The War on Wikipedia

The far right is targeting the internet's last bastion of unbiased information.

(From the Journalism Monday Memo, my weekly Substack about media, tech, and the ever-shrinking space between them.)

If you tuned in late, you would have missed it. During his opening remarks on a recent video call with the Wikipedia Board of Trustees, Jimmy Wales, the non-profit encyclopedia’s co-founder, quickly mentioned one of his recent concerns.

“I’m keeping a close eye on the rising noise of criticism from Elon Musk and others,” he said.

That comment came at the 21-second mark of a 90-minute Zoom call. After that, Musk’s name never came up again. Nor was there any discussion of increased chatter from right-wing activists about Wikipedia or recent revelations regarding plans by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation (more on that in a moment).

Still, it’s a safe bet both were on the minds of some attendees. In recent months, there has been an increase in calls to both defund Wikipedia and delegitimize its content, as well as attempts to tie it to a vast conspiracy theory that claims prominent liberal Jews like George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are secretly working to increase antisemitism in the country.

The most public attacks have come from Musk. On Christmas Eve, during the height of Wikipedia’s year-end fundraising push, Musk posted on X: “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balancing to their editing authority.” The comment was attached to a re-tweet of a Libs of TikTok post that included a doctored screenshot of a chart from Wikipedia’s 2023-24 budget plan. The chart showed the non-profit was putting over $50 million of its nearly $177 million budget toward either “equity” or “safety & inclusion.”

This, of course, was meant to cast Wikipedia as pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion, though that would be wrong. Instead, the equity budget was targeted toward the recruitment of new volunteer editors with diverse knowledge that can fill gaps in the site’s coverage—ensuring the balanced editing Musk demanded. And the safety and inclusion budget? It funded programs to defend the integrity of Wikipedia and to keep its existing editors safe—which, again, will be important in a minute.

Of course, Musk didn’t stop there. On Jan. 21 he tweeted, “Defund Wikipedia until balanced is restored,” and included a retweet of a post from tech founder Arthur MacWaters. It sported a screenshot of a chart that showed references to far-right extremism on Wikipedia outnumbered those to far-left extremism four to one. And yeah, the chart is shocking.

The only problem: The original Substack post from David Rozado, a data science professor at New Zealand’s Otago Polytechnic University, wasn’t linked in the tweet. Readers had to find it themselves. If it was, though, they might have seen that the chart actually shows the number of times the phrases “far-right” and “far-left” appear on Wikipedia as a whole. Rozado even noted that “far-left” isn’t as commonly used as “radical left” or “leftist radical,” skewing the results. And Wikipedia covers the entirety of human history, not just the current political environment. Framing the chart as Wikipedia’s commentary on modern conservatism is like claiming all recorded references to an asshole are about Elon.

(That said, Rozado isn’t exactly scot-free either. He failed to disclose that his research was funded by the conservative Manhattan Institute, which published his full findings.)

But Musk’s tweets—and there were more, like this one and this one and this one—are just the loudest calls to undermine Wikipedia. It’s the quiet work of the Heritage Foundation that’s more worrisome. According to a pitch deck obtained last month by the Jewish-American investigative site Forward, The Heritage Foundation plans to “target and identify” Wikipedia editors it believes are “abusing their position” as a way to combat what it claims is antisemitism on the site. The slides aren’t specific about what antisemitism the group aims to address, but they do detail how Heritage intends to expose editors, many of whom post using pseudonyms. The presentation outlines methods including text analysis, deception, and datamining of breached usernames, emails, and online identities to dox editors, potentially exposing them to both online and in-person harassment.

It's not the first time The Heritage Foundation has gone after Wikipedia. Back in 2017, the organization was tied to what’s known as a sock puppet attack on the site. Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is that anyone can be an editor. Once you join, you become part of a community, one that loves to debate the very nature of accuracy. The golden rule: Editors must remain neutral and objective. Once you’ve proven you can do this, logging a minimum of 30 days as an editor and 500 on-site edits, you can work on Wikipedia’s most sensitive pages, those with extended confirmed protection.

But plenty of folks try to prop up fake accounts—sock puppets—to maliciously edit entries. Even governments have done it, which, of course, Wikipedia has documented. The 2017 Heritage sock puppet attack included what Wikipedia labeled were a series of suspicious and favorable edits by a new editor to only a few select sites, including the foundation’s page.

But that’s nothing compared to what the Heritage is trying to do now. The slide deck comes from the think tank’s Project Esther. According to another batch of documents Forward received from Jewish organizations pitched on the project, Esther’s goal is to undermine nonprofits and groups Heritage sees as supporting Hamas—including Wikipedia. And since any entries that cover the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in general, and the most recent war in Gaza specifically, are covered by extended confirmed protection, have well-documented entry histories, and require consensus around unbiased and neutral entries, Heritage determined the only way to change the wording on those pages is to go after the editors themselves.

A recent post in Wikipedia’s community newsletter, The Signpost, asks plainly, “Will You Be Targeted?” It feels eerily familiar. Pres. Donald Trump and his allies have long targeted journalists, labeling them the enemy of the people. And while that’s awful and should be condemned, we at least get paid to do the job. Wikipedia editors are just knowledge geeks volunteering their time. They shouldn’t be threatened because one organization wants to control the narrative—or one billionaire wants to own the flow of all information.

Thankfully, there’s a Wikipedia budget designated towards maintaining the safety of editors.

Sadly, they’re gonna need it.