Twenty-five years ago today, a Florida internet entrepreneur who didn’t mind being called “Jimbo” set up a little experiment on a web domain with an inscrutable name: wikipedia.com. The rest, as they say, is history: a quarter century later, Wikipedia is one of the great wonders of the internet world.

The Wikipedian doesn’t really do reposts of old content, but this occasion feels worthy of a partial exception. Almost ten years ago, I wrote a version of the piece below to mark my first decade as a Wikipedia editor. I’ve made a few updates to align with the current occasion, ideally more Blade Runner: The Final Cut and less Star Wars Special Editions. I hope it still resonates.

All I Really Needed to Know I Learned Editing Wikipedia

By William Beutler

Wikipedia is turning twenty-five years old today, January 15, 2026. Last year, when Wikipedia hit the 7-million article milestone, I wrote about a number of ways the encyclopedia has changed—and stayed the same—over time.

The same is true for me: later this year I will notch twenty years editing Wikipedia, and much has changed. These days I have a family, a mortgage, and a business. I also have this blog, which I started writing in March 2009, less than three years into my Wikipedia career.

To say that Wikipedia has changed me far more than I have changed it would be an understatement. I owe a great deal to Wikipedia, and so I am given to reflect on what, specifically, I have learned from it. Dare I say, to finally invoke the title of this piece, all I really needed to know I learned editing Wikipedia.

The following is an entirely non-comprehensive list of life principles as elucidated by Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines as I’ve come to understand them. I’d love to hear feedback, whether you agree or disagree, and especially if you can think of any others:

• There are many lifetimes worth of knowledge to be found in the 7 million entries1 on the English Wikipedia. In a very literal and obvious sense, of course it contains everything you need to know.

• More to the point, Wikipedia’s written rules and the unwritten lessons one can learn from participaion, are extremely useful if you’re willing to think about them and apply them to your own life. (WP:POLICYLIST)

• Finding a balance between giving others benefit of the doubt while also being judicious in whom you trust is one of the most challenging tasks facing everyone, and making the right call can have a profound influence on what we believe and how we act upon these beliefs. (WP:AGF, WP:RELIABLE)

• Building on the last one: be prepared to investigate your own opinions and beliefs. Just because you think something is true, there’s a decent chance you may be wrong, and the best way to handle any challenges is to soberly consider the evidence and determine if your conclusions hold up. (WP:VERIFY)

• Sometimes the best way to understand what a thing is is to observe what it is not. By process of exclusion, one can arrive at more a objective assessment about the practical nature of a thing by determining first what it isn’t, than by trying to understand it solely for itself. (WP:NOT)

• Not all principles should be accorded the same weight, and forming a coherent and defensible hierarchy for which values supersede others is necessary to conduct oneself morally. Rules should in general be followed, but well-intentioned rules can lead to bad outcomes if you don’t pay attention to the totality of their implications. (WP:GUIDES, WP:IGNORE)

• Respect others’ intellectual contributions as you would their physical property. If you got a good idea from someone, give them fair credit. You’d want the same, and if you don’t there’s a very good chance it will catch up with you, especially on the Internet where everything is searchable. (WP:COPYVIO, WP:IMAGEPOL)

• Don’t be a jerk, don’t violate others’ space, and don’t cause anyone grief to make a point, even if you have one. It’s possible to disagree reasonably and with appropriate emphasis while upholding your dignity and allowing others’ theirs. Just be cool, OK? (WP:CIVIL, WP:PERSONAL, WP:BADGER)

• If you want to get along with others and coexist in a world where there are many differences of opinion and belief, it’s important to have a good sense of how others came to those conclusions, be able to assess other opinions neutrally, and know not only when to give them their due but also how far is too far in polite society. (WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE)

• You can’t make rules for everything, and some degree of flexibility based on your surroundings will be necessary to thrive in surroundings you cannot control. Not every community will have the same standards, so it’s in your best interest to be alert for these differences and conduct oneself accordingly. (WP:CONSENSUS)

• Finally, no matter how worthy the principles you decide to live by, it’s simply a fact that not everyone you’ll come across will agree to them, or act the same even if they voice agreement with them. When you’re dealing with human beings who have their own objectives, passions, prejudices and prerogatives, a certain comfortability with uncertainty and disagreement is as necessary as any of the rules preceding this one.

When I first published this list in 2016, I concluded in part with this:

So, does all this mean Wikipedia is perfect? Heck, no! What I mean is that it’s an excellent place not just to soak up the sum of all human knowledge, but also to learn how to conduct oneself in a society riven with conflict and ambiguity, where might sometimes seems to make right and in the end all one can really be certain about having the power to safeguard is one’s own integrity. Maybe that's a dim view of the world, but when you consider all the bad things that happen every day, you know, getting into (and out of) an edit war on Wikipedia is a relatively safe and surprisingly practical way to learn some key lessons about life.

A lot has changed in ten years’ time, but my “dim view of the world” unfortunately has proven to be the right one. It’s hard to remember now, but by mid-2016 it had become fashionable to declare it the worst year ever. For a time it was partly a joke, based on a series of unexpected celebrity deaths: David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman. But things got worse: a second major terrorist attack in France—the Bataclan massacre was just the November before—and the original version of this post was published one month after the Pulse nightclub shooting and two weeks after the Brexit vote.

Now it’s January 2026, and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—the world has never felt more on edge. But this time no one is joking. The instability owes more to geopolitics, including the continuing Russia–Ukraine war, and much of it emanates from an unpopular, unrestrained U.S. government: Minneapolis, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, even CBS News—while artificial intelligence and other changes threaten mass culture and maybe even our shared reality.

Not even Wikipedia is insulated from these changes. The world has grown more hostile to it and more dependent on it at the same time. The open web Jimbo built it upon can no longer be taken for granted. Twenty-five years on, we still have much to learn from Wikipedia—and more to lose than we once imagined.

It’s time once again for The Wikipedian to carry out its self-assigned task of ranking the ten biggest stories shaping Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement over the past twelve months. It’s a terribly subjective exercise, of course. Another observer might shuffle the order or swap out a few items based on their own perspective. But as Wikipedia approaches a milestone anniversary—it turns 25 years young next month—there’s little doubt that the uncertainties of technological transformation, unprecedented political pressure, and unbearable weight of global relevance were defining themes in 2025. Let’s do this thing.

10. From Six to Seven

Before things get serious, let’s take a moment to celebrate a milestone that seemed like it might never arrive: in May, the English Wikipedia crossed the seven million article threshold, albeit several months later than projected. In the race to publish article number seven million, the best-guess lucky winner was a 1958 memoir about schizophrenia, although in retrospect the article about a devastating flood might have been a better choice. Seven million articles is no small feat, even with 24 years to do it. For a volunteer project that skeptics once dismissed as an impossible fantasy, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the sheer improbability of what this movement has accomplished.

9. Governing the Ungovernable

Wikipedia’s governance has always been more miracle than method, and 2025 put that to the test. First, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Board removed two candidates from the community election ballot, prompting the kind of procedural controversy that Wikipedia specializes in. Meanwhile, the Arbitration Committee—the closest thing Wikipedia has to a supreme court—faced the possibility of being short-staffed after its scheduled election initially failed to attract enough candidates. Neither crisis proved fatal, but both lend credence to the old saw that Wikipedia doesn’t work in theory, only in practice.

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8. Temporary Accounts Forever

After years of development, the WMF finally rolled out a new feature called temporary accounts, anonymizing IP addresses for logged-out editors. Now casual contributors can update football scores and filmographies without broadcasting their location to anyone who cares to look. The timing is good: as we’ll see in the entries ahead, 2025 was a year in which Wikipedia faced government demands to reveal user information, and volunteer editors were openly targeted for doxxing. Making it marginally harder to identify contributors was the very least the WMF could do.

7. Wikipedia vs. the World

Nothing says you’ve made it like relentless legal challenges, and these days Wikipedia seems to be in court almost constantly.

In India, the defamation case that topped last year’s list dragged on, with the Delhi High Court continuing to pressure the Wikimedia Foundation to identify specific editors. The trend of so-called “age gating” remained in vogue, and the UK’s Online Safety Act moved toward implementation despite WMF protests that it could end up treating Wikipedia like an adult content site.

It wasn’t all bad news: in France, Wikipedia won a pivotal defamation case and the plaintiff will pay its court costs. Whether alarming or merely annoying, Wikipedia’s legal exposure is directly proportional to its international influence.

6. Grok to the Future

In October, Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grokipedia, an AI-generated Wikipedia alternative promising freedom from “wokeness”. Early reviews were absolutely brutal, citing its obvious dependence on Wikipedia and the hallucinations that plague all LLMs, alongside some particularly risible biases more glaring than anything Wikipedia has been accused of.

Nevertheless, Grokipedia represents the most credible challenge to Wikipedia’s supremacy since Wikipedia itself dethroned Britannica from its hundred-plus year reign. Perhaps Grokipedia will fade to irrelevance like Wikipedia’s also-rans, but Musk’s outsize wealth, AI technology, and his grievance coalition will keep it afloat for now.

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5. AIs Wide Shut

The Wikipedia community took a decidedly oppositional view of generative AI in 2025. It’s not hard to understand why: Wikipedia is built on human judgments about sourcing, accuracy, and neutrality—concepts alien to how LLMs work. And LLMs’ ability to generate content at massive scale could overwhelm a community that reviews everything by hand.

To the rescue comes WikiProject AI Cleanup, started in late 2023 but gaining significant momentum this year. What began as a small group of editors grew into a coordinated, encyclopedia-wide effort to hold back the tide of AI slop. In August, editors added a new speedy deletion criterion for articles obviously generated with minimal human input.

But volunteers also found themselves fending off their own ostensible support system. When the WMF experimented with AI-generated article summaries without consulting them, the backlash echoed past complaints about intrusive top-down impositions on the volunteer project.

As of December 2025, there is still no unified policy on generative AI. The community’s response has been fundamentally defensive: protecting what Wikipedia already is from degradation. It’s a necessary fight, but a reactive one, leaving open the question of how Wikipedia might actually harness this new technology rather than simply resist it.

4. Hoping to Be Eaten Last

If the community saw AI as a threat to be repelled, the WMF saw it as a challenge to be met, and perhaps even an opportunity to be seized.

On the challenge side: AI crawlers now account for up to two-thirds of Wikimedia’s server requests, straining infrastructure while potentially siphoning off human readers, too. On the opportunity side: the WMF released new datasets intended for AI training, pointed companies toward the Wikimedia Enterprise API—a paid tier for heavy commercial users—and launched the Wikidata Embedding Project to make its structured data more AI-friendly.

The logic is reasonable: Wikimedia projects are useful for AI systems, which will use them regardless of WMF’s wishes, so it’s better to cut a deal than get cut out. But critics, especially among volunteer editors, worry this could make Wikipedia handmaiden to its own downfall: normalizing commercial extraction of volunteer labor while weakening editorial norms and community control. CC-BY-SA is not a suicide pact.

The tension between the WMF and volunteer community on AI reflects a genuine disagreement about Wikipedia’s future. The community sees pollution to be filtered; the Foundation sees a new climate to survive. Other entries in this list also describe outside pressures on Wikipedia, but AI is the one where the community and Foundation aren’t fully aligned.

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3. Meet the New Boss

In May, Maryana Iskander announced she would be stepping down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Her departure was abrupt if not shocking—the job is a pressure cooker—but the timing, amid escalating political attacks, left Wikipedia to choose a new captain while navigating choppy waters.

The Board took until December to name her successor: Bernadette Meehan, a former Obama administration foreign policy official with at least one stint on Wall Street and no Wikimedia background. The choice was greeted with a collective shrug, but could still find critics in a community that views polished résumés with skepticism. Meehan’s diplomatic experience could suggest the Board was prioritizing political savvy over movement fluency. Then again, Iskander was also a credentialed outsider and by most accounts did well in the position, so perhaps the Board figured: if it ain’t broke.

The WMF needs a CEO who can handle congressional inquiries, legal battles, and hostile regulators. There’s good reason to think she’ll succeed in that. Whether Meehan can also earn the trust of a volunteer community whose default state is wariness remains to be seen.

2. No Man’s Land

The controversy over Wikipedia’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, number three on last year’s list, continues apace. And where scrutiny previously focused on alleged bias against Israel, the accusations in 2025 went further: antisemitism, or at least looking the other way.

The naming of the “Gaza genocide” article, formerly “Allegations of genocide”, remained a flashpoint. Critics argued the title prejudged a contested legal and historical question; defenders cited the weight of scholarly and NGO support for the characterization. Jimmy Wales himself waded in, calling the article “particularly egregious” in its framing, publicly second-guessing the community’s consensus, a rarity.

And the stakes rose when a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress—led by Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz—sent a letter to the WMF expressing concerns about antisemitic content and citing the Anti-Defamation League, with which Wikipedia has repeatedly been at odds.

These accusations have some overlap with the right-wing attacks in this year’s top spot but are not identical. Both question Wikipedia’s neutrality; both seek Foundation intervention in editorial decisions traditionally left to the community. The difference is this critique crosses political lines and includes good-faith concerns alongside bad-faith opportunism.

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1. Enemy of the State

If there’s a single story that defined Wikipedia’s 2025, it’s the escalation of coordinated attacks from Trump-aligned Republicans who have decided the free encyclopedia is an enemy to be defeated. For the first time, these attacks are backed by threats of government action, aimed at delegitimizing Wikipedia and intimidating its volunteer editors.

Early in the year, a leaked fundraising appeal from the Heritage Foundation suggested it would unmask anonymous Wikipedia editors, and the Media Research Center took aim at Wikipedia’s sourcing standards. Their cheerleaders at the New York Post editorialized that Big Tech should cut ties with Wikipedia until it started citing sources like the New York Post.

Things escalated when interim U.S. attorney for DC Ed Martin sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding documents amid vague accusations of bias and political manipulation by foreign actors, hinting at a review of the WMF’s nonprofit tax status. Martin’s nomination was later withdrawn, but in August the House Oversight Committee picked up the baton, as did Ted Cruz in October on behalf of the Senate Commerce Committee, invoking not just concerns about left-wing bias but the antisemitism question again.

Criticism of Wikipedia is fair game. Like any institution, it has blind spots and points of failure. But these are not isolated critics stumbling upon the same complaints. They are participants in a broader movement that has identified Wikipedia—with its billions of pageviews and unmatched credibility—as an obstacle to be removed.

But what’s truly new in 2025 is the enlistment of government power in an effort to control it. Members of Congress demanding editor identities and activist groups threatening to expose them aren’t engaging in criticism—they’re threatening the conditions that make volunteer participation possible.

The Price of Prestige

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that Wikipedia has become too important to ignore. AI companies need its data. Governments want to know who edits what. Political movements have learned to weaponize accusations of bias. A billionaire launched a competitor. And through it all, the volunteer community and the Foundation that supports it found themselves disagreeing about how to face the future, even as a new CEO prepares to take the helm.

The encyclopedia that anyone can edit has become the encyclopedia that everyone wants to control. Whether that’s a mounting crisis or simply the permanent condition of critical infrastructure may be the defining question of Wikipedia’s next quarter-century.

The great existential question of our age is, will my job be replaced by AI? Wikipedia editors have recently had reason to ask themselves this question, since Elon Musk finally made good on his longstanding joke-turned-threat to create an AI-powered online encyclopedia: Grokipedia, named for Grok, the large language model developed by his company, xAI.

Not so long ago, Musk was a normie appreciator of the internet’s default fact-checker—“Happy birthday Wikipedia! So glad you exist”, he tweeted unironically, when that was still the word for it, upon Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary in 2021. Since then, Musk has acquired the platform where he once posted that, undergone a one-man political realignment, gutted at least one federal agency, and started calling his once-beloved reference site “Wokepedia”.

Wikipedia has withstood many attempts to challenge its effective monopoly in online encyclopedias over the years, leaving would-be competitors nothing but ashes and 404 links, but Grokipedia is something different. When the world’s richest man steps onto your block, you’d best pay attention. But to understand why Musk wanted into the game, one must appreciate how the political and technological environments have changed, and why Grokipedia has a constituency in the first place.

In recent years and especially in the second Trump administration, Wikipedia has found itself in the same league with the mainstream media, academia, Big Tech, and international institutions as targets of a far-right movement that has displaced or captured more traditional center-right parties in Western countries, while putting the creaky liberal establishment on its heels.

As of 2025, an ascendant class of avowedly post-liberal counter-elites has come to power, unapologetic in its disdain for the erstwhile ruling class, armed with agentic tools capable of producing content and capturing attention at a scale unimaginable only a few years ago.

If Donald Trump is its lodestar, Musk is its vanguard, and Grokipedia his latest provocation.

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Groksplaining

When Grokipedia launched in late October, the first thing everyone noticed was that it borrows from Wikipedia. Like, a lot. Many articles were simply copied over wholesale, as Wikipedia’s licensing allows. This occasioned no small amount of snickering—as much as Musk professes to hate Wikipedia now, even his own project can’t get off the ground without it.

The second thing was that significant areas, especially in politics, had been heavily modified to align with Musk’s recently acquired but strongly held worldview. As such, Grokipedia was received skeptically by the mainstream tech and news media, and with great enthusiasm by heterodox opinion entrepreneurs on Musk’s other website.

A deeper dive from researchers at Cornell Tech found that a little more than half of Grokipedia’s articles are near clones of their Wikipedia counterparts. Even substantially modified articles have more than 75% similarity to Wikipedia, but are often much longer, and highly concentrated in controversial topic areas (as defined by Wikipedia’s own list of such topics).

The study also found a nearly 90% increase in usage of what Wikipedia considers “generally unreliable” sources, including 42 citations to the Nazi website Stormfront and 34 to Alex Jones’s InfoWars—compared to Wikipedia’s grand total of zero for both. It also cites chat transcripts with Grok itself more than 1,000 times.

It’s the snake eating its own tail and asking for seconds.

Different Class

Grokipedia’s political commitments can be seen clearly by comparing how each encyclopedia covers the events in and around the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Wikipedia is unsparing: it describes the events as an “attempted self-coup” by Donald Trump and “insurrection” by his supporters; the very title calls it an “attack”. Grokipedia prefers more ambiguous terms like “riot” and “incursion”, emphasizing security lapses and intelligence failures among its causes, effectively blaming those who were trying to stop it. Where Wikipedia frames the events as gravely serious, leading to impeachment and numerous convictions—to be overturned in Trump 2.0—Grokipedia notes that sedition cases were few in number, and many charges were misdemeanors.

Wikipedia offers a confident assessment of what happened that day. Grokipedia considers the day’s events open to interpretation. But evading a conclusion is its own kind of bias. As Jeremiah Johnson of Infinite Scroll observes, “Nothing in the opening paragraphs is factually incorrect.” It just represents a different set of values, one self-consciously in opposition to the prevailing wisdom.

The same pattern appears elsewhere: pro-Kremlin framing of the Ukraine war, referring to transgender women as “biological males”, enumerating justifications for slavery while throwing shade at The 1619 Project, and omitting Musk’s role in dismantling USAID.

Grokipedia isn’t always 2+2=5 wrong. It’s just on the other side.

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A Land of Contrasts

For all of Musk’s desire to replace Wikipedia, and despite his massive online fanbase—perhaps he knows something about their suitability for such a task—he has little interest in fostering a rival encyclopedia-building project, let alone the discipline to fully become the Bizarro Jimmy Wales. Instead, he has enlisted his wealth and the transformational technology of LLMs as a substitute.

