Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales reportedly stormed out of an interview after being pressed on why he referred to himself as the site’s “founder.”
The incident occurred while Wales was speaking with Tilo Jung for the German political podcast “Jung & Naiv.” When Jung pressed him to clarify if he’s the founder or co-founder, Wales responded, “I don’t care. It’s the dumbest question in the world.”
Jung pressed the topic, asking if there was a “dispute” over the issue. “What are the facts?” Jung asked. “Well, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion, so you can have whatever opinion you like,” Wales replied.
Jung tried to nail down that detail again, saying, “For you, you’re the founder?”
“Can I just say again, it doesn’t matter. I’ve answered your question four times,” Wales said firmly. He then stood up and said, “You know what? I’m done. Thank you.”
“What’s going on?” Jung asked as Wales seemed to head for the exit, prompting Wales to say over his shoulder, “It’s stupid. Don’t ask me stupid questions.”
“How is that stupid?” Jung wondered.
This isn’t the first time this particular issue has caused strife. During a 2023 interview with Lex Fridman, Wales also called the question of who founded the most popular online encyclopedia “unimportant” and “not that interesting.”
“I actually think Larry Sanger doesn’t get enough credit for his early work in Wikipedia, even though I think co-founder’s not the right title for that,” he said at the time.
Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia along with Larry Sanger, but Sanger exited the project in 2002 and has been speaking out against it ever since.
“Wikipedia is badly biased. The original policy long since forgotten, it no longer has an effective neutrality policy. It now touts controversial opinions on politics, religion, and science. And examples have become embarrassingly easy to find,” Sanger shared on X in 2020 alongside a link to a blog post detailing some of the worst offenses.
Those listed included a “Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing ‘Obamagate’ story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump.”
“It is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy). At the very least they should admit that they have redefined the term in a way that makes it utterly incompatible with its original notion of neutrality, which is the ordinary and common one,” Sanger wrote in the post. “Of course, Wikipedians are unlikely to concede any such thing; they live in a fantasy world of their own making.”
In September, President Donald Trump announced that the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was investigating Wikipedia over alleged pro-Kremlin, anti-Western, and anti-Israel bias, and that it was raising serious concerns given that AI chatbots heavily rely on the site’s information, as The Daily Wire previously reported.
Sanger expressed his gratitude for the probe, saying, “I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia. … There is clearly massive support for this sort of investigation.”
The co-founder added that Wikipedia “makes broad editorial decisions about what constitutes reliable sources, which must be respected by large numbers of participants. … The Wikipedia Foundation could address the situation, but does not.” He noted that the Wikipedia Foundation also “refuses to reveal the identity of its most powerful editors or to override decisions by editors.”
