a lot of things that need to take place.
	We need to have the The actual content standard.
	We actually have a file format.
	It's called the ZWE file format.
	It's actually just a kind of zip file, and it has a specification for all the different kinds of files that need to be in it, and it represents in a standardized way that can be used by Actually, all kinds of different kinds of content, but certainly encyclopedia articles.
	It has a standard way for representing them.
	It can open certain pages in there, and it looks the same across all of the different sources.
	And you don't actually have to even include the article itself.
	You can just have the metadata about the article as part of this Zui file.
	And then the combination of the free articles and the proprietary metadata.
	about the proprietary articles.
	You can build search engines, right?
	And you can build readers.
	So that's why we have Encycloreader and Encyclosearch.
	It does, again, encycloreader.org, encyclosearch.org.
	On the reader thing, you can actually read some free encyclopedias.
	They're not all there.
	So, I mean, what we're trying to do is very big.
	And so we haven't, like, gone out whole hog and, like, downloaded millions and millions of articles.
	But we're going to when all the kinks are worked out.
	But it's working pretty well right now.
	And it's going to get a lot better.
	I'm going to feel comfortable basically downloading all of Wikipedia into this format, I think by the end of this year.
	And when we're doing Wikipedia, we'll be doing probably most of everything else.
	And that's going to be really neat.
	You'll have, like, an instant search.
	Go to either of those websites that I told you about.
	And here's the other thing.
	If it's going to be truly decentralized, then you can't be locked into using any one set of software, right, in any one platform.
	And there can't be just one aggregator, right?
	There actually has to be multiple options.
	So we actually are running two different aggregators independently.
	And we're building two different search engines independently.
	And we're making sure that they can interact with each other and share data across them.
	And it will be possible.
	We actually have some people who are already on board to install their own version of EncycloReader or EncycloSearch.
	And, you know, have it...
	It'll be like...
	It's open-source software, right?
	So anybody will be able to use it, and we'll make it so that it's easy to adapt, just like WordPress, right?
	So these are going to be like the WordPress-type applications, but for the encyclosphere.
	You'll be able to actually edit encyclopedias using this software, but which draw from blogs and all kinds of other sources all around the internet.
	So just different windows into the same overall decentralized body of content.
	Larry, I think after this ends, I'm introducing you to someone I know, and it might be the match made in heaven.
	But Robert, hold on.
	I know you have a question, Robert.
	Someone said, look up The Great Reset.
	I'm just going to show you that this is legit.
	I'm going to highlight and hit enter again, just so it repopulates.
	Entry number one, WeForm.
	Great Reset.
	Entry number two, WeForm, Great Reset.
	Entry number three, I don't think I've seen three top...
	How does this happen, Larry?
	Are they buying this from Google?
	Who knows?
	I couldn't tell you to tell the honest truth.
	And then the fourth one.
	Here you go.
	The fourth result is Wikipedia.
	The Great Reset is the name of the 50th...
	By the way, two years ago, this was called Conspiracy Theory by...
	Wikipedia's own definition.
	The Great Reset is the name of the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
	It's just the name of a meeting.
	That's funny.
	It got videos flagged two years ago on YouTube.
	It brought together high-profile business and political leaders convened by Charles, Prince of Wales, and the WEF, and...
	Okay, whatever.
	Everyone can go read that.
	I just love the fact that the first three results are the WEF form itself.
	That's unique.
	Okay, Robert, sorry.
	I know you had a question there.
	So are you confident in the capacity of this to be a solution to return to the roots of Wikipedia and offer a meaningful alternative?
	And what do you think the time frame is for the delivery of that?
	The answer is yes.
	Basically, I've been thinking through different possible solutions since basically 2005 or so.
	I've tried personally to develop a few different kinds of solutions.
	And I think actually, basically, for the reason that you brought up before, basically we have to have A guarantee against being taken over by the left.
	It has to be an independent network that is robust.
	Let's put it this way.
	As long as the funding doesn't run out, it's going to happen.