Choices like these present clear tradeoffs compared to Wikipedia. As far as The Wikipedian can tell, there are four principal ways Grokipedia differs:

1. The first is its production model; Grokipedia is written by AI, Wikipedia is written by people.

2. Second is the governance model; on Grokipedia, Musk sets the terms for everything, while Wikipedia’s decisions are made collectively.

3. Third is process orientation; each has its biases, but Grokipedia is actively fixated on outcomes, while Wikipedia’s biases emerge from its systems.

4. Fourth is sourcing requirements; specifically which external sources each platform is willing to trust.

These elements reinforce each other—AI tilts toward centralization, which reinforces its benefactor’s perspective—but each represents a specific decision point where different combinations could exist. The pros and cons of each model are mirror images:

1. Production Model: Synthetic vs. Human

Being AI-written gives Grokipedia advantages in speed, scale, and comprehensiveness—and zero risk of burnout. If you want a particular topic handled consistently across many pages, AI will do this much better than humans. But it can misinterpret sources and invent plausible-sounding falsehoods, because it has no real awareness of what it’s saying.

Wikipedia being human-curated means real people making real choices. These editorial judgments improve both accuracy and accessibility: subject-matter experts bring context and nuance, while wordsmiths improve the reading experience. Contributors can have discussions and arrive at novel solutions an AI would be unlikely to predict. But they are vastly slower, have blind spots, hold grudges, and have topics they care about too much, or not enough.

2. Governance: Centralized vs. Distributed

Grokipedia is a case study in centralized planning. Musk’s developers will build exactly what he asks for (although not always perfectly). No consensus-building is required, nor endless debates about policy, and if you don’t like it, you know exactly who to blame. But it’s autocratic, having a single point of failure, and with no transparency into how decisions are made. Don’t expect passionate users, because there’s no meaningful way to get involved. There will never be such a thing as a Grokipedian.

Wikipedia’s distributed model bestows greater legitimacy, benefiting from passionate contributors from different backgrounds who can catch errors, reconsider past decisions, and make the project resistant to capture. On the other hand, participatory governance can be exhausting, and Wikipedia suffers from the tyranny of the committed: those with the most time often get their way. Wikipedia is also far harder to join today: new editors face a bewildering maze of policies, customs, and norms, and so much has already been done.

3. Orientation: Partisanship vs. Pluralism

I’m deducting points from Grokipedia here because it refuses to admit the project is a partisan one. This self-delusion is not unique: the temptation to declare oneself objective and everyone else biased is universal. But the fact is Grokipedia exists to serve a vocal minority who disagree with Wikipedia’s conclusions on a narrow range of topics. This can be a good thing—serving audiences that feel excluded elsewhere is the market in action. But there’s no denying Grokipedia explicitly prioritizes its creator’s ideological agenda over truth-seeking. It’s less of an encyclopedia, and more a simulacrum of one. If Wikipedia is biased, Grokipedia just flips the script—and pushes too far in the other direction.

Wikipedia tries to represent all significant views in proportion to their real-world import. As such, it’s generally considered a reasonable source for most subjects, and is useful for settling disputes. It is pluralism in action: no one person or perspective will get everything right, so the best we can hope for is multiple viewpoints converging on a better result. But someone unhappy with the outcome is unlikely to appreciate the process that got there. And when the process is followed, whatever the outcome, its participants often simply shrug.

4. Sourcing: Permissive vs. Selective

Perhaps Grokipedia supporters’ most appealing argument is that Wikipedia’s exclusion of certain publications makes it less inclusive. Grokipedia’s supporters will argue that less restrictive sourcing allows more detailed articles by permitting sources that Wikipedia discounts. It boosts “citizen journalism” against the out-of-touch establishment, and surfaces information that doesn’t serve elite interests. But its lack of rigor also leads to citing Nazis, and laundering propaganda as “another perspective”. To critics, this is naïve, if not a loophole designed to elevate fringe views.

Wikipedia’s sourcing standards prioritize quality control over completeness. Privileging sources with fact-checking, editorial oversight, and independence from the subject improves accuracy, professionalism, and impartiality. Of course, all the same caveats about elite capture and structural biases remain. Wikipedia’s selectivity in sourcing is its real soft underbelly.

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Machine Learnings

None of which is to say Grokipedia has nothing to teach Wikipedia, which even its strongest supporters can sometimes acknowledge has become risk-averse and inertial. No doubt, it has many laurels on which to rest. But perhaps it has become a little too comfortable. Many things about it are worth criticizing, but without a visible alternative, it’s hard to articulate what a different world could look like, much less find motivation to do the hard work of bringing it about. If for that reason alone, Grokipedia’s arrival could be good for Wikipedia. Everyone needs a little competition to stay sharp.

Take Wikipedia’s neglected topics—a downside of its incredible 7 million article count is that many are underwhelming at best. As Katie Notopoulos at Business Insider observed, on obscure topics, Grokipedia sometimes produces more satisfying overviews than Wikipedia’s unloved entries “where it truly seems like a bunch of people added in a single sentence once a year for the last 15 years.” It’s heresy today, but perhaps the speed and scale that AI affords could be harnessed to solve these problems.

Wikipedia editor Ryan McGrady suggests taking lessons from Grok’s sourcing approach where the value of additional context outweighs the risk of self-serving claims. For journalists, welcoming primary sources “could draw information about the person and their work from their own writing, and it would remain more up to date than articles that have to wait for a secondary source.”

The Wikipedian has another lesson in mind, based on Grokipedia’s lone interactive element: a three-field form for suggesting changes. If you know what you’re doing on Wikipedia—and aren’t too close to a subject to trigger conflict of interest concerns—you can make a change instantly. But only a very few will ever try. Wikipedia’s infrastructure still assumes everyone could become an editor, a notion long past its expiration date. Even those who figure out the Talk page face response times far slower than on Grokipedia, which now reviews suggestions within minutes—not to oversell the experience, you’re still petitioning an algorithm. If Wikipedia enabled such a mechanism, it could turn editors into a team of fact-checkers—which to some extent is what its process-oriented, long-term contributor base wants to be anyway.

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Predictive Modeling

As yet, Grokipedia has not seriously challenged Wikipedia’s popularity or position. Search interest in Grokipedia peaked in the first two weeks after its announcement, then fell off hard, while Wikipedia continues to be sought out by orders of magnitude more. As of mid-December, Wikipedia remains the top organic search result for “elon musk” on Google, while Grokipedia is nowhere to be found in the first ten pages of results.

Musk has the advantage of technology, which will keep it in the game. It may even become the world’s largest encyclopedia, since it can keep churning out pages without so much as a coffee break. But technology will only get you so far. The Wikipedian would be surprised if it captured significant market share beyond its built-in audience; Wikipedia is more than good enough for the great silent majority who just want to check one thing and go on with their day.

Grokipedia is also unlikely to replace Wikipedia in the tech industry. While Musk has declared Grokipedia free to use “at no cost”, it’s unclear what that really means, whereas Wikipedia’s commercial-friendly licensing has already made it a resource tech firms are happy to use. Even if Musk does clear this up, companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have strong business reasons not to use it—particularly that Grokipedia is owned and operated by a competitor.

It’s also very possible Musk simply loses interest, having made his point, with a trillion-dollar pay package from Tesla pulling his attention, to say nothing of his stated plans to move to Mars.

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Grok Will Not Replace Us

Wikipedians probably don’t have to worry about being replaced outright. Grokipedia’s production model forecloses the possibility of a rival movement, its governance is anathema to the read-write web, its perspective limits its broad-based appeal, and its anything-goes sourcing undercuts its credibility.

Unfashionable though it may be to say, values matter, and not every set is equally conducive to the task at hand. Sooner or later, the intent behind the project will have consequences, and the fact remains that Grokipedia is rather transparently a spite house of a website reflecting the worldview of a single man, no matter how rich, whose reputation and run of decisions will ultimately limit its appeal. Wikipedia may be written by a “bunch of nobodies”, but if you put enough nobodies together with the right set of values making the right editorial choices, and even the most self-obsessed somebody the world has ever seen is no match.

Still, the best possible encyclopedia would take advantage of both: humans leading the way, supported by AI. Wikipedia is great, but not as great as it can be. The development of generative AI is a very real hinge point in the history of information, one equal parts exciting and terrifying, as all hinge points are, and Wikipedia risks obsolescence only if it lets the moment pass by.

At time of publication, the WMF is approaching the end of its semi-annual elections to fill seats on its Board of Trustees. Like any corporate or institutional board, the trustees make CEO appointments, review annual plans, and provide general oversight. The Board has 12 members: Jimmy Wales is the sole permanent trustee, five are appointed by the Board itself for outside expertise, and six are selected by vote of the editorial community and its affiliate organizations.

But this year a last-minute change to the process—and the unexplained removal of two candidates—has plunged the Board and the election into acrimony unlike any Board election in Wikipedia’s history.

Dig Your Own Hole

The 2025 cycle started normally. In May, community trustee Victoria Doronina announced the election timeline in a letter posted on Meta-Wiki, a wiki for WMF and community collaboration. “Here are the key planned dates,” she wrote:

May 22 – June 5: Announcement and call for questions period

June 17 – July 1, 2025: Call for candidates

July 2025: If needed, affiliates vote to shortlist candidates if more than 10 apply

August 2025: Campaign period

August – September 2025: Two-week community voting period

October – November 2025: Background check of selected candidates

Board’s Meeting in December 2025: New trustees seated

Out of 17 applicants, 12 were deemed eligible. Affiliates shortlisted six finalists. Voting was scheduled for late August. But the timeline didn’t hold. On August 21, six days before voting was to begin, the Board abruptly postponed the start to October 8, citing a decision to switch the order of two items: background checks would now happen before voting began. The logic was sound enough: scheduling background checks after voting meant the Board would vet candidates only after the community had spoken—creating a very real possibility of overruling the election results. But no specifics were cited.

Then on October 3, just five days before the delayed start of voting, the Board announced that only four of the six active finalists would appear on the ballot. Two candidates—Ravan al-Taie (User:Ravan) and Lane Rasberry (User:Bluerasberry)—had been removed by “unanimous” decision. The letter did not name them or explain why, but you could read between the lines.

Their rationale centered on a change to the Candidate Review Process just two days earlier, on October 1, explaining that background checks were meant to safeguard “reputational, financial, operational, or other types of risk for the Foundation” based on a range of factors, including “subjective criteria like a candidate’s judgment, discernment, discretion.” No specifics were cited.

If failing to put the checks first was an unforced error that set the stage for the rest, the larger failure was in what their official communications left out. Thus the Board’s intended fix walked them straight into a transparency trap, one as old as governance itself, but ever more common in this age of heightened scrutiny.

The dilemma: either reveal damaging information and face accusations of interference, or stay silent and erode legitimacy through opacity.

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Fight Song

But the mistakes didn’t end there. The letter, shared by Board chair Nataliia Tymkiv, sought to further justify the Board’s decision:

“Now more than ever, the Foundation needs a strongly unified board committed to collective decision-making responsibilities that can help steer the organisation and our movement through difficult global headwinds...”

Editors found this, shall we say, vaguely authoritarian. “I find it really scary,” wrote one. “The essence of any election lies in the community’s trust and its ability to choose the most suitable candidates,” wrote another, “not in pre-filtering choices for the sake of ‘unity’ or ‘alignment.’”

The very first comment was perhaps the most forceful of all:

“[I]t is not the board’s function to be a united front. Limiting choices in an election (before or after the vote) vitiates the entire election except for the exclusion of obviously unsuitable candidates … Please rescind this decision and let the community vote.”

Within days, an editor who was the 2024 Wikimedian of the Year organized a reform petition receiving over 100 signatures, and affiliate organizations released their own statements of concern. Some called for boycotting the election. A former community trustee1 proposed structural reforms:

“I believe we need an independent group of elected community members, who have signed non-disclosure agreements, and are provided details by the WMF legal team and trust and safety, to oversee who is and is not eligible to stand for election.”

Jimmy Wales’s user talk page filled with questions about the Board’s decision. Wales remained conspicuously silent, even as he responded to other questions on the page. The issue came up IRL when Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander and two (appointed) trustees spoke at last week’s WikiConference North America2—some editors were displeased with her take, others more cautiously open-minded.

Voting opened on schedule on October 8 with four balloted candidates: Bobby Shabangu, James Alexander, Michał Buczyński, and Wojciech Pędzich. Despite everything, turnout appears comparable to previous years. Results will be announced shortly after voting closes October 23.

Main Character Energy

So what changed between August and September? While little overt campaigning was happening on-wiki—there’s no such thing as yard signs on Wikipedia—elsewhere on the Internet, a political storm was gathering.

On August 10, the Jerusalem Post published an article about finalist Ravan al-Taie, an Arabic Wikipedia editor, spotlighting her apparently numerous inflammatory social media posts about October 7 and the war in Gaza. It circulated mostly on pro-Israeli, conservative, and low-quality news sites.

The Post’s headline—“Wikimedia Foundation trustee candidate denies use of rape on Oct. 7, posts Hamas symbol”—is slightly misleading, specifically referring to her repost of Jackson Hinkle, a small-time Gen Z provocateur who champions something he calls “MAGA communism,” disputing the evidence of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.

But there was a lot more.

“Israel is committing a new Holocaust added to a new Hiroshima,” she allegedly wrote on X/Twitter. Another post seemed to justify the October 7 Hamas attacks: “What happened on October 7 was for everything that happened during the 75 years before October 7!” Her Instagram account displayed a red triangle—identified by Wikipedia’s own article as a Hamas symbol.

Though the Board didn’t name Ravan in their letter, phrases like “a candidate’s judgment” and “reputational risk” were plenty for editors to make the connection.

After the controversy erupted, Ravan deleted her social media accounts and mostly stayed quiet. Then on October 11, amid the ongoing outcry, she posted a defense on Meta-Wiki. It called the Wikipedia article on the red triangle “problematic”, without explaining how. It went off in a strange tangent about whether “Jesus was a Palestinian”, citing pop culture references as evidence. But most concerning, it doubled down on the dismissal of October 7 sexual violence—cherry-picking a UN report’s caution about verification limits in war zones—despite numerous eyewitness accounts, many cited on Wikipedia itself. Ravan’s allies were quick to offer support, but as an effective rebuttal, it’s unconvincing.

Wikipedia editors regarded the report cagily, citing the Post’s conservative reputation, but they shouldn’t have. Regardless of one’s views on Middle Eastern politics, the posts reflect poorly on her judgment and suggest a temperament ill-suited for the role. But the question isn’t whether the Board was right to have concerns. The question is why they wouldn’t say so.

The Decoy

Lane Rasberry’s removal is more puzzling. A longtime English Wikipedia editor, Wikimedian-in-Residence, and a familiar presence at Wikimedia conferences, Rasberry has long been a consistent advocate for transparency and community empowerment. The Board’s official explanation—insufficient experience—struck many as pretextual, especially given his many years of contributions.

In careful, measured public responses, including an interview with the volunteer-edited The Wikipedia Signpost—with which he is also involved—Rasberry expressed confusion about the Board’s assessment. The community response was largely supportive, with many viewing him as exactly the kind of thoughtful, community-minded editor they wanted on the Board.

In whispers, darkest imaginations, and group chats, it has been suggested that Rasberry’s removal was less about his supposed disqualifications and more about not wanting to single out Ravan—or rather, the Board not wanting to be seen as singling her out. In this view, removing both candidates was an attempt to create plausible deniability, allowing the Board to claim it was simply applying rigorous new standards rather than responding to political pressure about one controversial finalist.

If true, this would make Lane Rasberry collateral damage in the Board’s attempt to avoid making a politically charged decision look politically charged. Whatever the case, no one seems to be buying it.

No Other Choice

On October 9, Doronina—the trustee who had originally announced the election process—did something rather unusual: she told the truth. Late-20th-century American politics had a term for this: a Kinsley gaffe,3 named for the editor Michael Kinsley, who once wrote: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”

Writing to a public email list for Wikimedians, she explained her personal reasoning for opposing both candidates. Regarding Ravan, Doronina wrote bluntly: “[F]uture candidates should be more cautious about what they post on social media, as some posts pose significant risks to the WMF’s reputation...”

As for Lane, she pointed to statements in his candidate materials about creating a “Right to Information” project and encouraging “the user community to organize to make public information requests to me.” She interpreted this as seeking Board membership for nefarious purposes: “As a trustee, I cannot support anyone who wishes to disclose non-public information, which is in direct contravention of the trustee’s duties and responsibilities.”

Although editors responding to her message largely disagreed with her reasoning, several still thanked Doronina for her transparency. Which also highlights the central dilemma facing the Board: the informal, human explanation the community craved was also a violation of governance protocols trustees are expected to follow. Other trustees hastily followed up to clarify her words did not represent the Board’s views.

The saying “discretion is the better part of valor” suggests that restraint is central to responsible stewardship. But that only works when there is trust, of which the community is presently in short supply.

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CYA vs FYI

The Board’s actions cannot be fully understood without considering political climate. As The Wikipedian has previously covered, Wikipedia and the WMF are indeed facing “global headwinds”—from legal challenges in India to intensified criticism from pro-Israel and right-wing activists to subpoenas from Republican officials. While the nastygram from acting U.S. attorney Ed Martin went away when his candidacy was withdrawn this summer, it has returned in the form of a subpoena from Ted Cruz and the Senate Commerce Committee demanding records that the WMF doesn’t really have.

This is a board in a defensive crouch, and it’s hard to say they’re wrong to feel that way. But the Board’s greatest mistake was thinking it had something to lose by being transparent. By rewriting the rules late in the game and then failing to honestly state what everyone could figure out for themselves, the Board created the very problem it sought to avoid.

The silver lining—if there is one—is that the Board’s work barely touches the daily contributions of editors who keep Wikipedia running. Articles will still be written, vandalism reverted, debates will rage on Talk pages. But institutional legitimacy depends on more than optics. Whether the WMF will remember October 2025 when it again has to choose between FYI and CYA is anyone’s guess. More likely, they’ll walk into the same trap again.

Wikipedia’s 7 millionth article should be written sometime in December 2024. What was Wikipedia like when its 1 millionth article was written? What is different now? What’s the same?

It ended up taking a bit longer than expected. The milestone finally arrived at the end of May 2025—nearly six months later than projected, and a little over a month ago at this writing. We’re only talking about it because of round number bias, but hey, seven million is a lot of anything, except maybe TikTok views.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

So which article had the honor of being Wikipedia’s seven millionth? Well, it’s complicated.

As the milestone came into view, the regulars geared up for a discussion about “which article did it”. Some gamesmanship was expected; one editor even shared their strategy for trying to score lucky number seven million. And then, like an eBay bid sniping, multiple articles were created in the same minute—2:26 UTC, or about 10:30 p.m. Eastern—making it difficult to declare a winner.

The community settled on Operators and Things, a 1958 memoir of schizophrenia, published under a pseudonym. The four runners-up were:

• a rural area in Belarus

• a type of dandelion

• a devastating 1955 flood

• a Belarusian fencer

Why this one over the others? It’s a little hard to explain. Of course, it could be the one. But the choice is as much symbolic as it is technical. Wikipedians helping select which articles to spotlight want articles showing Wikipedia at its best.

Absent a clear winner, amid concerns that other plausible contenders were cobbled together from data sets, otherwise lacked human interest, or might forever remain a short “stub” article—like certain Minsk-area subdivisions or herbacious perennials I could name—Operators and Things wasn’t a reconfigured database entry, it wasn’t gamed, and wasn’t anyone’s least favorite.

But some participants in the process didn’t seem to understand, as it was somewhat indelicately explained, that it was “about picking the most ‘photogenic’ (so to speak) article that paints the project in the best light.” A disillusioned editor replied: “Now I see it is simply about PR”. A third demurred: “The article should be what it is. Not what we wish it was.”

