When I read that Sandi Toksvig, the British 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-center public figures than left-of-center public figures.

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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........

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