	I have people who are very technically adept, who are involved.
	And they assure me that there is absolutely nothing about this that is hard.
	It just requires putting in the time and the concepts are all old and proven.
	So it's just a matter of basically getting it done.
	And we have been, too.
	I mean, on very little money.
	Just spent, like, over $200,000 altogether in the last 18 months or so.
	And we've built a lot of the back end.
	Not so much of the front end, like, for the public to use.
	Although you can see some stuff there.
	But that's going to change.
	That's going to change.
	So anyway, I'm very bullish, actually, about our chances of solving the problem we're trying to solve.
	Larry.
	This is an interesting question.
	Could digitizing pre-2006 print encyclopedias with OCR to build a comparative database for fact-checking that can be overrided with citations by empirical scientific archaeological, That's a mouthful.
	Why pre-2006?
	I don't know, but digitizing...
	The printed word, so that you can't get into the memory holing that we saw with 8645 type crap where they edit out the murderous implication of 86ing somebody, digitizing it.
	What would that do?
	What could that do?
	And could that be a solution?
	Yeah, well, I mean, basically what we're working on is the technology of doing something like that.
	It supports that sort of thing.
	We're going to be encouraging Actually, we will build the tools for existing encyclopedias, and this includes, obviously, traditional reference publishers and people who own the copyrights to those older encyclopedias.
	We'll give them all of what they need, basically, in order to get that stuff online.
	Again, even if it is not proprietary, or sorry, even if it is proprietary, we'll still be able to link to the articles.
	And who knows, maybe we'll find some decentralized way of allowing people to get paid for articles as well, although that isn't as high of a priority.
	For me, I actually think what's going to happen in the long run is once the software is in place and running very well, like just I'll give you an example of what I mean by the software.
	We have a woman who has recently, just in the last month, started working on a WordPress plugin.
	And what this will do is once you have the plugin turned on, You'll be able to press a button on a page if it's an encyclopedia article and you want to put it on the encyclosphere.
	It will actually push it to the aggregators, the ones that we have, and it will then be available through the various search engines.
	And so I can easily imagine how there will be A competition to write the best article on each topic.
	Once all of the articles are out there, the long tail on every single topic, it's really an eye-opener.
	Comparing the results, even if you just look at Encyclosearch or Encycloreader now, just look at the results on encyclopedic-type topics.
	There versus like Google.
	And it's frequently more useful.
	And we're just searching over 100,000 articles from a lot of different sources.
	That's going to change radically when there are millions.
	And then when it becomes possible and easy for people to...
	To submit new articles and to very easily create new encyclopedias, like I can imagine an academic basically selecting encyclopedia articles from many different sources and aggregating them together in a new collection.
	It'll basically put Wikipedia totally to shame.
	And then I haven't even started talking about the rating system.
	I should say the rating systems that will arise.
	So we'll have support for multiple competing ratings and ways of aggregating the ratings.
	Will blockchain have any role in this?
	It can.
	It definitely will not have to.
	That won't be part of the backbone, but actually one of the newest volunteers on the project is putting the ZWE files, those are the encyclopedia articles on...
	On the Encyclosphere, they're putting it into IPFS.
	So IPFS is like, it's kind of like BitTorrent, but BitTorrent for people who like crypto.
	So yeah, it actually has an associated coin, file coin.
	I don't think that's necessarily required or that it's going to be the answer, but we're going to support people who want to do that.
	In fact, one of the organizations who originally supported this idea, I worked for them for almost two years, Everipedia.
	And they also are committed.
	They haven't started it yet, but they're going to have a strong commitment.
	Recently repeated that they're going to put that on their blockchain.
	So, yeah.
	Larry, I'm an idiot and I will always be an idiot.
	What the hell is blockchain?
	How does it work?
	And how is it a solution to anything other than confusing an adult?
	It's hard to explain very briefly, but you can think of it as a kind of distributed database, but it's made in a certain way, right?
	Each new addition to the database is appended to the end of the last addition to the database.