In the moment, the book looked the most ready for primetime—although today I think you’d have to go with the flood article, which has more citations, more details, and better images.

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I Can See for Milestones and Milestones

The one millionth article was Jordanhill railway station, a nondescript suburban train stop in Glasgow, created on March 1, 2006. To this day, the page contains a self-referential note about its milestone status, and that it “received international recognition” for the designation. Later milestone articles were spared the navel-gazing, but their creation was still sometimes considered newsworthy.

It took just over five years from Wikipedia’s launch for an article about the side-platformed railway station to become its millionth. Then momentum picked up, for a while. It took just 18 months to hit two million during Wikipedia’s exponential editor growth in the mid-aughts. Yet the pace slowed with each successive million, until the seven millionth took slightly longer than the first.

This chart tracks the number of days between milestones:

By the four-million mark, editors began creating commemorative pages for each milestone. But long before that, editors had a tradition of placing bets on not just the date of future milestones, but sometimes even which article it might be.

The pool for the eight millionth article closed in 2021, but users are still placing bets on the ninth, tenth, and even one-hundred-millionth articles. There’s a joke entry for an “infinity pool” but the quadrillion pool appears to be at least kind of serious.

What’s Changed About Wikipedia

Nineteen years have passed since Jordanhill’s fifteen minutes of fame—a whole generation. March 2006 was an exciting time to be part of Wikipedia. The site was less polished. Articles were shorter. Here is the Jordanhill Railway Station article at the end of its first day, and here it is in May 2025. Editors were more welcoming and less territorial—there was more to create than to defend.

Which doesn’t mean they weren’t concerned about optics.

The last of Wikipedia’s core policies had been adopted just three months earlier—Biographies of Living Persons (BLP)—following an embarrassing hoax. A few months later, the site would be roasted by The Onion with the headline “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence”. Today, that kind of jokey vandalism is mostly a thing of the past, thanks to ClueBot NG, a vandalism-fighting bot that’s been on patrol since 2010.

But overall, Wikipedia itself hasn’t changed all that much. It’s still a freely-licensed, volunteer-driven project, maintained by a sprawling and sometimes contentious consensus-driven community, backed by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is even more trusted by Google in 2025—and now by ChatGPT as well. Even the front page of the site looks remarkably the same today as it did in 2006.

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What’s Changed About the Internet

What’s really different from 2006 isn’t so much Wikipedia. It’s the rest of the internet, how we use it, and how we feel about that.

In 2006, the internet was still a place you went to get away from being IRL. The pre-commercial, late 1990s internet of Usenet and Geocities still felt recent, and the “Web 2.0” era of blogs and social media was still emerging.

When Wikipedia’s first millionth article was written, YouTube wasn’t owned by Google yet, and Facebook was still in MySpace’s shadow. Reddit was a newborn. Wikipedia, too, remained a scrappy, idealistic experiment. People were starting to take it seriously, but it wasn’t entirely to be trusted—pretty much the conventional wisdom around generative AI today.

Most of the collaborative and media-based websites in its age cohort haven’t fared so well. Many, like MetaFilter or Fark or Slashdot are actually still around, but the world has moved on. Wikipedia feels like a holdover from an earlier, better, more human version of the internet.

Recently, The Wikipedian pulled off the shelf a dusty old copy of Suck.com’s 1997 essay collection, Suck: Worst-Case Scenarios in Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet. Suck was a proto-blog—one new post daily, formatted in a tall, centered column that would look right at home on a smartphone today. Its pseudonymous writers eventually ended up at Salon, The New York Times, Wired. The essays were bracing, self-aware, discursive, and fun—time-wasters in the best sense. 

But nobody writes like that online anymore.

“What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in order to separate from the real world,” Dan Nosowitz wrote for New York in 2018, when Wikipedia had just 5.6 million articles, “not the place you seek to waste time, but the place you go to so that you’ll someday have time to waste. … It is not very much fun.”

Wikipedia is one of the last places where a people-first collaborative project is as relevant as the algorithm-driven colossuses in its peer set today. It’s sometimes even fun.

Thanks a Million

In the roughly four weeks since passing the last milestone, Wikipedia has added more than 16,000 new articles. If current trends hold, Wikipedia will reach its eight millionth article as early as September 2031. It should take seven years to pass nine million—call it December 2038. And if the trend holds, Wikipedia’s 10 millionth article should arrive in March 2047, when Wikipedia will be not quite fifty, twenty two years from now.

Publicly, there’s no named successor, no shortlist, nor any indication that an internal candidate has the inside track. Unofficially, Iskander and the Wikimedia Board of Trustees began succession planning in 2024, presumably to avoid the months-long leadership gap it experienced during the 2021–2 transition from previous CEO Katherine Maher.

Sometime in the next six months, we’ll find out who the board thinks has the right stuff. Until then, we speculate. Doing its part, The Wikipedian reached out to more than thirty individuals from across the Wikimedia movement—volunteer editors, affiliate members, and a few around the WMF itself—with an off-the-record question: what qualities should the next CEO have?

Around a third got back to me in the past week, and this post is the result of what they told me.

The first thing that stands out is Iskander’s tenure is generally viewed as a success, counting both her personal leadership qualities and actual performance. Three years isn’t really long enough time to truly put a stamp on an organization, but among those who offered an opinion, impressions were positive.

She assembled a capable C-team, worked well with the board, listened to stakeholders, and promoted a stable organization. One person in a position to know praised her for not trying to play the hero, instead focusing on building systems and empowering staff.

Unsurprisingly, all wanted more of this: a competent facilitator with an eye on the long view—not on their next gig. The Wikipedian heard no calls for a visionary, just someone who helps others do their jobs well.

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But is the Wikimedia Foundation doing the right job?

To some, the WMF has simply become too large, bureaucratic, and detached from the community it exists to serve. These concerns often turn on the Foundation’s remarkably successful fundraising—for both its tactics and the resulting stockpile. While perhaps easily dismissed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, there’s more than one level to this critique.

First is about the alarmist tone of its year-end banner ads, which may trick readers into thinking the site is in financial trouble when it absolutely is not. They’re squicky at best, but then a few years ago they tried it the other way and the ads tanked, so that’s apparently that.

Second is how it uses its considerable largesse. The WMF raises and spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year but, as they say in Hollywood, you can’t always see the money on the screen. And what is the point of a $100 million-plus endowment, if a fundraising shortfall means staff cutbacks?

Still the WMF has more than 700 staff and contractors spread across dozens of teams distributed around the globe, many of whom, with respect, have little to do with why Wikipedia really matters (sorry). Perhaps credit where due, the WMF did dramatically downsize its San Francisco office space in late 2024—only a slight laggard in downtown real estate trends.

One longtime community member floated an idea The Wikipedian has also raised in the past: the Foundation should scale down drastically, focus on core functions—technology, legal, administration—and shift toward a grantmaking model that empowers smaller, more nimble affiliates and nonprofits to try new things. Maybe bigger isn’t always better.

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Another way of looking at what kind of leader the WMF needs is to consider the challenges it faces today.

One correspondent pointed out that previous WMF leaders were chosen to address specific problems at points in its history. The first Executive Director—the title until 2021—was Brad Patrick, also its general counsel, when first it needed to file paperwork. The WMF’s longest-tenured ED was Sue Gardner, a journalist, who helped Wikipedia establish its credibility. Lila Tretikov, a technologist, was tapped to improve its tech stack. Katherine Maher, a communications officer, was promoted when Tretikov’s efforts to develop a search engine produced a staff revolt. Iskander, an NGO executive, promised drama-free leadership and largely delivered.

Were we ever so young? The stakes feel a bit higher now.

Two challenges stand above the rest: generative AI, which now competes with Wikipedia for public attention, and an increasingly hostile political environment—in the U.S. obviously, but also in the UK and India—posing new threats to open knowledge projects.

While nearly everyone agreed on the primacy of these two issues, views diverged on which mattered more, and what could or should be done about either, including by the next CEO. No one thinks the path forward is obvious.

One insider argued WMF’s relevance is at risk—ChatGPT recently passed Wikipedia in global traffic btw—and suggested a leader from Big Tech was needed to address it. Another argued that WMF missed the boat by not helping to make Wikimedia content accessible in formats beyond traditional encyclopedia articles—like video and short-form media. Several voiced concerns about hiring from Silicon Valley at all, though this view was not universal. Others warned against swinging too hard in any one direction.

No one called for a CEO with a political background, although one veteran editor suggested the WMF would be wise to prepare for the possibility of relocating outside the U.S. if political conditions continue on their current path.

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Yet another way to answer the CEO question is to consider the actual professional experience and leadership traits desired.

Recurring themes included international experience, cultural fluency, ability to manage large organizations, and a capacity for humility. Backgrounds in international NGOs or legacy institutions were seen as promising. (It was hard to miss that the ideal leader being described is Iskander herself.)

Among all these conversations, just one serious name came up: Megan Smith, former U.S. CTO under Obama. Notwithstanding the political connections and lack of international exposure, Smith would bring technical expertise, business leadership, and foundation experience.

Inevitably, another recurring theme was the Wikimedia Foundation’s relationship with the Wikimedia community, and what the next CEO could do to change that. Skepticism ran deep—not just among core Wikipedia editors, but even among Wikimedians with formal ties to affiliates and outside institutions—that the WMF fully understands or supports their contributions. As well, some in the former group felt that those without affiliate status or regular conference attendance are excluded from important discussions.

Could the next CEO actually come from within the community? No one thought this was likely. The scale and complexity of the WMF’s operations demand experience and skills no one in the Wikimedia community is considered to possess.

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The real challenge facing the next CEO is that Wikipedia isn’t one thing, but many things at once. It’s a volunteer project, an editorial enterprise, a tech platform, and a global nonprofit. The needs of each sometimes conflict, and the WMF may never fully reconcile these internal contractions. Yet they linger, unspoken, in the question of who should lead next.

No one can be everything to everyone. But the next CEO must build trust across constituencies and somehow help the WMF find itself. They’ll inherit an organization whose flagship project remains vital but feels vulnerable. AI depends on Wikipedia but also threatens to displace it. Wikipedia still represents the “last bastion of shared reality”, but that too feels shaky right now.

Whoever gets the nod, they’ll be taking on one of the hardest jobs in the nonprofit sector. Think you have what it takes? Read the job posting and submit your application here.

Deep within the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan for 2023–24, it turns out there was a warning that feels eerily prescient early in Trump’s second term:

As Wikimedia projects are increasingly regarded as trusted sources of knowledge across the world, some politicians and governments have made deliberate efforts to discredit Wikipedia through disinformation campaigns in mainstream and social media.

Last week, Ed Martin, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, announcing an investigation into whether alleged political bias and foreign influence—claimed but not substantiated—violate the Foundation’s obligations under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. The WMF now has until May 15 to respond to a dozen questions and produce documents outlining its safeguards against foreign propaganda and ideological manipulation, along with any relationships it maintains with search engines and AI companies.

There are two ways to read this letter. One is to take it at face value, and respond to it point by point. The other is to examine the political and ideological motivations behind its creation. Because it’s not good enough simply to call it ridiculous—you also have to explain why—The Wikipedian will do both.

Just a Light Fisking

The letter opens with a polite, almost disarming tone—an official formality that belies what follows:

To Whom It May Concern:

As the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, I regularly receive requests for information, clarification, and official comment. I regard such inquiries with the seriousness they warrant and respond appropriately through formal correspondence, such as this letter.

From the very first paragraph, Martin makes clear he’s acting on a tip. But from whom? The Wikipedian has a theory. We’ll come back to that.

It has come to my attention that Wikipedia, which operates via its fiscal sponsor, the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., is engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. As a nonprofit corporation incorporated in the District of Columbia, the Wikimedia Foundation is subject to specific legal obligations and fiduciary duties consistent with its tax-exempt status.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office is not the IRS. It does not oversee compliance with tax-exempt status, unless there’s a credible allegation of criminal fraud. Martin makes no such claim anywhere in the letter.

In addition, the public is entitled to rely on a reasonable expectation of neutrality, transparency, and accountability in its operations and publications.

This statement is half true. The public can expect Wikipedia to pursue neutrality and transparency, because it says so itself. But the notion that falling short of this inherently subjective—not to mention impossible—standard justifies government intervention? Martin seems to have invented it to support the rest of the letter.

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In its 2023 IRS Form 990, the Wikimedia Foundation describes its mission as, “empower[ing] and engag[ing] people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain and to disseminate it effectively and globally. . . [.]”

Here, Martin is on solid ground. Wikipedia does describe itself as an educational project, and it is indeed written by contributors from around the world.

As you know, Section 501(c)(3) requires that organizations receiving tax-exempt status operate exclusively for “religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes. . . [.]” It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.

But with the phrase “foreign actors,” Martin pivots into something else entirely. The term is meant to raise suspicions. Vladimir Putin is a foreign actor. But then, so is Mr. Bean. And what does it mean to “manipulate information”? That is the very definition of editing. And what “propaganda” is he referring to? Martin doesn’t offer any examples, but still states it as a settled fact.

Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key historical events and biographical information of current and former American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and interests of the United States.

The word “manipulation” here is slippery. On a basic level, modifying information is the quotidian labors of an online encyclopedia. But in this context, Martin clearly intends the more sinister meaning.

Similarly, the fact that Wikipedia articles are constantly being revised—especially on historical topics or public figures—is inherent in the collaborative process.

Martin’s invocation of “national security” echoes the rationale used in the detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, whose presence in the U.S., the government argues, poses “potentially serious foreign policy consequences.”

Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission.

Again, he never says what, exactly, this alleged “propaganda” is. Disappointing, really. You know, Ed, a simple Google search for “wikipedia propaganda” would have turned up the Wikipedia community’s own freely available essay on the topic.

In addition, Wikipedia’s operations are directed by its board, which is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers.

Martin may be correct that the board is majority non-American. But as he acknowledges, Wikipedia is a global project. It’s entirely unsurprising that its leadership would reflect that scope. Yet Martin takes this unremarkable fact and uses it as the basis for a far more provocative claim: that it somehow means Wikipedia is “subverting the interests of American taxpayers”—a leap made without evidence and grounded in nothing more than assertion.

Educational content should be directionally neutral; however, information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers.

Martin’s claim that educational material should be “directionally neutral” is so vague it borders on meaningless. More notably, this marks the second time he refers to an unnamed informant, while implying that some portion of Wikipedia’s billions of words somehow benefits “foreign powers.” It’s true, of course, that accurate information may serve the interests of various governments, especially when it writes about them accurately.

Moreover, we are aware that search engines such as Google have agreed to prioritize Wikipedia results due to the relationship that Wikipedia has established with these tech platforms.

Martin implies that Wikipedia’s prominence in search results stems from some special arrangement with tech companies. This gets it backward. Google and others rank Wikipedia highly because its structure, interlinking, and content quality closely are perfectly designed for search algorithms. Whatever agreements may exist between the WMF and tech platforms in 2025, they follow from Wikipedia’s value as a uniquely useful resource, not the other way around.

If the content contained in Wikipedia articles is biased, unreliable, or sourced by entities who wish to do harm to the United States, search engine prioritization of Wikipedia will only amplify propaganda to a larger American audience.

True, as far as it goes. Given the rest of Martin’s letter, perhaps the only surprise here is this sentence begins with the word “If” and not “Because”.

Lastly, it has come to our attention that generative AI platforms receive Wikipedia data to train large-language models. This data is now consumed by masses of Americans and American teachers on a daily basis. If the data provided is manipulated, particularly by foreign actors and entities, Wikipedia’s relationship with generative AI platforms has the potential to launder information on behalf of foreign actors.

Again, technically true—but far from proven. In fact, Martin understates Wikipedia’s influence on generative AI. Beyond its role in training large language models, Wikipedia is one of the most frequently retrieved sources by consumer-facing chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

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In light of these concerns, my Office seeks information pertaining to Wikimedia’s compliance with the laws governing its tax-exempt status. To assist with our investigation of this matter, I request the following documents and information, covering the period of January 1, 2021 to the present, as soon as possible but no later than May 15, 2025:

For the first time, Martin signals that an investigation has already been opened. And here begins the second half of his letter, a lengthy list of questions and document requests, organized around the WMF’s accountability structures, editorial oversight mechanisms, and information governance practices—all framed to imply a lack of transparency, control, or neutrality.

1. Safeguarding Against Propaganda: What mechanisms does the Wikimedia Foundation have in place to fulfill its legal and ethical responsibilities to safeguard the public from the dissemination of propaganda, particularly in light of its designation as a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and its longstanding hands-off policy regarding Trust & Safety (including content moderation and editor misconduct)?

Martin’s question more or less answers itself. The Wikimedia Foundation’s mechanism for safeguarding against misinformation is its Trust & Safety team—part of the legal department—which generally defers to the Wikipedia editor community but steps in under extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps the WMF will simply send him a link to its Trust & Safety page, which outlines these responsibilities, provides contact information, and explicitly references “identifying and countering disinformation campaigns.”

2. Trust & Safety Oversight: Regarding Trust & Safety, what does the Foundation provide in terms of employees and contractors, budget, day-to-day oversight, and enforcement mechanisms, for the purposes of content moderation and addressing editor misconduct (including but not limited to content manipulation, bullying, and off-platform canvassing)?

Martin’s letter does something curious: it shows just enough research to show familiarity with terms like “canvassing”, but never once acknowledges the Wikipedia community—the volunteer editors who actually create and moderate content, who predate the Wikimedia Foundation, and whom the Foundation exists to support. Like many critics before him, Martin directs his complaints at the Foundation rather than, say, the relevant Talk page.

As for the information he seeks, it’s readily available. The WMF’s 2023–24 Annual Plan allocated roughly $20.5 million—or 11.6% of its $177 million budget—to “safety and inclusion” efforts, of which Trust & Safety is a part. Martin likely knows this. His ideological allies, including Elon Musk and the New York Post, recently seized on the word “inclusion” to mischaracterize it as a DEI initiative—which is what led Musk to describe Wikipedia as “Wokepedia” in the first place.

3. Transparency and Donor Influence: How does the Foundation ensure transparency and accountability regarding the extent to which its editorial practices and platform governance are influenced by ongoing relationships with donors, sponsors, funders, or other external stakeholders?

The WMF already discloses extensive financial information, including annual reports, IRS Form 990 filings, and audited financial statements. These documents detail revenue sources, expenditures, and major donors, providing clear visibility into the Foundation’s funding.

In addition, twice a year the WMF publishes Transparency Reports, disclosing requests to alter or remove content or provide nonpublic user information. Each report notes the origin of requests, the content they addressed, and how the WMF responded, carefully balancing its commitments to both privacy and transparency.

4. Foreign Influence Protections: What steps has the Foundation taken to exclude foreign influence operations from making targeted edits to categories of content? Who enforces these measures, and how? What foreign influence operations have been detected, and how were they addressed?

Martin could have saved himself the trouble by reading Wired’s “The Hunt for Wikipedia’s Disinformation Moles” (October 2022), which explains attempts by Russian and Chinese state actors to influence Wikipedia content, and how the community and Foundation responded. In one notable case, the WMF banned seven Chinese nationals in 2021 for, to borrow Martin’s phrase, making “targeted edits to categories of content”. The community itself maintains an article, “List of political editing incidents on Wikipedia”, with further examples.

5. Viewpoint Diversity Policy: What policy does the Foundation have in place to ensure that content submissions, editorial decisions, and article revisions reflect a broad spectrum of viewpoints, including those that may conflict with the views of major financial or institutional backers?

