Wikipedia Bans its Founder

The NY Post reports:

Left-leaning website Wikipedia has taken the drastic action of permanently blocking one of its founders from editing pages — after he had campaigned to make it more balanced and fair.

Last month, Larry Sanger launched WikiProject Intellectual Diversity (WID), a group designed to help reinforce the online encyclopedia’s “original, firm commitment to intellectual diversity,” by emphasizing neutrality and transparency.

However, Sanger — who coined the name “Wikipedia,” drafted the site’s foundational set of rules and guidelines, and launched the site alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001 — is now indefinitely blocked from editing, the most drastic action the site can take against an editor.

It is bizarre that a cabal of anonymous Wikipedia editors would ban someone for having a Wikipedia discussion outside Wikipedia.

I have posted here about Wikipedia controversies occasionally, and I did not realize that I could be accused of the sin of canvassing:

To justify the ban against Sanger, editors categorized Sangers’ recent efforts — most notably his intellectual diversity project — as “canvassing.” Wikipedia policy describes canvassing as alerting other editors on the site about editorial activity “with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”