	And exactly how things get added, that's how the different blockchains differ.
	So in the case of the Everpedia blockchain, for example, anyone can propose a new addition.
	In the form of a new article or an edit to an article.
	Whether it remains on the blockchain, though, depends on the vote of the people who hold tokens.
	So if there are more tokens devoted to a yes vote than a no vote, then the change stays up.
	That's just an example of how somebody might use a blockchain.
	And not all blockchains use voting at all.
	Some of them, that actually would be proof of stake.
	I'm not even trying to explain why it's called proof of stake.
	It involves staking something.
	Bitcoin uses a different way of determining whether a new block is added to the blockchain.
	It uses proof of work, right?
	And there it's just relatively easy to see if a certain number satisfies the mathematical conditions that are needed to accept something as a new block, as a new Bitcoin.
	So when somebody comes up with a new number that represents a Bitcoin, then it's added as a Bitcoin.
	So anyway, it's highly technical.
	I know, I'm sorry.
	I understand.
	So blockchain, it's a block built on the next part which forms a chain.
	What happens if you cut the chain in half?
	How do you maintain the data from one end of the blockchain to the other?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, again, that's another way in which different blockchains differ from each other.
	But, you know, some of them literally vote across what are called the block producers.
	And, you know, they have certain rules about how they vote.
	And a lot of it is automated.
	So it's not like...
	People are involved.
	But people can get involved under certain circumstances.
	If you really want to understand what blockchain is, just think of it as an attempt to manage a collectively shared but decentralized database of Originally, it was financial information, right?
	But it could be information about anything.
	So it essentially is very similar to BitTorrent.
	If you remember BitTorrent, it still exists.
	And in fact, the encyclosphere lives on BitTorrent.
	And that's one of the ways in which you can get to it.
	And that actually might help explain it a little bit better.
	BitTorrent is a simpler concept, but it's a similar concept.
	In BitTorrent, basically, I have a copy of a file.
	And when I run a certain kind of BitTorrent server, I basically publish the availability of my copy to the world.
	And anybody who wants to can basically get my copy.
	But the origin can be masked, so nobody has to know that it's coming from me.
	And as long as somebody has a copy of the file, then anybody can get it.
	I believe it's content addressed.
	What that means is that basically where it lives in BitTorrent is determined by the content of the file, essentially.
	So if you know what you're looking for and anybody has a copy, all you have to do is to put this, what's called a hash of the content into a BitTorrent.
	You know, browser software, and then you can download it, right?
	So this makes it possible for people who, like, want to share movies and music and all kinds of other things, too, right?
	It makes it possible for them to share in a decentralized network, you know, files that can't be It can't be censored.
	That's the really cool thing about BitTorrent.
	Basically, that is the big advantage, what I just described, as far as I'm concerned.
	That's the big advantage of blockchain.
	But you don't have to have a blockchain.
	You don't have to have this business about people owning a token in order to have that.
	The advantages of a decentralized network.
	Robert, I'll say one thing.
	I love watching people who understand it explain it, and I know you understand it.
	I will never understand this, what you just explained.
	I will never understand Bitcoin.
	I will never understand a lot of things.
	But now, Larry, I ask Robert, I'm going to ask...
	What Robert's book is, but I can read his.
	What is the book you have over your left shoulder?
	Right.
	Thank you for asking.
	So this is something I came out with a couple of years ago.
	Essays on Free Knowledge.
	The Origins of Wikipedia and the New Politics of Knowledge.
	It's basically a collection of my essays.
	There's a new one at the end called The Future of the Free Internet.
	But it's basically the best of Sanger.
	Some of this is not online anymore, actually.
	Well, it's available on...
	I'm going to put an Amazon affiliate link if I'm thinking business, but is it on Amazon?
	It's on Amazon, yeah.
	And if you just want to get the digital file, you can find it on Gumroad.
	I actually have an audiobook version if you want to listen to it.
	Who reads it, Larry?
	Is it you that reads it?