This isn’t the role of the Wikimedia Foundation—it’s the responsibility of the Wikipedia community. Among its three core content policies, the first is neutral point of view, or NPOV, which requires contributors to write “fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias”.

The WMF, for its part, receives most of its funding from small-dollar donors but also publishes an annual list of its largest supporters. In 2023–24, this included Apple, Google, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Wikipedia article Criticism of Apple Inc. runs to 3,800 words. Criticism of Google clocks in at more than 11,000, making it one of the longest articles on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the entry for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is surprisingly poor, and has carried a warning tag about its lack of sourcing since 2018. While this is mere anecdata, it suggests these donations are doing little to sway Wikipedia’s volunteer editors.

6. Addressing Editor Misconduct: What is the Foundation’s official process for addressing credible allegations that editors or contributors have materially misled readers, engaged in bad-faith edits, or otherwise manipulated content? What is the official process for auditing or evaluating the actions and voting patterns of editors, administrators, and committees such as the Arbitration Committee? Detail all instances in which these processes have been used over the last six years.

The Trust & Safety page includes not one, but two—count ’em, two—flowcharts explaining the process for handling editor misconduct. One outlines how to report an incident; the other explains what steps the WMF legal team may take in response.

Martin also references a bit of Wikipedia arcana: the Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, often and only somewhat inaccurately called “Wikipedia’s Supreme Court”. The Wikipedian will give Martin this much: a historical analysis of ArbCom decisions could be interesting—though it’s doubtful the WMF has ever undertaken one. It’s even less likely that it has “audited” editor behavior. Audit what, exactly? Requests for Comment? Good luck with that. RfCs aren’t centralized, and there’s no formal archive. However, with a bit of sleuthing, The Wikipedian has identified a bot-generated list of 4,200 RfCs dating to at least 2012—so if anyone wants to try, this is probably not a bad place to start.

As for “voting patterns”, the phrase raised eyebrows on Wikipedia’s Village pump (WMF) discussion board. Some editors pointed out that, as non-Americans, they’ve never voted in a U.S. election—aha, foreign influence! Others noted that Wikipedia’s own “!vote” philosophy emphasizes consensus over simple majority. Given Martin’s word choices elsewhere, which seem engineered to invite conspiratorial readings, it’s little surprise Wikipedia editors are doing so here.

7. Anti-Discrimination Enforcement: Does the Foundation maintain a public, formally adopted policy explicitly prohibiting hateful content and conduct by editors? If so, what enforcement mechanisms are in place to ensure compliance, and how do they apply across different namespaces and content areas?

In 2020, the WMF adopted the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC), which prohibits hate speech across all Wikimedia projects. It includes enforcement guidelines, a coordinating committee, and a public archive of current and past cases.

Partial credit to Martin’s staff for using the term “namespaces”—though their use of it suggests they may not fully understand what it means. Namespaces aren’t separate projects; they’re technical categories that distinguish between different kinds of pages on the same project. Articles, user pages, and talk pages all occupy distinct namespaces.

Then again, perhaps The Wikipedian isn’t giving them enough credit. Maybe someone in Martin’s office really is worried that enforcement of hate speech policy is more lax in template documentation than media file metadata.

8. Safeguards Against Ideological Manipulation: What safeguards exist to detect and prevent undue influence by ideologically motivated individuals or coordinated networks? Provide details regarding the actions taken by the Foundation over the last six years and any changes made to these safeguards.

We’re repeating ourselves a bit here. Still, it bears restating: this is primarily the responsibility of the Wikipedia community, not the Wikimedia Foundation. Nevertheless, the Trust & Safety team exists, the Universal Code of Conduct is enforced, and the WMF supports the development of tools the community uses to monitor and protect articles from miscreants, malefactors, and meatheads.

In addition to ArbCom and Requests for Comment, Wikipedia editors have venues like the Administrators’ Noticeboard to flag and discuss problematic behavior, such as attempts at coordinated or ideologically motivated editing.

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9. Anonymity and Accountability: In view of public criticisms, including those by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding editorial opacity, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny? How does it reconcile this with broader editorial standards requiring attribution and accountability? What measures does the Foundation take to assess the integrity and competence of senior editors and administrators?

OK, now things get interesting. It’s striking to see Ed Martin cite Larry Sanger—Wikipedia’s lesser-known co-founder—who holds the title of co-founder over the objections of its much more famous co-founder, Jimmy Wales. Sanger was originally hired by Wales at his startup, Bomis, to lead the Nupedia project. Wikipedia spun out of that work. After being laid off in the 2002 dot-com crash, Sanger resigned.

Sanger’s preference had always leaned toward Nupedia’s expert-driven model over Wikipedia’s open-editing ethos. A few years later, Sanger launched his first and most successful (but still unsuccessful) Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium, which required contributors to register under their real names. This was Sanger’s first, but not his last, objection to Wikipedia. And that is the context in which Martin invokes him here. But there’s more to the story.

Sanger and Wales originally met on a message board about Objectivism, the radical individualist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Wales’s politics have since moderated to a center-left position, but Sanger’s evolution—or perhaps revelation—has taken him in a hard-right direction. Over the years, Sanger has repeatedly attacked Wikipedia, at one point calling the FBI over concerns about illegal images, and more recently aligning himself with conservative and right-wing figures. He has claimed that Wikipedia has “gone woke”, and is now regularly cited by right-leaning media outlets as the encyclopedia’s chief critic.

In the past few months, Sanger has tagged Donald Trump on social media to suggest an executive order banning federal employees from editing Wikipedia at work. He’s also appealed to Elon Musk, asking that DOGE investigate whether government agencies have hired Wikipedia consultants. Did he also contact Ed Martin? Unless Sanger says so, we’ll probably never know. But there’s a pattern.

10. Prevention of Repeat Offenders: What internal safeguards exist to prevent banned users from creating new accounts and resuming prohibited activities? How does the Foundation address concerns regarding the lack of a robust and transparent process to detect, deter, and exclude repeat offenders?

Plenty—and most of them aren’t the WMF’s responsibility. Still with me? I promise, we’re almost there.

11. Third-Party Contracts: What third-party entities, including AI and LLM companies and search engines, has the Foundation contracted with to use, redistribute, or process Wikipedia content? Please produce all related documents, contracts, amendments, and correspondence.

Technically, the WMF has no obligation to respond to this question. The letter is a request, not a subpoena. The Foundation’s contracts are its own business—and it will be interesting to see how much, if anything, it chooses to disclose.

12. Downstream Content Corrections: When editors or the Foundation delete harmful or illegal content that has already been shared with third parties, what steps are followed to mitigate the downstream effects on search results and LLM training data? What measures ensure that third parties and the broader public are informed of misinformation, bias, or other problems across Wikipedia and related projects?

This is an interesting question... but it’s really one for the AI companies. They’re the ones responsible for how and when their systems update training data or revise outputs based on changes to source material like Wikipedia.

I look forward to your cooperation with my letter of inquiry. Please respond by May 15, 2025. Should you have further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to call my Office or schedule a time to meet in person.

All the best,

Edward R. Martin, Jr.

United States Attorney for the District of Columbia

Thanks, Ed! “All the best”—from the guy threatening to investigate Wikipedia. What a swell guy.

Concern Troll, Esq.

It’s time to just say it: Martin’s letter is a political threat masquerading as a legal inquiry. And it’s no anomaly. It’s part of a coordinated effort by right-wing activists, politicians, and their media enablers, who have grown increasingly hostile to any institution operating beyond their influence. The term “gaslighting” became a buzzword during Trump’s first term, describing manipulative attempts to erode trust in shared reality. It applies here.

From a legal perspective, the letter is untethered from jurisdiction, precedent, and basic constitutional principles. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is not the IRS. There is no law barring non-U.S. persons from contributing to Wikipedia or serving on its board. And several of Martin’s questions appear designed less to gather facts than to chill free speech.

From a Wikipedia perspective, the letter is riddled with errors. It conflates the Wikimedia Foundation’s role as host and steward with editorial control, and implies that any content violating Wikipedia’s own neutral point of view policy might somehow be at odds with federal law.

Martin never states outright why he sent the letter, but The Free Press—a Trump-friendly outlet that got the exclusive—reported that “a person close to Martin” cited Wikipedia’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas conflict. That tracks with a growing pressure campaign aimed at Wikipedia. In recent years, right-wing Jewish groups have criticized Wikipedia’s coverage of Israel, and the site has clashed with the increasingly hardline Anti-Defamation League as well.

Since returning to office, Trump and his allies have escalated a years-long campaign to delegitimize institutions that serve as arbiters of shared reality. Targets include tech companies, media outlets, elite law firms, Ivy League universities, and scientific institutions. While Trump goes after his usual foes—Harvard University, 60 Minutes—Martin has sent similar letters to Georgetown Law School and even to a scientific journal. It was only a matter of time before they came for Wikipedia.

Indeed, elements of the right have been gunning for Wikipedia for years. Besides Sanger’s social media activism, perhaps the clearest precursor to Martin’s letter came in February, when the New York Post editorial board published a jeremiad, “Big Tech must block Wikipedia until it stops censoring and pushing disinformation”, calling for vague but punitive action against Wikipedia. Martin has now stepped up to do exactly that.

Martin is an unlikely banner carrier. As CNN has reported, Martin has had ties to Nazi sympathizers and the white supremacist group VDARE. Donald Trump himself has trafficked in antisemitic tropes and dined with known antisemites.

Martin is also the sort of unlikely public official found throughout Trump’s second administration. A longtime Missouri GOP operative, his brief, chaotic leadership of the late Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum ended in a lawsuit and allegations of sockpuppetry. He had no prosecutorial background prior to this role. And, ironically—given the concerns raised in his letter—Martin appeared on Kremlin-backed media over 150 times, a fact he failed to disclose in his Senate confirmation questionnaire.

Since taking office, he has pledged loyalty to Trump over his office, floated using his position to go after critics of Musk’s DOGE, defended January 6 rioters, and fired the prosecutors who handled those cases. He also has a bit of a reputation as a Twitter troll. Undermining the polite tone of his letter, Martin posted on X: “Hey @Wikipedia: you can run but you can’t hide!”

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The Epicenter of “Fake News”

So why target Wikipedia? Because it embodies everything the MAGA movement resents: expertise, transparency, editorial standards. As others have noted, we are watching a long-running, coordinated effort to dismantle public trust in any institution not fully within MAGA’s grasp. From universities to the press, the judiciary, and now, Wikipedia, the common thread is hostility toward shared reality.

Wikipedia’s popularity makes it threatening. As a project whose mission is to centralize all of the news coverage MAGA hates—and which excludes the bad-faith framing and conspiratorial logic of its favored media—Wikipedia is the center of the “fake news” universe. Wikipedia is also a target because it bridges two worlds it wants to dominate: institutions of knowledge and the public at large. It is, improbably, both elite and populist.

Yet Martin’s attack begins from the position that neither the Wikimedia Foundation nor the Wikipedia community cares about neutrality, accountability, or the public interest. Perhaps this is why it’s so insulting. Wikipedia’s editors and administrators argue constantly. They write, revise, fact-check, and defend their work in the open. The Wikimedia Foundation has entire teams dedicated to safety, privacy, disinformation, legal risk, and community health. The project is far from perfect, but it is constantly being refined by people who care deeply about how knowledge is produced and protected.

Wikipedia operates on consensus. It works because even if participants don’t always agree on what it says, they agree on the values and processes that underpin it. The U.S. political system, we observe in its unraveling, operates more like this than we once appreciated.

A Choice, Not an Echo

The Wikimedia Foundation now faces a defining choice—one of several it has been forced to confront in recent years. Will it bend to a bad-faith political stunt, or stand firm for the values Ed Martin and his allies deride?

Its recent decision to comply with an Indian court order in an unrelated case has raised uncomfortable questions about its willingness to hold the line under pressure. Most Americans don’t track international legal disputes or know much about Narendra Modi. But they do know Donald Trump. And they know Wikipedia.

Few institutions have stood firm through the Trump era. Harvard, now under similar attack, has signaled its intent to fight. Wikipedia has the opportunity—and the obligation—to do the same. All the best, Wikimedia legal team.

The battlefield is Wikipedia’s Hebrew-language edition (hewiki, as its editors call it), where the ongoing crisis echoes the deepening political fractures within Israel, and perhaps beyond. It is also shaping up to be one of the most destabilizing, project-threatening disputes The Wikipedian has encountered.

Consensus or Control?

In December, an 11,000-word Request for Comment (RfC) was posted on Meta-Wiki1, alleging that a religious-nationalist faction had taken control of hewiki, rewriting the rules and banning dissenters to make sure the content of articles align with their political views. Much of this content centers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, but its political implications extend beyond Israel, including LGBTQ+ issues.

The multi-part essay—a group effort by left-leaning hewiki contributors and posted by an editor named Itamar—describes a pattern of mass bans of progressive and secular editors in 2023, followed by elections in November 2024 that further entrenched the faction, as banned editors were unable to vote.

The timeline runs straight through one of the most consequential periods in modern Israeli history: the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. While that event reshaped Israeli politics, the hewiki controversy mirrors larger domestic political debates—particularly Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, which Itamar and his allies see as a direct parallel. He even uses language associated with Israel’s ongoing hostage crisis:

“Editors are still being interrogated and threatened; only 3 of the 59 editors who were inexplicably blocked have been released.”

Itamar and his allies have called on the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to investigate the bans and remove the administrators responsible. So far, the WMF has yet to respond.

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A Familiar Dynamic

The most detailed counterargument comes from a hewiki veteran named Yuri, who disputes nearly every claim in the RfC. He asserts that most of the banned editors were right-wing, not left-wing, and that Itamar’s faction engaged in its own off-wiki coordination through WhatsApp. In response, Itamar’s allies accuse Yuri of lying and misrepresenting data, while Yuri’s supporters argue that there is no real crisis and most hewiki editors agree with them and... that is about as far as The Wikipedian will go in trying to get to the bottom of it.

The Wikipedian knows only an Economist subscription’s worth about Israeli politics and much less about hewiki before this controversy, but he has read enough left-right disputes to recognize certain patterns.

In many political conflicts, there is a dynamic where the side seeking change must win the argument outright to shift the status quo, while the side in power only needs to muddy the waters enough to maintain it. When faced with strong evidence for reform, defenders of the system often present a weaker but emphatic counterargument—not to convince opponents, but to confuse the persuadable middle, making inaction the easiest choice.2 While The Wikipedian cannot say with absolute certainty that is what’s happening here, considering the detailed arguments and receipts provided by Itamar compared with Yuri’s assertive but vague dismissal, it can reasonably be understood to follow that pattern.

Speaking of receipts, the clearest example of how hewiki content has moved in a religious-nationalist direction can be seen in its treatment of a topic which on the English Wikipedia is called Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It once carried the same name on hewiki, until a 2021 discussion resulted in its renaming to Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria.

The word choices are inherently political—arguably in both directions. To North Americans, Judea and Samaria are historical and biblical terms, but it is also a political designation used by the State of Israel, and used specifically for those connotations. Even the current hewiki article acknowledges the differing usage:

“The region is referred to in Israel as ‘Judea and Samaria’ or ‘the Territories,’ and internationally as ‘West Bank.’”

But that’s not the whole story, either. In Israel, conservative parties prefer “Judea and Samaria”, while liberals use “West Bank”, and mainstream media sources will often use both, depending on the context. This resembles linguistic divides in other places, such as Republicans and Democrats in the Washington, DC area preferring to call their regional airport “Reagan” or “National”, respectively—or to opt out and just call it “DCA”.

A Matter of Precedent

At first glance, the struggles on Hebrew Wikipedia might seem to mirror those on English Wikipedia. In some ways, they do—but not precisely. On the English Wikipedia, criticism of Wikipedia’s content and governance mostly comes from the right3, while on hewiki the two sides have switched places. While English Wikipedia’s large and diverse editor base helps ensure stability and prevent any single faction from gaining too much control, hewiki’s smaller community makes it far more vulnerable to power consolidation and factional rule. And untangling that can be incredibly difficult—perhaps requiring external intervention.

The current controversy, and Itamar’s call for the WMF to weigh in, is not without precedent. In the early 2010s, a far-right faction of Croatian Wikipedia administrators gradually took control, and used their power to whitewash fascist war crimes and block dissenters. By 2013, Croatian Wikipedia had become widely recognized as a propaganda tool. Finally in 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation intervened, stripping administrative rights and leading a research effort providing support for the Wikimedia community to reset governance.4

Will the WMF do the same here? It’s a tricky decision. Given how polarized the factions are, it’s hard to imagine an internal resolution that would satisfy both sides. Left alone, the Hebrew Wikipedia could become even more insular and isolated. Then again, it’s also possible Yuri is right, and Itamar is wrong.

When the WMF intervened in Croatian Wikipedia, it drew little international attention—unlike the intense scrutiny that comes with anything involving Israel. Getting involved would send a clear message, but risks criticism. Yet while inaction seems like the easiest path, history suggests the problem will only fester.

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A Crisis of Governance

The WMF’s decision will have ramifications far beyond Israel, feeding directly into rising political polarization, the breakdown of international consensus, and institutional paralysis that has repeatedly played out globally over the past decade.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the relative stability that defined much of the late 20th century has been giving way to something more fractured and volatile. In Orban’s Hungary, Modi’s India, Trump’s America, and yes, Netanyahu’s Israel, the “postwar consensus” is yielding to an era of multipolarity, power politics, and economic nationalism—first slowly, and now, increasingly it feels like, all at once.

At the same time, a frustrating passivity among ostensibly more responsible parties has allowed these trends to accelerate. In the U.S., Republican officials have repeatedly declined to challenge Trump’s lawlessness. In Europe, centrist parties have hesitated to take decisive action against the rise of the far right. In the headlines as of this writing, New York Governor Kathy Hochul seems unlikely to use her power to remove NYC Mayor Eric Adams, despite mounting scandals.

If the Wikimedia Foundation steps in to resolve the crisis on Hebrew Wikipedia, it would send a strong signal that it is doing something different. If it does not, it will be yet another case study in how liberal institutions are failing to act as the old consensus collapses.

When The Wikipedian ranked conservative agitation against Wikipedia as the #5 top Wikipedia story of 2024, tensions were already high. In early 2025, they’ve only intensified.

Last month, the Heritage Foundation—recently in the news for organizing Project 2025, Donald Trump’s blueprint for dismantling the federal bureaucracy—was revealed to be planning to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors it deemed to be “abusing their position.” As Slate’s Stephen Harrison put it, “Targeting Wikipedia editors personally, instead of debating their edits on the platform, marks a dangerous escalation.”

Then last week, the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters blog launched a broadside against Wikipedia’s handling of sources with the dramatic headline:

EXCLUSIVE: Wikipedia Effectively Blacklists ALL Right-Leaning Media; Smearing Trump, GOP and Conservatives

Echoing last summer’s controversy over Wikipedia’s partial deprecation of the Anti-Defamation League, this latest uproar marks another attempt to frame Wikipedia’s editorial processes as a left-wing conspiracy.

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NewsBusters offers little to no evidence of Wikipedia “smearing” right-wing figures—that isn’t really Wikipedia’s M.O. But the claim that Wikipedia favors left-leaning sources over right-leaning ones isn’t entirely baseless. The problem is that MRC’s “study”—at best a cursory skim of Wikipedia’s exhaustive catalog of source reliability—never bothers to ask why that might be.

The blog post, authored by a former Donald Trump campaign staffer, largely recites Wikipedia’s own explanation of how it evaluates sources from “generally reliable” to “blacklisted”. It leans heavily on the word blacklisted, using it 21 times—apparently to suggest Wikipedia editors are McCarthyites—while the more common designation deprecated (which means discouraged but not banned), appears just five times. In reality, a site can only be blacklisted for spam.

MRC also singles out former Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher, blaming her for (again) “blacklisting” right-leaning outlets. In reality, the WMF has no control over Wikipedia’s content, and its sourcing standards long predate Maher. Their real issue seems to be her progressive views, criticism of Trump, and later role as NPR’s CEO.

The MRC’s principal complaint is this:

Among the effectively blackballed media sources are Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Daily Mail, Newsmax, OANN and the Media Research Center. Meanwhile, leftist media like The Atlantic, Jacobin, Mother Jones, Pro-Publica, The Guardian and National Public Radio (NPR) are given the green light.

It’s worth pausing to note how Wikipedia defines a reliable source. Wikipedia prioritizes publications with strong editorial oversight, fact-checking, and a track record of caring about accuracy. Publications that engage in rigorous reporting and issue corrections are prioritized, while those known for misinformation, sensationalism, or political advocacy are treated with skepticism. Reliability is determined through community discussions, weighing independence and journalistic standards—not political alignment.

MRC also ignores several right-leaning publications that Wikipedia considers reliable. But these outlets differ from the ones it champions. Reason leans libertarian, while Forbes—which once used the slogan “capitalist tool”—and The Economist serve business audiences. Then there are newspapers with conservative-leaning editorial pages but independent reporting, like The Times and The Telegraph in the UK, The Globe and Mail and National Post in Canada, and The Wall Street Journal and The Hill in the U.S. Also getting the green light from Wikipedia: the late Weekly Standard, shuttered in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election.

MRC’s comparison overlooks a crucial distinction between ideological perspective and outright partisanship. Outlets like Mother Jones and The Guardian undeniably have a left-leaning perspective, but they aren’t partisan in the way that Newsmax, OANN, and the Media Research Center consistently advocate for right-wing candidates and causes. Mother Jones and The Guardian regularly publish investigative journalism that scrutinizes Democrats, whereas Breitbart and The Daily Caller rarely criticize Republicans—except from the right.

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Just in case you’re unfamiliar with why the MRC’s favored sources are deprecated, let’s do something MRC didn’t bother with—review the Wikipedia discussions that led to these decisions:

Breitbart News

Breitbart has been debated at least 16 times on Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources Noticeboard, including a major discussion in 2015. The site:

• Published a deceptively edited video falsely portraying Georgia official Shirley Sherrod as racist, leading to her wrongful dismissal

• Promoted misleading undercover videos about the activist group ACORN

• Ran a fabricated claim that Chuck Hagel had ties to a nonexistent group called “Friends of Hamas”

• Reported a false story about Paul Krugman filing for bankruptcy

• Confused U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch with someone else

• Was blacklisted for spam, not for content reliability

The Daily Caller

The Daily Caller has been debated at least eight times and was deprecated in a 2019 RfC for publishing “false or fabricated information”, including:

• Promoting a fake nude photo of AOC

• Falsely claiming a Miss Universe who supported Hillary Clinton was a “porn star”

• Denying it paid women to falsely accuse Sen. Bob Menendez of hiring sex workers

• Publishing deceptively edited footage misrepresenting an NPR executive’s remarks

• Employing multiple writers with ties to white supremacist groups

Daily Mail

A 2017 Wikipedia discussion resulted in the Daily Mail’s deprecation due to issues like:

• Paying $3 million in damages for falsely claiming Melania Trump worked as an escort

• Publishing a misleading story about J.K. Rowling’s comments on a church community

• Running a false report about a Nigerian hotel selling human meat

• Promoting baseless claims that Facebook and WiFi cause cancer

• Facing multiple plagiarism accusations

Newsmax

• Pushing conspiracy theories questioning President Obama’s birthplace

• Settling a lawsuit with Smartmatic over false claims about the 2020 election

• Facing another lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for similar falsehoods

One America News Network

• Hiring Jack Posobiec, Pizzagate and Seth Rich murder conspiracy theorist

• Employing a host who spread false claims about Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg

• Pushing a fake robocall scandal about The Washington Post offering money to Roy Moore accusers

Media Research Center

A 2020 Wikipedia RfC found MRC unreliable due to:

• Not being a news organization, but a conservative think tank

• Providing cover for conspiracy theories, including birtherism and climate change denial

• Some argued MRC was useful for conservative opinion, but its history of misinformation led to its deprecation

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There is nothing new about the conservative movement criticizing the mainstream media. What is new is that Wikipedia has become so institutionally important that it now ranks alongside The New York Times as a bogeyman they feel compelled to discredit.

And the real problem isn’t that left-leaning media is untrustworthy—it’s that conservative media has never fully committed to journalism in the same way. Most of the sources MRC attacks as “leftist” are primarily focused on reporting, while many of the right-wing outlets it defends are commentary-driven. This has been a defining characteristic of conservative media for decades.

The MRC itself was founded in 1987, coinciding with the Reagan-era rollback of the equal-time rule, which fueled the rise of conservative talk radio—most notably Rush Limbaugh. Even National Review, the most storied conservative publication, has historically prioritized opinion over investigative reporting. While it has employed respected journalists like Tim Alberta and Robert Costa, each ultimately left for more traditional reporting outlets.

The journalistic achievements of the outlets MRC attacks far surpass those of its favored sources. ProPublica and The New York Times reported on life-and-death decisions made by medical workers during Hurricane Katrina. ProPublica’s Hannah Dreier won a Pulitzer for exposing how a misguided crackdown on MS-13 devastated Salvadoran immigrants on Long Island. Of course, it was also ProPublica that broke the Clarence Thomas-Harlan Crow scandal—so naturally, it must be in the tank for Democrats.

MRC’s analysis also lumps together explicitly progressive outlets like Mother Jones and Jacobin—which has itself been the subject of an ongoing Wikipedia RfC questioning its reliability—with publications that defy ideological characterization. The Atlantic, in particular, has long published conservative writers including former Republican administration staffers, though in recent years many of them have been Trump critics—enough to disqualify them as “real” conservatives in MRC’s view. Likewise, The Washington Post has long featured conservative voices on its op-ed pages—some of them even Trump-friendly. How many liberal columnists does the Media Research Center employ?

It isn’t necessary to defend the publications MRC disdains against all charges; they certainly do get things wrong. Wikipedia itself maintains pages explaining controversies involving The New York Times, CNN, and even liberal stalwart MSNBC. Any news consumer can cite the mainstream media’s missteps, many of them collected in Wikipedia’s Journalistic scandals category. What matters is whether a publication has a process for accountability, such as issuing corrections and engaging in fact-checking. An organization founded by a partisan to carry out partisan ends has little use for such things.

Finally, the journalism matters, too. For all their faults, mainstream and left-leaning media engage with a broad spectrum of issues beyond politics—reporting on science, business, culture, and global affairs—something conservative media outlets have chosen, despite so many opportunities over decades, not to do.

In June 2010, The Wikipedian covered an intriguing development in the world of Wikipedia: the creation of a new professional role for a volunteer editor at the British Museum in London—the Wikipedian in Residence. Borrowing from the artist-in-residence concept, this position aimed to bridge the gap between traditional institutions and the digital world, sharing knowledge locked away in their musty halls with the vast virtual repository of Wikipedia.

What began as an experiment has since evolved into a formal role—you know, a job—and a vocation for many. Fifteen years later, over 200 Wikimedians1 in Residence (WiRs) have been embedded at cultural institutions worldwide, collectively known as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).

Wikimedians in Residence have helped create and expand content from archaeology to Picasso, shared collections of the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, and uploaded millions of videos, sound recordings, and photographs. The relationship is symbiotic: as GLAM institutions contribute content, they increase their visibility, bring in new visitors, and even win new donors.

The WiR’s Lament

Yet all is not well in GLAM world. A new report by Smithsonian Wikimedian at large Andrew Lih titled “GLAM Contributor Study Initiative” currently circulating at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) details frustrations by professional WiRs, whose work has long been undermined by underfunding and minimal institutional support. That its abbreviation is “CSI” is lost on no one.

Even the CSI report only hints at a larger challenge: a lack of job security or career pathways. As the WiR position developed from the bottom up, it has always remained an informal designation. Most are on short-term contracts that must be renewed year-to-year, and sometimes require them to fundraise for their own position. While WMF has a dedicated GLAM team, its capacity is limited, given its small size and emphasis on partnerships over technical skills.

The resourcefulness of the WiR should be praised—but they shouldn’t have to do it alone. Without proper institutional backing, the WiR role remains precarious. And that’s never been as true as it has been for, oh, about the last two weeks, as WiRs2 and their institutional colleagues face a near-future defined by what could be the most hostile environment for government workers in living memory.

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Boulevard of Broken Tools

The current crisis has its roots in late 2022, when WiRs discovered that the very software tools they relied on to measure the impact of their work had degraded. Utilities to track how often images were used on Commons or monitor traffic to specific categories had been critical to keeping institutional partners informed about the value of their contributions. Without reliable metrics, it becomes more difficult for many to justify their next year’s grants.

These tools, built in Wikipedia’s early days by volunteer developers like Magnus Manske—a legend for writing the MediaWiki software still used by Wikipedia today—have become increasingly unmaintained and unreliable. Herein lies a microcosm of a larger problem: the Wikimedia movement’s reliance on sometimes a single individual volunteer to support critical processes. When those volunteers move on, the process may simply come to a halt.

Consider Pattypan, an open-source tool responsible for nearly 1.9 million images on Wikimedia Commons. Despite being the only one-click, user-friendly tool for mass uploading of images, it’s no longer maintained, and can only accept files in Microsoft Excel’s pre-2007 XLS format, among other technical limitations. You shouldn’t have to be a software developer to be a Wikimedian in Residence.

But the problem isn’t just outdated tools—institutional prerogatives sometimes stand in the way of helping them do their job as well.

Take the Wiki Commons Query Service (WCQS). It allows users to ask detailed queries like, “Show me all images of castles in Europe in cities with populations over 500,000”, or “Show me the most popular images of extinct animals”. Yet when it debuted in 2023, it launched behind an authentication wall, making it essentially unusable for the public or GLAM partners outside the Wikimedia ecosystem3. Imagine having to login to Wikipedia just to read its articles. Two years later, there is still no release criteria nor support for developers. What’s the point of building great products if your audience can’t use them?

These are not mere inconveniences: these impediments directly affect high-value WiR partnerships the WMF should be supporting, such as bulk uploading utilities, advancing the query service, or providing tools to measure impact.

We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now

And this is all before considering, ahem, the larger institutional landscape. The problem is no longer merely technical, or institutional. Ironically, it’s increasingly cultural as well.

Of course The Wikipedian is referring to the havoc being wrought across the federal workforce by world’s richest edgelord Elon Musk—no friend of Wikipedia’s—and his merry band of post-adolescents. Some GLAM institutions, like the National Gallery of Art and National Archives, are directly federally funded, and now increasingly imperiled. Would you be surprised if they were ransacked tomorrow? Many non-federal U.S. institutions also receive grants, the likes of which the new Trump administration has already made moves to block.

What’s more, many GLAM projects focus on underrepresented minority populations and trailblazing women—which obviously smacks of DEI, making any such initiative a prime target for harassment and elimination.

In a context where WiRs are often dependent on irregular grants and work occurs at federal institutions, it’s not too alarmist to speculate whether the combination of benign neglect and malign intent threatens the survival of this important role.

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The Fragile

The Wikimedian in Residence went from experiment to cornerstone, yet WiRs face an uncertain future marked by underfunding, broken tools, and a lack of institutional support. Outdated systems, short-term contracts, and now the shifting political winds threaten the viability of their work.

WMF’s mission is all about promoting open knowledge, and WiR-led collaborations with the world’s top institutions represent among the clearest expressions of that goal. But when you look at how financial commitments speak to actual priorities, the revealed preference is striking. It’s time for WMF to stop paying lip service to its commitment to free knowledge and start actually supporting the people who make cultural knowledge freely available.

The CSI report is too polite to ask whether the Wikimedia Foundation really cares about their work, but The Wikipedian isn’t. Does it?

In 2024, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement once again grappled with local debates, global tensions, outside agitators, and relentless technological change. It was a year of high-stakes legal battles, internal power struggles, genuine reform efforts, and bad-faith critiques, all seeking to shape Wikipedia’s future and, ultimately, the way we understand our world.

Shall we?

10. Gender Gap Milestone Passed, Surpassed

Wikipedia editors have long sought to close the gender gap in both contributors and content. Among the sorest of spots: its biographies, of which only 15.53% were about women on the English Wikipedia when first measured in 2015. In mid-December 2024, the number tipped over 20% for the first time. This milestone was achieved through nearly a decade of effort by WikiProject Women in Red and countless contributors worldwide. And, yet by the time it was announced, it was almost over. Wikipedia stops for no man—or woman—and by late December the percentage had fallen below the threshold (18.9% as of publication time).

9. Politician’s Edits Follow COI Rule, Break Law

In late summer Portland, Oregon city councilor and then-mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez landed himself in hot water by using $6,400 in taxpayer funds to hire an outside firm to propose a series of changes on his Wikipedia page. Politicians meddling with their own Wikipedia articles is a tale as old as time, but this one was different. Gonzalez’s team actually followed Wikipedia’s guidelines, but for some reason decided to pay for it with public funds, was found to have violated campaign finance rules, and subsequently fined. Gonzalez went on to lose the election. However, given the length of the “Controversies” section on his Wikipedia page, this was probably not the only reason. Nevertheless... progress?

8. Digital Preservation Takes an L

If you’re familiar with the Internet Archive (IA), it’s probably for its popular Wayback Machine, a tool widely used on Wikipedia to preserve defunct web pages. Another IA project, the Open Library, lets users borrow digitized books based on physical copies it owns. But the IA started making trouble for itself in 2020 when, during pandemic closures of IRL libraries, the Open Library lifted its one-to-one lending limit, allowing unlimited digital borrowing of the same book.

Publishers sued, claiming this violated copyright law. In 2023, courts ruled against the IA in Hachette v. Internet Archive and, after a long-held breath, the Second Circuit upheld the decision this September. Facing slim prospects at the Supreme Court, the IA declined to appeal and removed over 500,000 books from its collection. Though the Wayback Machine is unaffected, the ruling limits resources for Wikipedia editors and threatens broader digital preservation efforts, which is hard to read as anything but a setback for free and open knowledge.

7. Will U4C Make Editors Behave Better?

An internet-famous web comic posits that anonymity on the web can turn even normal people into jerks. Sadly, Wikipedia is not immune. Harassment and toxicity have been a persistent issue, especially as significant gaps in behavioral policies continue to exist across Wikimedia projects. To set a global standard for behavior, several years ago the WMF Board approved a Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC), leading to this year’s launch of the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C).

Designed to handle serious misconduct and systemic issues while complementing local processes, the rollout hasn’t been without skepticism. Some fear the U4C might interfere too much with how local communities manage themselves, while others are concerned about mediating cultural differences across the Wikimedia movement. As of this writing, the U4C has completed only two cases. This partly reflects its narrow mandate and cautious approach, but also the reality that meaningful conclusions are still years away.

6. A Wikidata Divided

If Wikipedia is meant to be read by humans, then Wikidata is meant to be read by computers. This collaboratively-edited knowledge base of structured data has arguably been the Wikimedia movement’s unsung hero over the past decade. And with nearly 115 million items—compared to Wikipedia’s (almost) 7 million articles—maintenance has become a bit of a headache. Still a good problem, right?

To ease infrastructure strain, WikiCite, a massive bibliographic metadata effort accounting for a full third of all Wikidata items, was hived off from the rest of Wikidata. The split reduced server pressure and improved reliability, solving the immediate problem. However, users now face the added burden of querying Wikidata and WikiCite separately, effectively doubling their workload. Some users worry the fix is only temporary, and that bigger issues with how Wikidata handles growth have just been kicked down the road.

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5. Standing Athwart Wikipedia, Yelling Stop

Criticism of Wikipedia from conservative quarters is nothing new, but in 2024 these attacks became more insistent and better coordinated. In June, the Manhattan Institute released a study alleging systematic bias in the assessed sentiment of language describing conservative topics. Pirate Wires, an upstart newsletter with ties to techno-billionaire Peter Thiel, ran a series of polemics with titles like “How Wikipedia Launders Regime Propaganda”. Unrepentant poster Elon Musk revived his October 2023 offer of $1 billion to rename the platform “Dickipedia”—while personally promoting the nickname “Wokepedia”—and urging his followers to halt their donations.

Adding fuel to the fire, estranged Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger enjoyed rising celebrity among right-wing critics interested his long-standing claims that Wikipedia has abandoned its commitment to neutrality. What’s more, allies of authoritarian leaders like India’s Narendra Modi seized on these narratives, leveraging them to bolster claims of Western bias. While conservatives have succeeded in building alternative institutions in other fields, various efforts to stand up a Wikipedia rival—and Sanger has tried more than once—have never gained traction. There’s a deeper story to be told about why the MAGA movement is unlikely to develop a respected encyclopedia. For now, Wikipedia remains in the crosshairs of an increasingly polarized world.

4. Board Rejection Derails Movement Strategy

In June, a teetering shoe finally dropped when the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Board of Trustees dealt a major setback to the Movement Strategy process by declining to ratify the Movement Charter. This ambitious document, nearly a decade in the making, ostensibly aimed to establish a more equitable governance structure through the creation of a Global Council to oversee resources, strategy, and accountability. But those watching closely could see it coming: many felt the Movement Charter Drafting Committee’s (MCDC) process lacked transparency, community representation, and adequate time to review drafts. Others even saw it as a “power grab by the affiliates”.

In its place, the Board offered its own vague suggestion of WMF-led pilot programs, which may never see the light of day. In a parting shot, the MCDC, which dissolved in August, published an open letter describing “feedback loops” that “were never concluded” and alluding to “different stakeholders” who “kept trying to intervene”. What happens next isn’t clear, but one thing is: the WMF has no intention of permitting the establishment of a rival power center.

3. Wikipedia Faces Charges of Anti-Israel Bias

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict once again tested Wikipedia’s ability to reconcile conflicting narratives. Amid the continuing Gaza invasion, deepening humanitarian crisis, and Israel’s escalating hostilities with Hezbollah and Iran, Wikipedia editors grappled with a nearly impossible task.

Early in the year, the World Jewish Congress released a scathing report accusing Wikipedia of selectively enforcing its own rules. The controversy deepened when Wikipedia downgraded the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a source, citing concerns about its reliability. And it reached a boiling point when editors reached a consensus to rename the article formerly titled “Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza” to Gaza genocide. Supporters prevailed by citing numerous scholars and human rights reports, but even relying on these sources drew criticism as systemic bias.

Wikipedia’s global reach magnifies its role as a battleground for competing worldviews. Sometimes, compromise isn’t an option, and tough judgment calls must be made. But those on the losing end are unlikely to forget anytime soon.

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2. Will AI Prove to Be Catalyst or Catastrophe?

As 2024 ends, Wikipedia finds itself both crucial to and contested by the rise of artificial intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude rely heavily on Wikipedia for training and up-to-date answers, underscoring Wikipedia’s cornerstone position in the digital infosphere.

And yet, questions about AI’s impact on Wikipedia’s future abound. Will it draw traffic away from the site? Could it discourage potential editors from joining? WMF leaders remain optimistic, noting that traffic remains steady—at worst, its growth has slowed—and emphasizing AI’s potential to support, rather than replace, Wikipedia’s volunteer community.

To be sure, it’s possible to describe a long-term future where consumer over-reliance on AI could kill the golden goose that underpins its own success. But so long as the computational velocity of AI fails to surpass the value of human judgment, Wikipedia will survive. And the more people use AI, the more important Wikipedia will be. The challenge ahead is not survival but how Wikipedia evolves to thrive in an AI-driven world.