	Yeah, me.
	Dude, amazing.
	So hold on.
	I'm going to put it in the back here.
	It's called Essays on Free Knowledge.
	Essays on Free Knowledge.
	Done.
	I will post that afterwards.
	Where can people find you now for what you're doing?
	What is your current project?
	And by the way, I googled you.
	You are the net worth not among what you should be for what you've done.
	I had to do it when you said you.
	Top 10 companies in the world.
	Wikipedia, which has now gone from what would have otherwise been a valuable Commodity for private enterprise to toxic, to be burnt and sent to the bowels of, you know, digital hell.
	What are you working on right now?
	Well, I'm working on the Knowledge Standards Foundation.
	And you would follow me on Twitter at L Sanger.
	You'd follow the Knowledge Standards Foundation account at KS underscore found.
	Underscore found.
	That's on Twitter.
	I believe we have a Facebook account, but we don't use it so much.
	If you want to, like, get involved, if you just want to, like, track us, then get on our mailing list, and we won't spam you too much.
	Just, like, once or twice a month at the very most.
	Lately, it's been, like, once every three months.
	Just giving you updates.
	We don't sell your address, but it's...
	Encyclosphere.org.
	Encyclosphere, just like it sounds.
	And, yeah, just in the middle of the front page, there's a sign-up form.
	Just sign up there.
	If you're interested in coding...
	If you actually like the vision that I've outlined here, and you actually want to participate in developing the software, or if you run an encyclopedia or anything like that, and you have any sort of technical competence, even if you're just like a power user, you should get involved.
	The way to get involved actively with the development community is on Slack.
	So we've got a Slack group, and there's a link to that in the intro email.
	There should be.
	So if you sign up, then we'll send you about a link for that.
	I think we might end it on this one, but serious question.
	How do you protect Encyclosphere from the CIA?
	Yeah, well, that's kind of like asking, how do you protect the blogosphere from the CIA?
	And my guess is you can't, ultimately.
	Like, if they really, really, really want to take over something, they will find a way.
	But I don't think we can do a lot more than what we've done.
	So far.
	And that is, like, we have a small board with people who are very committed to internet freedom, essentially.
	And, you know, serious-minded neutrality, essentially.
	And we're always going to be committed to that by principle and by our published...
	Standards.
	And I, at least, am going to make it very clear, and I have made it very clear that no part of our standards will involve making editorial decisions at all.
	They're going to be content neutral.
	And then they won't pose a target.
	That can be controlled the way that Twitter or Facebook can be, because they have to have some sort of moderation system.
	So we're not going to have a moderation system any more than the blogosphere will.
	We will support ratings, though, but it will be multiple ratings, and there isn't going to be any official rating for the articles.
	so yep Last question.
	Can you give everybody, once again, those two places they can go right now to search?
	Sure.
	Encyclosearch.org and encycloreader.org, just like it sounds.
	Yep.
	There's actually a number of others.
	If you're interested in the other projects that we have going, just go to our projects page.
	In fact, if you remember Encyclosphere, just go to encyclosphere.org and you'll find links to everything on our projects page.
	I'm going to post all the links in the pinned comment once this finishes publishing on YouTube.
	Larry?
	It's amazing, man.
	Godspeed, because I use Wikipedia for indisputable facts, like when were the pyramids built?
	But now I don't even trust that.
	That's my level of being black-filled.
	Phenomenal stuff.
	I feel the same way, actually.
	It's what happens.
	It's the destabilizing nature of...
	Of realizing if what you're being told now is not true, why was what you were told 10 years ago true?
	Why was it true 50 years ago?
	Phenomenal stuff.
	Larry, Robert, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes at chat.
	Thank you very much.
	Tomorrow, live streaming, reaction, mouth tweeting, the hearing with Tamara Lich.
	It's amazing.
	Godspeed in your new ventures and may we be able to be an impetus of helping it.
	Wait, but stick around, Larry.
	We'll talk and everyone else, enjoy the night.

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