1. India Pressure Triggers Editor Protest

The most consequential news story of 2024—in a year full of contenders—is the potential implications of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) intensified efforts to control Wikipedia, a platform relied upon by more than a billion Indian citizens.

In a major lawsuit brought by a pro-BJP news agency, the Delhi High Court demanded the Wikimedia Foundation disclose volunteer editors’ identities or face a nationwide block. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s protections under India’s IT Act faced regulatory scrutiny, raising the possibility of Wikipedia losing its protections as a platform—an alarming precedent for online free speech.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s decision to comply with some of the court’s demands—removing disputed content and disclosing editor identities under sealed cover—sparked outrage from Wikipedia’s global community. Many saw this as a retreat from the WMF’s past resistance to authoritarian pressures, such as defying censorship demands in Russia and China. Volunteer editors warned that compromising anonymity could deter contributors from editing politically sensitive topics, and nearly 1,400 signed an open letter in protest.

India’s actions—and the WMF’s response—serve as a stark warning for other democracies. The once and future President Trump has repeatedly threatened U.S. media outlets, and ABC News’s decision to surrender in a winnable defamation case has been especially chilling. If U.S. courts start compelling similar disclosures, Wikipedia could face legal and financial threats like never before. What’s happening in India may foreshadow similar battles closer to home.

The Thrilling Conclusion

In 2024, Wikipedia faced some of its toughest challenges yet, centering on three recurring struggles: keeping information reliable, managing internal conflicts, and resisting outside pressures. Legal battles, like India’s crackdown on editor anonymity and the Internet Archive’s defeat, showed how vulnerable free knowledge can be. Governance fights like the rejection of the Movement Charter exposed deep rifts in how Wikipedia is run. Meanwhile, rising political attacks and the rapid advance of AI left the platform caught between defending its mission and staying relevant in a changing world. If this year brought chaos and controversy, just imagine what 2025 might have in store.

Institutions in media, business, law, and international NGOs have repeatedly bowed to pressure from hostile governments and populist figures, at times even enthusiastically embracing it. Jeff Bezos’ unconvincing defense of the Washington Post’s no-endorsement decision, followed by his obsequious congratulations to a victorious Trump, is just the most embarrassingly transparent recent example.

As a global NGO, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has an admirable track record of doing the opposite. Wikipedia has been blocked and unblocked in Turkey, restricted in mainland China for nearly a decade, and has been fined by Russia time and time again.* Each time, the Foundation has stood firm.

Now, the WMF faces a new test. It is one with immediate consequences for a few specific editors, and potentially lasting implications for all contributors—not to mention for Wikipedia’s unique role as a defender of free knowledge. Wikipedia has been here before, but this challenge comes at a precarious moment. More troubling, this time the Foundation has signaled it may buckle under pressure.

BJP vs. WMF

In the decade since he first ascended to power, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been widely criticized for restricting free speech, polarizing the nation along religious lines, and undermining the country’s democratic institutions. Wikipedia editors have documented this across a great many articles. The BJP recognizes Wikipedia’s influence and has responded in kind, first by aligning with right-wing critics of Wikipedia, and now pursuing legal action against it.

Section 79 of India’s Information Technology Act, similar to Section 230 in the U.S., protects “intermediaries” (platforms) from liability for user-generated content. The BJP is seeking to redefine Wikipedia as a “publisher” not protected by safe harbor statutes, both through an official inquiry by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and unofficially via lawsuit by BJP-aligned news agency Asian News International (ANI), which is suing three anonymous Wikipedia editors for defamation.

The WMF initially resisted ANI’s demands on the moral grounds of Wikipedia’s commitment to protecting user privacy and on the legal grounds of its intermediary status under Section 79. ANI has pressed its advantage, seeking contempt charges as the WMF first slow-walked its cooperation. And when Wikipedians created a new article about the case itself, “Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation”, the Delhi High Court declared it to be “interference” and ordered its removal within 36 hours.

With Jimmy Wales’ assent, the WMF removed and locked the page. As unhappy as Wikipedians were about it, blocking content can be temporary. If the Foundation reveals these editors’ identities, this is a decision it can never reverse.

In a recent court proceeding, WMF’s legal team offered a supposed middle path, proposing it take the unusual step of serving summons to the editors itself, thereby revealing their identities only to the court, not the wider public. Wikipedians, however, do not see this as a compromise—it’s capitulation. Last week, Wikipedia editors published an open letter to the Foundation, urging it to protect its volunteers’ privacy regardless of the outcome. It reads in part:

[W]e call upon the Foundation to prioritize the safety and well being of volunteers, even if it comes with a risk of legal action against the Foundation, or other costs. Any other action risks having a chilling effect on the work of volunteers … and only makes it more likely that such pressure will be exerted in future. In short, it jeopardizes the future of our shared project.

As of publication time, the petition has more than 800 signatories, including some of Wikipedia’s most active editors. The Foundation has yet to respond.

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The Cost of Compliance vs. the Cost of Defiance

The WMF is undeniably in a difficult position. If it complies with the court order and reveals these editors’ identities, even privately to Indian authorities, it risks shattering the trust it has built with its volunteer base over more than 20 years. The right to edit Wikipedia anonymously is a core community value, one explicitly supported by WMF policy, and for precisely the reasons that matter here. Wikipedia maintains a “List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia”; if WMF itself plays a role in adding to it, the trust of its editor community under current leadership would be badly damaged, perhaps even lost for good.

And the consequences would not end with this case. Compliance may discourage contributions from editors worldwide, not just those under authoritarian rule. WMF submission could encourage other governments to make similar demands, putting Wikipedia in an untenable position and reducing its influence where free knowledge is needed most. In the wake of the U.S. election, many American editors are likely wondering whether they are at risk, too.

It’s worth acknowledging that the Foundation occasionally cooperates with subpoenas for serious matters involving threats of violence or child safety issues. Twice annually, it publishes a Transparency Report explaining such actions. However, acquiescence in this case would set a new precedent. Here there are no immediate threats—only political interests.

On the other hand, refusing to comply could lead to fines, sanctions, or even a total ban on Wikipedia in India. The repercussions could extend to other U.S.-based and international websites operating in the country. Given India’s status as the world’s most populous country and one of Wikipedia’s largest traffic sources, this would be a bitter pill to swallow. But there is reason to doubt India would go that far. The BJP has long complained on Twitter about “anti-Hindu bias” on Wikipedia, to little effect. Wikipedia is a widely-used resource, and blocking it would likely cause domestic public backlash and further harm India’s reputation internationally. That Indians primarily edit and read the English Wikipedia would make such a move more relevant to Wikipedia’s primarily Western audience.

How is This Even Close?

For now, the Wikimedia Foundation’s limited public response surely owes to legal and PR constraints. Consider, openly defying the High Court could provoke further sanctions and perhaps even punitive new laws. But its silence has done little to reassure Wikipedians.

The WMF faces an unenviable choice between complying with a repressive regime and losing the support of its community on one hand, and standing firm on its beliefs and losing an enormous readership on the other. Yet Wikipedia’s core values point to an obvious answer. Wikipedia has far more to lose by yielding to authoritarian demands than by defending its principles.

Wikipedia has plenty of experience being blocked in the world’s largest country, which was the case until India’s population surpassed China’s in April 2023. If India takes the most drastic step, the Foundation can stand proud in its resolve. But if Wikipedia surrenders now, this decision may go down as the latest example of the submission of truth and justice to illegitimate power in an era of emboldened tyrants—one from which its reputation may never recover.

*An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified WMF as the entity fined by Russia for “more money than actually exists in the entire world”. In fact, this was Google. The Wikipedian regrets the error.

These complaints might be easily shrugged off if not for Wikipedia’s own claim to neutrality. The second of Wikipedia’s five pillars is: “Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view”. Like The New York Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”) or CNN (“The most trusted name in news”) it asks to be held to a higher standard. Therefore, it should be no surprise when someone tries to do just that.

While no one has recognized or criticized Wikipedia’s potential for bias as much as Wikipedians themselves, the loudest complaints tend to originate on the political right. With the U.S. presidential campaign now at full tilt, a trio of otherwise unrelated developments show how this plays out in real life: a debate about Kamala Harris’ record as Vice President, a study finding evidence of a left-liberal bias on Wikipedia, and a new manifesto about Wikipedia’s purpose.

Czar Wars

Less than a week after President Biden tapped out of the 2024 presidential election and Kamala Harris rotated in, a single Wikipedia editor made a handful of edits to a little-viewed and seldom-edited article, “List of U.S. executive branch czars”. The fallout from this addition is still unfolding:

The archaic Russian title of “czar” has long been used for executive branch appointees managing policy areas not overseen by existing federal agencies. Starting with “energy czar” during the U.S. oil crisis of the 1970s and reemerging as “drug czar” under Reagan, titles such as “AIDS czar”, “cybersecurity czar”, and even “democracy czar” (figure that one out) have proliferated, typically for hot-button issues where the president must be seen taking some kind of action.

In the spring of 2021, amid a surge of migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border, Biden tasked Harris with working with Central American countries to “address the root causes of migration”. While the White House never used the phrase “border czar”, a few prominent outlets like Axios did. Harris never seemed to give the issue her full attention, and worse, gave a bad interview about it, so once she became the new nominee Republicans made it a key line of attack against her candidacy.

Within a few hours of Harris’ addition to the “List of czars” page, her name was removed and added back several times by editors with little to no editing history, then conservative writers and influencers complained on X / Twitter, and a big debate kicked off on the talk page. Meanwhile, the page was frozen in the status quo ante, angering some who saw its omission as “partisan hackery”—especially as page views temporarily exploded by 6,700%.

So… was Harris the border czar? What is a border czar, anyway? There has never been any U.S. government office with the title of “czar”. It’s insider jargon, an invention of the media, never intended to be interrogated like this. Does it matter that the phrase was not widely used at the time? Were media sources wrong to use it then? Are recent corrections just the liberal media doing Harris a solid?

It turns out that either a) the answers are not so simple, or b) hairs can be endlessly split to the point of absurdity. As difficult as consensus can be to obtain when political advantage is at stake, Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, and especially its prohibition against “POV forks”, forces editors to decide if these terms are plain facts or political spin, a ridiculous argument or serious business.

The pro-mention editors have a point that some reliable sources used the phrase “border czar”, which fits the article’s criteria, however their intellectual curiosity ends there. Mention skeptics have a point that the term was never used by the administration, that media usage was inconsistent and infrequent, and her remit did not entail an active role in border security.

As of this writing, the matter has not been definitively settled, but it seems plausible a “disputed mention” will be included. The controversy over her title belongs somewhere on Wikipedia, right? As a matter of fact, it already is: it’s explained quite clearly in Wikipedia’s biographical entry about Kamala Harris.

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First We Take Manhattan

Earlier this summer, a second cousin of this argument made the rounds when a conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, published a study by a freelance researcher answering in the affirmative the question it posed: “Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?”

By scraping Wikipedia for right-leaning and left-leaning topics and performing an AI-assisted sentiment analysis of words in close proximity to each, the author showed a “mild-to-moderate” tendency to associate right-leaning topics with negative sentiments and left-leaning topics with positive sentiments.

What are some examples of this bias? Unfortunately, you won’t find that in this purely quantitative survey. What’s more, the freely downloadable data set (credit to the author for making it available) consists of literally hundreds of thousands of isolated passages, separated from their original context, and is simply not a useful starting point for a qualitative review. What the results actually mean—assuming they’re even correct—is thus a matter of speculation.

The steel man version of this argument is probably that left-leaning editors are placing disproportionate emphasis on controversies involving conservatives. But an equally plausible reading is that Wikipedia is describing things in proportion, and conservatives tend to frame their issues in negative terms. If one considers the campaigns of the respective presidential candidates, is that so hard to believe?

Other studies focused on Wikipedia’s political tendencies have found more nuanced results. An almost identically named paper from 2012, “Is Wikipedia Biased?” in the American Economic Review, suggested that Wikipedia had an observable Democratic lean in its earlier days, but as it has expanded, its articles “appear to be centered close to a middle point on average.”

And later research by the same authors has also demonstrated that Wikipedia editors who focus on political topics tend to become less polarized over time—something that absolutely cannot be said for that other battleground in the war of ideas, social media. Given Wikipedia’s stated goal of neutrality, its consensus requirement, and its anyone-can-edit ethos, that isn’t so hard to believe, either.

Here again, one sees the tendency of conservative critics to halt their inquiry at a level of analysis that raises questions, but doesn’t wait around for the actual answers. They dig until they hit something solid, and announce they’ve hit treasure—without checking first to see if it’s actually a rock.

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Right Wrongs, Wrong Reason?

“We are not here to right great wrongs” is a phrase familiar to Wikipedians, often coming up in heated disputes among editors. In concept it derives from the “What Wikipedia is not” policy, but specifically comes from an explanatory essay about “Tendentious editing” and is referred to in shorthand as “RGW”.

Like “Play it again, Sam” and “E.T. phone home”, this phrase never appears in its most memorable form in the original source. Rather, it says:

Wikipedia is a popular site, and its articles often appear high in search engine rankings. You might think that Wikipedia is a great place to set the record straight and right great wrongs, but that is absolutely not the case.

The point is that Wikipedia exists to accurately record what “has already been sorted in the real world”, and leave the “novel connections and statements” to reliable sources.

Earlier this month, a new and seemingly contradictory essay appeared: “We are absolutely here to right great wrongs”. It argues:

True neutrality is neither passive nor indifferent. It is an active commitment to providing an inclusive portrayal of the world, which involves addressing the wrongs that have shaped our history and continue to influence our present.

It is not exactly an argument against RGW, but it does relocate the emphasis from process to outcome. It considers Wikipedia’s oft-quoted mission statement of providing “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” and asks: to what end? In this way it suggests Wikipedia’s process-minded editors and administrators may not be pursuing their own dearly-held assumptions to their logical ends.

This essay does aim to provide answers, which focus on progressive concerns and contain strongly left-coded rhetoric. It argues the free spread of knowledge is meant to support “marginalized groups”, call out “historical underrepresentation”, and critique “economic inequality”. It reads like a Port Huron Statement for Wikipedia.

This interpretation of Wikipedia’s mission is not at all implausible.

In fact, Wikipedia’s mission is stated in terms of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of positive liberty, or the “freedom to”, as in the freedom to become self-actualized. This contrasts with the concept of negative liberty, or “freedom from”, as in freedom from coercion. The former tends to be more associated with a liberal-left perspective, and the latter with a conservative-right perspective.

But the essay itself has been met with skepticism, both on the essay’s talk page and in a popular Facebook group for Wikipedia topics. It’s worth noting that none of these editors object to the political viewpoints espoused in the essay, only how Wikipedia should consider them. They point out that RGW does not call on editors to overlook injustices, merely to “wait until it’s been reported by reliable sources”, and Wikipedia would be less effective if widely viewed as an ideological or partisan instrument.

Undoubtedly, some critics already do see it this way, and could make a case that the very existence of this essay proves there is a liberal bias on Wikipedia. On the other hand, a Wikipedia supporter could say that editors’ defense of RGW suggests the site’s left-leaning tendencies are tempered by other values.

The stakes of this year’s U.S. presidential election may be higher than any other in living memory, and Wikipedia’s role in shaping perceptions may be greater than any election since its founding. Editors, readers, researchers, and commentators will continue to scrutinize it for bias, not to mention accuracy and proportionality. All that’s certain is Wikipedia will take its role very seriously.

The annual Wikimania conference took place last week in Katowice, Poland. This marked the 18th gathering since its 2005 debut in Frankfurt and the second since COVID-19 forced cancellation in 2020. It also marked The Wikipedian’s seventh attendance since 2012 in Washington, D.C., and first since the pandemic.

Katowice wasn’t the original location—Krakow was announced last year. When the chosen venue fell through, organizers optimized for the conference center over the city. In fact, the meeting space was very nice. And the nearby Spodek, a UFO-shaped arena, was memorable. But the rest of Poland’s 10th largest city, not so much. To quote Wikivoyage: “It’s not scenic, but has a rich industrial heritage.”

This year’s Wikimania had much in common with previous gatherings: bringing together Wikimedians from around the world to consider weighty topics, show off pet projects, and spend time with like-minded nerds. With over 2,300 participants onsite and online, it was among the largest in its history.

But it also differed in some ways. The Russian invasion of Ukraine cast a shadow, both in content and proximity. Generative AI was a hot topic, albeit with a less polarized, more practical perspective than a year ago. And with Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary just around the corner, this Wikimania also contemplated matters of generational succession and the community’s future.

Talkin’ ‘bout my generation

The future of Wikimedia was the theme of a “fireside chat” with Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) executives Maryana Iskander (CEO), Lisa Seitz-Gruwell (Chief Advancement Officer), and Selena Deckelmann (Chief Product & Tech Officer). Specifically: forestalling technological obsolescence, attracting young people to the movement, and managing the WMF–community relationship.

The latter was a topic Iskander had briefly addressed at the opening ceremony the day before, where some were disappointed by brief remarks she made seeming to gloss over disagreements about the long-gestating Movement Strategy initiative. Initially envisioned as a collective future plan, it has devolved into something more like a power-sharing agreement between the WMF and Wikimedia community. For years, the WMF let volunteers shoulder most of the work, only to reject the proffered draft during the community’s ratification vote last month. [Update, 8/19: The draft was rejected by WMF trustees, not the executive team or staff.]

Generative AI was addressed as a matter for potential future concern. Seitz-Gruwell raised the question about whether internet users might accept AI chatbot answers as a suitable replacement for Google searches, which send Wikipedia a majority of its traffic. Deckelmann emphasized the importance of Wikipedia as a trusted destination and counterpoint to low-quality web content—which apparently has been christened “slop”, i.e., the AI equivalent of spam.

The executives also touched on the aging of Wikipedia’s original contributor base and the challenge of engaging younger generations, as did at least three other sessions. Iskander has placed new emphasis on a phrase from the WMF mission statement, “in perpetuity”, viz., keeping Wikimedia available for all, free in all senses, forever and ever. The phrase is described as a “mandate” on a new page on the Movement Strategy project about establishing “multi-generational pillars”, and it was all but an official catch phrase throughout the week.

Make no mistake, Wikipedia continues to attract new (and young) participants, but it’s almost a quarter century old and no one’s taking anything for granted. Case in point: this year’s Wikimedian of the Year, announced onstage by Jimmy Wales like every other year, is Hannah Clover, a Canadian Zoomer who is ex-Jehovah’s Witness, proudly ace, and prefers to edit on her smartphone.

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Life during wartime

The conference’s most sobering presentation was given by journalist Anton Protsiuk, updating attendees on the status of his fellow Ukrainian Wikimedians, as he did at the war’s start in 2022. He described power outages, unemployment, and displacement, and paid tribute to five contributors who had lost their lives. Protsiuk joined via Zoom, explaining that as a military-aged male, he was not allowed to travel outside the country. Wikipedia’s well-known gender gap also complicates their work, since it’s mostly men who contribute, and entirely men who are called to serve. Even so, Protsiuk said some conscripts still find time to contribute, a way to maintain their sanity amid the chaos. (Video, Slides)

Russia’s fracturing community

On the other side of the trenches, things are screwier. As recounted by WMF trustee Dr. Victoria Doronina, Putin’s years-long persecution of the Russian Wikipedia (see: The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2023 (Part 2) has partitioned the Russian wiki-encyclopedia scene. There are now multiple competing sites, including: Russian Wikipedia, the oldest and most prominent; Runiversalis, run by a former KGB agent and openly ideological; and Ruwiki, also pro-Putin and in fact launched only last year by the former head of Wikimedia Russia—who was globally banned from Wikimedia projects but makes up for it with a nice Kremlin salary and staff working in posh Moscow offices. The Russian Wikipedia remains the most popular, though editing and viewer activity has declined. (Video, Slides)

Others receiving votes

• In an opening ceremony that ran shorter than those at the Paris Olympics but longer than most Marvel movies, the organizers failed to learn from the mistakes of Kendall “L to the OG” Roy and OK’d an awkward white guy rap.

• Did you know Japanese comedy TV show hosts enjoy disruptively editing Wikipedia to amuse themselves and their audiences? Dr. Kitamura Sae, an English professor at Musashi University, called out several miscreants including the hosts of a variety show, Gokuraku Tombo KAKERUTV, who drew criticism for “Providing silly and sexy photos to Wikipedia!” Japanese Wikipedians reverted their changes quickly and the show apologized. But at least one photo made its way to the English Wikipedia. (Video, Slides)

• An innovative effort that’s come on the scene just this year is WikiPortraits Studio. Attempting to solve Wikipedia’s lack of quality photos—particularly headshots of the Notable—a group of volunteers including Andrew Lih and Jennifer 8. Lee brought a pop-up photo studio to Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, and other events drawing boldface (or “blue-linked” in Wiki parlance) names to take quality photos for Wikimedia projects. (Video, Slides)

• “Link rot” used to be a big problem on Wikipedia: you’d click on a link in the References section, only to dead end at a 404 page. What you probably haven’t noticed is that these dead links have since been resurrected via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a clever program called IAbot. Over the last 10 years, they’ve saved more than 20 million links. (Video, Slides)

• If you’ve seen a bar chart or line graph on Wikipedia, it was probably created in Graphs, an extension that was disabled following the discovery of an unfixable security vulnerability more than a year ago. Now comes Charts, which aims to do the same thing but without exposing users to being hacked. It should be available by the end of the year. (Video, Slides)

• Shaun Spalding, WMF’s lead counsel, appeared via recording to deliver an understated but compelling presentation: “Understanding and assisting with undisclosed paid editing (UPE) enforcement”. He detailed his office’s efforts to roll up and shut down networks of scammers and “black hat” consultants, usually based overseas, sometimes offering real services violating Wikipedia’s rules and sometimes just outright stealing from unwitting customers. Alas, it is not online, so you’ll have to take The Wikipedian’s word for it.

All in all, another successful Wikimania. The Wikimedia movement is in better shape than it thinks it is. Its introspection is a strength, more self-reflective than self-critical. Everyone agrees on the project goals, and differ only slightly in how to get there. No meteor is headed its way. Next year, the conference will head to Nairobi, followed by Paris—where these conversations will continue.

The decision made international news, driven in part by the complaints of ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was quoted in USA Today claiming that the ADL had been “silenced” and its research “marginalized”. Greenblatt went on Morning Joe to discuss the matter, which MSNBC promoted with the headline “‘It’s flat out wrong’: ADL head slams Wikipedia for saying org is unreliable source”.

The truth is a bit more complicated. The ADL was certainly rebuked, but the severity has been overstated, and what happens next is up to ADL leadership.

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On reliability

Wikipedia’s Reliable sources guideline doesn’t include a list of approved sources. Contested sources are debated at Reliable sources/Noticeboard, and the outcome of significant debates is listed on a page called Perennial sources.

For years, the ADL had been counted in the most trusted category of sources useful for verifying information included on the encyclopedia, though that’s not to say it had never been challenged. The ADL’s focus on combating antisemitism and hate groups is inherently controversial territory. An earlier RfC held that the ADL was “generally reliable”, but included this cautionary note:

Some editors consider the ADL a biased source for Israel/Palestine related topics that should be used with caution, if at all.

That admonition, an afterthought in the summer of 2020, took on new significance in the post-October 7 world, where the Hamas terrorist attacks and aggressive Israeli response have forced debate about Israel and Palestine upon many institutions who’d much rather avoid it.

But where university leadership faced difficult decisions in the face of student protests, and corporate leaders acted cautiously, Wikipedia is a very different thing: decisions are not made from the top down, but the bottom up. No one is asking Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander to make a statement, because she doesn’t control what Wikipedia says about the conflict. 

That role belongs to Wikipedia’s volunteer editing community, which is perpetually deciding how to address real-world controversies, and whose internal debates are simultaneously open to all and impenetrable to most.

What Wikipedia actually said

The recent RfC, which ran from early April until last week, racked up more than 650 separate comments and nearly 67,000 words. The question was this: given the ADL leadership’s tendency to blur the line between criticism of Israel’s policies with Israel’s right to exist, as well as its increasingly strident rhetoric, could the organization’s published work still be trusted?

Wikipedia’s eventual answer was far more nuanced than the headlines suggested. In fact, Wikipedia editors came to three separate conclusions: 

1. The ADL is generally reliable for topics unrelated to the Israel/Palestine conflict 

2. Reliability is unclear for topics related to antisemitism outside the context of Israel and Zionism

3. The ADL is generally unreliable regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict

Here’s how it appears on the Perennial sources page:

The RfC is too long to recommend reading, but the carefully-written summary by the editors who rendered the final decision is worth your time. 

Contrary to Greenblatt’s assertions, Wikipedia’s decision was made solely with concern for the accuracy of Wikipedia’s articles, and construed as narrowly as possible so as not to discard what’s valuable about their work. The ADL continues to be perfectly suitable for identifying antisemitic and extremist groups in the United States. Journalists covering the decision should have made this clearer.

What the media reported

Readers following the news coverage could be forgiven for thinking that Wikipedia had handed down an outright ban. The Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA), which had the story first, headlined their report: “ADL faces Wikipedia ban over reliability concerns on Israel, antisemitism”. CNN went even further: “Wikipedia now labels the top Jewish civil rights group as an unreliable source”.

But it wasn’t just the headlines. According to the JTA, “in a near consensus, dozens of Wikipedia editors … said they believe the ADL should not be cited for factual information on antisemitism” because it “tends to label legitimate criticism of Israel as antisemitism”. CNN followed suit, claiming Wikipedia “overwhelmingly said the ADL is an unreliable source on antisemitism”.

This is just wrong. The RfC closing statement states, the ADL “can roughly be taken as reliable on the topic of antisemitism”, save for topics involving Israel and Zionism. One can also review the mid-debate survey of editors, which shows a little more than half of editors leaning toward some form of reliability.

Another common error was overstating the downgrade. Three examples:

• JTA: The ADL “is now grouped together with the National Inquirer [sic], Newsmax, and Occupy Democrats as a source of propaganda or misinformation in the eyes of the online encyclopedia.”

• USA Today: “The decision … puts it in the same company as Russian state media and the National Inquirer [sic].”

• The Independent: “The decision … puts the organization on par with tabloids like the National Inquirer [sic] and right-wing outlets like Newsmax…”

To understand why this is wrong, it helps to understand that Wikipedia has multiple levels of source reliability:

As the color coding suggests, the first three categories apply to the ADL, depending on the topic. The fourth category is reserved for sources whose use is actually prohibited, including… National Enquirer, Newsmax, Occupy Democrats, and Sputnik. Any claim that the ADL is grouped with them is completely false.

Instead, the decision puts the ADL in an awkward group with publications like Huffington Post (subject of a 2020 RfC) and Rolling Stone (another 2020 RfC), which also have different designations based on content and context. Both are considered reliable for non-political topics, but the partisan lean of both sources has compromised their credibility, resulting in a similar Neapolitan swirl: 

The ADL is in rare company another way, too. Whereas the vast majority of sources used on Wikipedia are news or academic in nature, the ADL is just one of three advocacy organizations considered reliable in at least some circumstances, along with Amnesty International—which survived a similar RfC in 2022—and the Southern Poverty Law Center—which may face its own reckoning soon. 

For any organization, but especially a non-traditional “reliable source”, this status is hard-won, easily lost, and should never be taken for granted.

A moment for reflection

Wikipedia’s decision—and the wave of opinion pieces following—wrestle with the question: what kind of organization is the ADL? Is it a research-based organization that follows the facts where they lead, or is it an advocacy group pushing for specific policy outcomes? Wikipedia’s RfC, along with other reporting and commentary, suggests the ADL itself is divided on this question.

In the aftermath of the RfC, Jewish Studies professor James Loeffler told USA Today: “The problem is that there’s one message coming from the leadership and one coming from the research team. The leadership statements are much less disciplined and raise questions about exactly how rigorous their measurement is and their standards for defining antisemitic acts.”

The ADL is currently used as a source in more than 1,200 Wikipedia articles, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. But it’s very much in question whether the ADL will continue to be used with regularity—and without argument. 

Meanwhile, its research is cited by publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, with no questions about its methodology. Whether that will change is something Jonathan Greenblatt has more power over than any Wikipedia editor.

Why ITN is reluctant to cover Trump’s trials

With some hesitation, our survey concludes with a look into how Wikipedia’s “In the news” (ITN) feature has handled the many legal challenges facing the former U.S. president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee. Trump’s career has been forged in the courtroom as much as the boardroom or the voting precinct, and in fact Wikipedia has two separate articles on the subject: one about his “personal and business” legal affairs, and another “as president”.

None have been so newsworthy, and so vexing to ITN, as the four indictments which were handed down in the spring and summer of 2023. One might think indictments of a recent world leader on undeniably serious charges would be an easy call. But nothing is ever easy at ITN. To understand why ITN has been resistant to spotlighting Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy, we must understand two separate rules: one that fails to meet the moment, the other simply misapplied.

First let’s revisit the essay “How ITN works (and how it doesn’t)” and its section on which news stories are “disfavored”. One is “penultimate items in a sequence of events”, i.e. when a news story is only one stop along the way to a more final headline, it’s better to cover just the last item to avoid repetition. Indictments are certainly not the last event in a trial—not to mention Trump is constantly in and out of court—so editors quickly become tired of repetitive news items, and want to stop covering them. Which is, alas, a neat little microcosm of the conundrum journalists wrestle with covering Donald Trump in the first place.

The second is a section of the “Biography of living persons” policy—which requires giving the “greatest care and attention” to articles when individual reputations are on the line—known as “BLPCRIME”. One of its stipulations is that criminal charges against non-public figures are sometimes omitted, as Wikipedia observes the presumption of innocence found in the laws of many countries. For non-public figures, this approach makes sense. But sometimes it is applied to public figures, as if it was just a good rule of thumb.

Both arguments lead many ITN participants to a position of caution, sometimes expressed as: “we post convictions, not indictments”. So, how did Trump’s four indictments fare at ITN? Let’s find out:

Indictment one

The first of these debates occurred last March, when Trump was indicted in New York for falsifying business records—the Stormy Daniels case. BLPCRIME came up eight times. More, if you count typos: “How many times do we have to talk about WP:BPLCRIME in this space? Exhausting.” “It isn’t a violation of WP:BLPCRIME to say that an indictment of a former US president is newsworthy.” There were some good old U.S.-centrism complaints as well: “This is a worldwide news page, not a list of news about U.S. politics. I’m so tired of this american/western bias here”. And of course: “Oppose since when did we start posting indictments instead of convictions?” In reply, another editor wrote: “I mean, I know it’s not conventional, but this indictment strikes me as being uniquely consequential and newsworthy.” Nevertheless, 7,200 words later, a “slight majority for posting” was not considered consensus enough. No blurb.

Indictment two

In June came the more serious indictment in Florida for mishandling and refusing to return government documents to the National Archives. Opinions looked much the same: “Support. Historically significant; no former U.S. president has ever been criminally indicted on federal charges.” “Oppose For now. Post conviction.” “Support Unprecedented and the top story everywhere.” 9,100 words of debate later, the blurb was posted—without formal review. If an editor had performed a review and shared their findings publicly, they almost certainly would not have posted the blurb. But this time, supporters took the initiative, and opposers did not press the issue. Demands to pull it were issued, but ignored, and so it remained.

Indictment three

In August Trump was indicted in DC for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, arguably the most significant case because it focuses on Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. This time only 5,500 words of debate were needed to decide against posting it. Many sharp words were exchanged, but the result can be mostly summarized with this early comment: “Weak oppose While I can be convinced, this isn’t the first time he’s been indicted, and it feels somewhat unnecessary to post again.” Result: not posted.

Indictment four

Later that month Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges similar to the DC case. The nominating editor argued: “The most important of the four indictments in my view.” Others did not share this view: “Fortunately, this should be the last time that a Trump indictment is nominated. In fairness, the indictment is sprawling, but the legal issues of Trump have already been covered on ITN.” But does one blurb mean it had been covered sufficiently? Having read through so many ITN debates, I think it’s actually rather common for editors to confuse their own deliberation of whether to post something with it actually being posted. All the best intentions, just a misremembering borne of being too immersed in too many similar debates. The fourth indictment also fell short of consensus, and was not posted. 

Verdict

May it please the court of opinion, The Wikipedian finds, of four major criminal indictments of the former (and very much possibly the future) U.S. president, only one was deemed worthy of posting to ITN—and that one almost didn’t happen.

A postscript: later in August, Trump turned himself in to Georgia authorities and submitted to a mugshot—an event that by itself was national news. And so it was nominated at ITN, albeit apologetically: “I know many will oppose us becoming ‘Trumppedia’ but I think it’s worth taking a look at this story.” Three “opposes” and no “supports” later, the nomination was closed. The reviewing editor’s final comments: “I think we all know where this is going.”

Never change, ITN

Why must ITN be like this? The Wikipedian sees a few reasons why it is, and also why it is unlikely to change.

The first has to do with its structure. ITN struggles to define its ethos because it is so much unlike the rest of Wikipedia. Where editors working on regular Wikipedia articles have no maximum word count, ITN operates within very tight formatting restrictions. Where Wikipedia articles take the long view, covering a topic from its origins through the present, ITN must take a narrow view of some very weighty topics. Where Wikipedia has no deadline, ITN is nothing but deadlines: a few days to post a name to RD, a few hours to weigh in on the latest news—or maybe just a few minutes. Answer now, or the wrong thing might have forever happened.

In this view, ITN functions much less like a Wikipedia article and more like a subreddit—a highly dysfunctional one.

Second, a more cynical view: ITN is not an editorial operation. It’s a fight club. ITN may have started out as a place to post articles, but it has become a place to blow off steam from one’s regular editing. Unlike RfC discussions or Arbcom cases, there are no long-term stakes. Stressed out from arguing over something that matters? Why not drop in on ITN and throw a spanner in someone’s works. Even better if you have the opportunity to annoy someone who has a different set of interests, national pride, or political viewpoint than one’s own.

In this view, one might argue ITN does not struggle at all, in fact it’s very successful at providing opportunities to get in an argument.

Finally, consider it through the lens of whether ITN serves its readers well. As of this writing, the main page of Wikipedia receives nearly 5 million views each and every day. When those readers glance at the ITN box, they see news items that may have just occurred, or perhaps several days ago. They may learn about events they would never have heard about, or their eyes may glaze over. They may feel a spark of recognition at a news story they care about being so prominently featured, but probably not. Maybe the “fault” actually lies with the readers. There are too many of them from too many places with too many different points of reference for five or six bullet points to capture the news of the world in a way that is meaningful to everyone.

In this view, ITN didn’t break, instead the mission was always impossible. This one is probably the most cynical of all.

If anything is going to change—and it probably won’t, but let’s imagine—it might start with something called the “DICE standard”, as conceived by the editor behind the “How ITN works (and how it doesn’t)” essay. DICE stands for depth, impact, consequences, and encyclopedic suitability. Quoting from the essay, which still remains a public draft in the user’s account, editors should consider:

The length and depth of coverage itself

The number of unique articles about the topic

The frequency of updates about the topic

The types of news sources reporting the story

This seems like a reasonable place to start. Which some might say is exactly why ITN will never adopt it. Another possibility is that ITN could assimilate all this data and nothing could change: editors would still want to put their thumb on the scale, because the point is not making sound editorial judgments—the point is about exercising one’s power to restrict others from getting what they want.

There was a popular saying in software communities of an earlier generation: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. Typically this means a critical mass of aligned developers will sort out all the problems in a piece of code. ITN shows what happens when the crowd, in all of its wisdom, is not aligned. ITN doesn’t lack for eyes, but it does lack for vision.

Mass shootings in the United States

The question of whether “In the news” (ITN) is too U.S.-centric is most often visited upon in sports discussions, as we explored in part two, but it also figures into a much different and much uglier American phenomenon: mass shootings. While other countries have been victimized by their own spree killings and mass murders, sheer numbers foreclose any debate about whether the U.S. is sadly exceptional when it comes to gun violence. 

There’s a saying in journalism that “dog bites man” isn’t a story, but “man bites dog” is, meaning novelty is part of what makes something newsworthy. For many ITN contributors, article nominations about U.S. shootings have long passed into “dog bites man” territory. When it comes to the gruesome task of deciding which of these murders are significant enough to post, their level of exhaustion has been boiled down to a single phrase: “another day, another shooting”.

One of the phrase’s earliest recorded uses was in December 2012, in the aftermath of the especially horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. A selection of comments from the hours after it occurred reveals the weariness felt by editors even at this point: “Another day, another shooting. Right to bear arms strikes again.” “Indeed. This is a self-evident argument for repealing the Second Amendment.” “I don’t think this is a good time to argue politics.” “Yes. Never talk about gun control when it’s topical.”

The article was still posted, although it wasn’t always a sure thing. ITN editors tend to be cautious about recent events when limited information is available, especially when the subject matter is this appalling. On the afternoon of December 14, the Sandy Hook blurb was posted to the front page by one editor, then pulled within ten minutes by another. This sparked a fight; the pulling editor was swiftly brought before a dispute resolution board, though no action was taken. The blurb was updated and reposted. All of this inside of two hours, generating 4,800 words of debate. 

The 2014 Fort Hood shootings that killed four (including the gunman) and injured sixteen also yielded exhaustion before it yielded a result: “[P]erhaps if the US can go without a mass shooting for a month then ITN should post that”, one editor grumbled. Another lost their temper and provided a classic demonstration of Godwin’s Law: “[I]magine people saying it when Hitler invaded Russia-- ‘Oppose. Napoleon invaded Russia too, so this must not be a big deal.’”

Result: not posted.

A different matter was the Congressional baseball shooting in June 2017, where no one died, but Rep. Steve Scalise was badly wounded. Here there was a case to be made for novelty: “An assassination attempt against such a high-ranking politician with blatant political motivation is a very rare event. I’m baffled at people who say there’s nothing ‘interesting’ about it.”

Result: posted.

A year later, the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting resulted in 10 deaths and another invocation of “another day, another shooting”. The editor most associated with the phrase—in fact, the same editor who was the strongest supporter of The Boat Race—showed up quickly to offer this terse appraisal: “Oppose business as usual.” Another editor commented: “I find it quite interesting that school shootings in the US attract far more support along the lines of ‘this is dreadful! It must be posted!’ than bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan with far larger casualty totals.”

5,500 words later: not posted. 

2023 Nashville school shooting, seven dead, including the shooter? Not posted. 

2023 Allen, Texas mall shooting, nine dead, including the shooter? “Oppose routine event. Not even the first mass shooting in Texas this week.” Not posted. 

2023 Lewiston shootings, 18 dead in the initial spree? “I rarely support US mass shootings as they are about as common as rain. But this one looks really bad, even by American standards.” Posted. 

It’s unfortunate but hardly inexplicable: the higher the casualties, the higher the odds an incident will be posted. 

Another journalism saying comes to mind: “If it bleeds, it leads”. This pattern led one longtime ITN participant to create a grim shortcut called WP:MINIMUMDEATHS—mimicking in the style of shortcuts to Wikipedia policy pages—implying there is a guideline requiring a certain number of deaths before a blurb is approved. Calling to mind the old “rickrolling” prank, it brings you to a page announcing: “You were likely referred to this page because someone, either ironically or purposefully, used the WP:MINIMUMDEATHS shortcut as a rationale for a !vote or to make a point. Let’s be clear about one thing here: There is not a guideline for the ‘minimum death toll’ needed for such posting.”

The fake guideline is part of a real, and brilliant, Wikipedia essay called “How ITN works (and how it doesn’t)”, a labor of love by an editor with much invested in the ITN project. This section collects examples of past arguments—mostly the bad ones—attended by pitch black commentary. Take this assessment of accidental explosions: “Knowing death toll may not even be necessary if it’s obviously a major and unusual accident. Nevertheless, 17 is a good lower bound.” Or this rueful comparison of landslide accidents: “7 is enough in Norway. But 113 is not enough in Ethiopia.”

17 is also apparently the “magic number” for U.S. shootings, but it’s not just about the numbers. As the essay jokes-but-not-really: “[C]ircumstances surrounding any event, including a mass shooting in the U.S., must always be taken into account along with its death toll. Thus … 11 people shot in a mass shooting that was live-streamed and accompanied with a 180-page racist screed on an alt-right website will … be posted.”

ITN’s criteria asks readers to make judgments about what is newsworthy. Sometimes those judgments are too difficult to bear without jokes to keep your sanity.

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Henry Kissinger vs. Sandra Day O’Connor and Other Recent Deaths

On ITN, there are two possibilities for recently deceased persons to receive a front-page mention: a few may achieve “blurb” status, being listed among the top current stories, while many more merely rate inclusion in the “Recent Deaths” (RD) section just below it, just listing their names. Some, as we’ll see, don’t even get that.

As a brief visit to the very popular page Deaths in 2024 demonstrates, anywhere from one to two dozen notable people die every single day. Plus, one need not even be human to make the list: any “biological organism” is eligible. When not humans it’s usually race horses; most recently, Falbrav, just last week.

If ITN wasn’t careful, it could easily be overrun by its obituary section. Therefore, In the news/Recent deaths (ITNRD) rules try to put limits on which deaths rate a standalone blurb: “The death of major figures may merit a blurb. These cases are rare, and are usually posted on a sui generis basis” following discussion and consensus. The rest are relegated to the “Recent deaths” list, which rotates through a list of 6–7 of the most important from the last seven days. 

Who counts as a “major figure”?

When Sandra Day O’Connor passed away in late 2023, Wikipedia editors wrestled with the impact of her legacy. One view: “[S]he was not quite as influential as RBG”. Here again, concern about US-centrism: “Let’s not propose blurbs to American personalities for the simple fact of being American. There are almost 200 supreme courts in the world with their respective first female members”. More caution: “We don’t need two blurbs in a row being American politicians dying of old age.” O’Connor had to settle for the RD list.

And who was that other American politician? None other than Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State reviled by many on the left, who more or less sailed through. From one of his supporters, if you want to call it that: “Like him or hate him, a lot of world history surrounded him.”

Sometimes, being the first woman on the most powerful nation’s supreme court is not quite newsworthy enough. Sometimes being an accused war criminal is better.

Back to the question: who is considered a “major figure” for the purposes of ITNRD? Until a couple of years ago, the passage from the above-quoted rules included a subordinate clause defining said organisms as “transformative world leaders in their field”. But then a few years ago this distinctive clause was unilaterally removed, without discussion, yet editors have continued invoking it as if it remained. (Since there was no discussion, it probably should be restored.)

The vagaries of being “transformational” also came up when the pianist and composer André Previn died in 2019. A blurb was initially approved, then pulled from the main page on the basis of him not being a “major transformative world leader”. A cynical editor weighed in: “LOL - we went from ‘major transformative world leader’ to ‘Very well known in U.K.’ Quick, somebody start WP:LagerfeldEffect”. Another one channeled the same thought process: “LOL -- that was fast. TWO dead Germans in the box in just two weeks.”

Who was this dead German? They were referring to an ITN blurb about the fashion designer and icon Karl Lagerfeld, posted a few days earlier. It didn’t come easily, though: it took 5,600 words of discussion and three attempts for the blurb to finally be approved.

Meanwhile, some articles never make it to the front page RD listing at all, even when a blurb is not sought. This happens when the article nominated is just too embarrassing to post.

The article for British novelist A.S. Byatt was initially posted to RD following her passing in November, only to be pulled for low quality, especially for its over-reliance on quoted material. Soon after, questions were raised about potential copyright violations across multiple sections, adding unsightly warning flags which remain to this day. Although it did not return to the main page, this didn’t foreclose its listing on “Deaths in 2023”.

A similar outcome befell the article about singer Jimmy Buffett, who passed in September 2023. His biographical entry at the time also ran into that conflict between quality and significance: “Oppose solely on quality due to multiple unreferenced sections. RIP to a music legend.” The article was updated significantly, but not enough in time to meet ITN’s current standards. The nomination wasted away, and not even in Margaritaville.

A few years prior, TV personality Alan Thicke never made it to RD because the discussion got bogged down in a long debate about whether his filmography was well-referenced enough. Consensus was never reached. Thicke, one of America’s foremost “TV Dads” of the 1980s, was never in the news again.

All screenshots via Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA 4.0; mass shootings bubble chart by RCraig09, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Karl Lagerfeld photo by Christopher William Adach, CC-BY-SA 2.0; Henry Kissinger photo by U.S. Department of State, public domain

Recurring items and the Big Game

Notwithstanding the directive that “each event should be discussed on its own merits”, over time ITN participants have created a list of news stories that come up on a regular or semi-regular basis in hopes of avoiding having the same damn argument every time. The list is called “Recurring items”, or ITNR for short.

Events granted “recurring item” status are divided into several categories, including awards, discoveries, celestial events, and sports. 

Within the sports category, more than two dozen sports are guaranteed a front-page slot when championship time comes around. 

“Football (American)”—one of five listed sports called “football”—has just one allocated annual event. 

Of course it is the Super Bowl, and wouldn’t you know it, whether to include the Super Bowl is one of the earliest such items ITN had to figure out. The most frequent arguments on ITN often center on whether its content is too Western and especially U.S.-centric, or too defensive about its Western biases. And few things are as identifiably American as the Super Bowl.

ITN archives begin February 6, 2005, the same day as Super Bowl XXXIX. At this time ITN, still called “Current events”, already showed signs of it being an old argument. One participant begged: “Please just add this when the time comes”. But the next went the other way: “I don’t think American sporting events are sufficiently relevant to appear here. Just my opinion.” Nevertheless, it was posted with a compromise: listed below an item about the 2005 Thai general election:

But the matter was not settled. Two years later, on February 4, 2007, an editor asked why the Super Bowl wasn’t listed on the main page: “Since this is one of the largest sporting events around the world (at least TV wise), shouldn’t it be mentioned on the front page today? I think it should.” The first response: “I say no. The NFL is a national championship, in a sport that only has a following in one country … This is an event of local, rather than international significance.” The decision was still to post it.

Objections continued to be raised. In May 2013 an effort was made by ITN regulars to develop an “extremely conservative” list of “low controversy” recurring items, the Super Bowl among them. It was soon ratified and is in use to this day.

Only four years later, in the wake of Super Bowl LI—the one where the Patriots rallied for the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history—it still took 3,100 words of discussion to decide. “Oppose as a sports event of very little interest outside the country in which it is played”, went the first objection. “Trivial. The only interesting bit was the half-time show”, went another. Some of these opposes were surely deadpan humor, but certainly not all. It was posted anyway.

Fed up with the naysayers, pro-Super Bowl editors took the unusual step of proposing to remove the Super Bowl from ITNR. The idea was to settle this once and for all, and put as many editors on the record as possible supporting it. Not everyone got the point, and responded as if it was in fact genuine: “This is one of the biggest sporting events in the world. We’re not removing it. The fact that this is even being considered by anybody is a problem.” Which is exactly the response the nominating editor was going for; less than 4 hours later, precedent for posting the Super Bowl annually was re-established. And so it was never debated again. 

Until the following year: “This may be news in the States but it sure isn’t news anywhere else.”

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The Boat Race vs. March Madness

High-profile though it is, the Super Bowl is far from ITN’s most controversial sports-related topic. That honor goes to The Boat Race, a rowing competition between Cambridge and Oxford dating to the early 19th century. And its story at ITN is inextricable from another university-level sporting event: the NCAA Division I men’s (and women’s) basketball tournament.

The earliest recorded effort to post The Boat Race to ITN is found in April 2006. The proposed blurb was to be “Oxford won The Boat Race decisevely [sic] beating Cambridge in choppy Thames waters.” However, it was denied with the simple, uncontested argument that sports topics are “not ITN material”.

Two years passed without it being brought up again. Then in March 2009, it snuck through: “Oxford Boat Club defeats Cambridge Boat Club to win the 155th University Boat Race in London, England. (BBC)”. (Note, at this time ITN was featuring outbound links to news articles hosted outside Wikipedia, something it no longer does.) A month later, someone raised the idea of linking to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (only the men’s). In a show of personality that would never fly at ITN today, this discussion was given a rather David Foster Wallace-like headline: “Another one of those really, really long and tiring debates on sports; this one features a healthy mixture of basketball, baseball, association football, its American counterpart, rugby union, Gaelic football, horse racing, Aussie Rules, rowing, ice hockey... and The Da Vinci Code”.

By April 2010, the presumption against including sports stories had given way to a presumption in favor of only listing results from the “highest level of the sport”. On this basis the NCAA failed to make the cut this year, and spotty archives only confirm that the outcome of The Boat Race was up in the air for a while. Evidence against its posting, this comment: “I was tempted to nominate [The Boat Race], but if someone else had, I would have opposed because I think it’s of comparable significance to [the NCAA tournament].” Evidence for, a blurb exists in the archives: “Cambridge Boat Club defeats Oxford Boat Club to win the 156th University Boat Race in London, England. (BBC)”.

By the following April, The Boat Race had become a recurring joke. Its nomination went down again, and editors danced on its grave with a little light Anglophobia: “Toffs having a day out on the river isn’t newsworthy.” And: “What’s that you say, chap? A game of croquet before luncheon. Splendid, old chap, splendid!” Adding insult to injury, the NCAA tournament (still just the men’s) was posted, although it took 5,300 words of debate to get there.

For the next two years, thousands upon thousands of words of debate were necessary to deny both events. In 2013, The Boat Race wasn’t even nominated.

Then in April 2014, the tide began to turn, as it were. This time one editor nominated both The Boat Race and the NCAA championship and argued forcefully for each, using similar arguments: “This is not the ‘highest level’ of rowing, but is a race of high cultural significance.” This time, both succeeded.

In 2015, both made it through again, and so too did the NCAA women’s tournament, finally. Both were fully accepted as mainstays in the ITNR list, although The Boat Race remained an object of some mockery. From the comments prior to its posting in April 2021: “Oh no, not this again. Hooray, at last the Fens hit the front page!”

As recently as 2022 neither the NCAA tournament nor The Boat Race faced any opposition to their inclusion.

But in early 2023, something happened: a newly active ITN regular decided to nominate The Boat Race for removal from ITNR—the accepted list of recurring events—and The Boat Race haters came out in full force. The motion passed. Subsequent to the decision, the Boat Race could still be nominated for inclusion, but would no longer enjoy official sanction all but guaranteeing its listing. 

This time, the very persistence of the rowing competition’s supporters became a liability. That is to say, a perception had developed that ITN (and all of Wikipedia, really) had become immodestly influenced by British editors who had been too successful getting British topics in general and pub sports considered obscure by the rest of the world specifically—darts, snooker, hurling—all the way through the process. One editor summed it up: “All the focus tends to go to the project’s American bias, so it’s good that the British bias is getting some attention.”

A couple months later the NCAA tournament was posted with limited opposition, while The Boat Race sank like a stone. One cranky British editor particularly associated with The Boat Race’s cause snapped: “[I]t’s the relentless hatred that’s stopped me bothering. Fuck it, why bother? The ex-colonials win and the encyclopedia loses.”

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Even as the NCAA basketball tournament’s ITNR spot seems secure, and the Super Bowl’s opposition never amounted to much more than eye rolls, a similar competition appears to be no closer to acceptance at the beginning of 2024: the College Football Playoff National Championship.

No one is ever satisfied with American college football’s postseason, so the current game only replaced the hated BCS’s championship game in January 2015. The CFP championship game was nominated for ITN, but produced no consensus after more than 10,000 words of debate. 

Nor was it accepted in 2016. Also in 2017, no. In fact, The Boat Race’s chief proponent posted 17 comments in opposition, arguing that Americans having to “fight so hard to get this apparently so notable and so significant event onto ITN must demonstrate to them that at the very least that it’s utterly insigificant [sic] outside their own universe?” 

In 2018 it was a “weak consensus against”, then no in 2019, a no in 2020… wait, wait, a yes in 2020! Yes in 2020!! The editor responsible for deciding wrote: “Consensus has established posting for this year, and it won’t be pulled. Discussion as to whether to include in ITNR can take place there, now that it has been posted this once. That’s how ITNR works, not the other way around.” Although it was secondary to a meteorite:

In 2021: no. 2022: no. 2023: no.

The 2024 game was held last night. As of publication time, it looks like this one is also going to be: no.

We’ll get ‘em next year, guys.

All screenshots via Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Patrick Mahomes photo by All-Pro Reels, CC-BY-SA 2.0; The Boat Race logo via The Boat Race, all rights reserved; The Boat Race photo by Chris McKenna, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Murchison meteorite photo by Art Bromage / Basilicofresco, CC-BY-SA 3.0

5. Jimmy Wales Takes Another Step Back

To the general public, Jimmy Wales is the King of Wikipedia, but on Wikipedia his influence has receded over the years. In 2023 his standing within the community suffered a potentially irrecoverable setback.

In early April, Wales accused a respected administrator of promoting a long-banned paid editing company, on the basis of a report others later found dubious, and with absolutely no chill: “I have what seems to me a credible report that you have been recommending to people that they use WikiExperts. Is this true? … I am asking you because if so, then you definitely should not be an admin in English Wikipedia. If it is a lie, then fine. But please tell me the truth.”

Wales also didn’t realize the editor had been on a long hiatus after completing service on the Arbitration committee (“Arbcom”). Facing blowback and a potential Arbcom case, Wales finally posted a statement that was close enough to an apology for most, and showed he was serious by requesting that his administrative permissions be removed. His wish was granted, and an old, unused clause in Arbcom policy listing Wales as a one man appellate review board was deleted.

Now User:Jimbo_Wales is just another Wikipedia editor—albeit one responsible for the whole thing in the first place.

4. Revising Polish Holocaust History

Perhaps the most alarming major story from the past year was the discovery that Wikipedia articles concerning the Holocaust in Poland had been distorted by editors with Polish nationalist sympathies, downplaying Polish anti-semitism, overstating Polish heroism, and shifting blame to the victims themselves.

The controversy kicked off in February with the publication of an essay in the The Journal of Holocaust Research titled “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust”. The academics who authored it didn’t capture every nuance of Wikipedia correctly, as The Signpost pointed out, but the case they made could not be ignored: that these editors, largely well-established veterans, had used “dubious sources” and cherry-picked facts to misrepresent Poland’s role in the Holocaust. Among the publications which took notice: Slate, Der Spiegel, and the Times of Israel.

The issue was not unknown to Arbcom, who had heard a precursor case in 2019. But Arbcom’s actions were always limited: its mandate is to adjudicate editor behavior, not article content. But now a credible pattern emerged of content judgments crossing into bad behavior. This time around the committee initiated a case on their own, and in mid-May handed down “topic bans” for three editors, forbidding them from editing pages about Polish WWII history. Additionally, a “reliable sourcing restriction” was passed for the topic, limiting the use of contested sources.

There is no question that other areas of Wikipedia, in English and other languages—as we shall see in #2—are similarly controlled by factions motivated by ideologies beyond Wikipedia’s five pillars. Liberating these topics is possible, but even years of strenuous opposition may not be enough. Sometimes it requires a concentrated effort from a credible outside authority.

3. Foundation Financial Follies

Wikipedia’s annual fundraising banners have arguably overtaken NPR pledge drives as the media’s most familiar, scrutinized, and joked-about fundraising appeals. Wikipedia’s editors take it even more seriously, asking questions for years about Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) fundraising ethics and financial responsibility. In 2023 this long-simmering tension finally had consequences. 

In October 2022 a “request for comment” (“RfC”) about the upcoming campaign produced ​​more than 66,000 words, only to arrive at no consensus. But the WMF got the message, and set up a “co-creation page” to seek direct input on appeal language. The campaign wound up running milquetoast banners with language along the lines of: “If you can comfortably afford it this year, please join the readers who donate.” You can guess what happened next: the banners tanked.

In a post on a community forum in January, WMF CEO Maryana Iskander telegraphed changes to come: “Given the reduced revenue from the English campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has reduced its budget projections for the current year.” Then without so much as a courtesy back-channel to a friendly tech reporter, WMF started making layoffs. By April, The Signpost figured out that approximately 7% of total staff had been let go since the start of the year.

Layoffs rarely feel fair to the laid off, but the logic of nonprofit governance is simple: Wikipedia not only raises a lot of money each year, it also spends almost all of that money each year, and if next year’s money isn’t there, the ax has to fall somewhere. Of course it missed the volunteers who made it happen, because they weren’t receiving a paycheck anyway.

Note: My own firm had a WMF marketing contract (not the COI work we’re best known for, FWIW) come to an abrupt end because of the shortfall. No hard feelings on either side, but better to say so before anyone asks.

2. Putin Squashes Russian Wikipedia

Foreign interference in Wikipedia has made this list several times before, including as the top story in 2015. Some language editions, including Kazakh and Azerbaijani, are understood to be under de facto state control. After years of trying to censor specific pages, China eventually blocked Wikipedia entirely. And the year began with the chilling revelation that two Arabic Wikimedians had been imprisoned for decades, starting in 2020. 

Focus soon shifted to Russia, which continued its campaign against Wikimedia Russia (WMRU), repeatedly fining it—ultimately at least ten times—for failing to remove articles about the war in Ukraine. The Russian government used the dishonest phrase “fake news” to describe 133 Wikipedia articles they did not like, and a Kremlin spokesman suggested in April the Russian government should start a competing online encyclopedia.

A month later none other than the WMRU director took him up on the offer, and announced in a blog post that he had created a fork of Wikipedia. The post cited a number of old hat criticisms of Wikipedia as motivation, but no one was fooled—this fork is now the frontrunner to receive state approval—and the now ex-director was “banned indefinitely” from all Wikimedia sites.

Then in December, the replacement WMRU director announced in a very different blog post that he had been forced to resign from his position at Moscow State University after the government informed his employers he was to be named a “foreign agent”, and WMRU subsequently disbanded. This doesn’t mean the Russian Wikipedia will disappear anytime soon—unless Wikipedia pulls the plug on it—but does mean it should no longer be trusted.

1. The Promise and Peril of AI

It takes a lot to beat out a major government destroying its native language Wikipedia edition, but this first full year of wide-scale consumer adoption of artificial intelligence meets the requirements. The topic is so large, it’s a challenge to decide where to begin.

On-wiki, editors have experimented with ChatGPT-written articles, wrestled with how best to use AI, considered whether it should be used at all, and argued that it’s actually not very useful. Questions have been raised about whether readers will abandon Wikipedia entirely and seek information from AI chatbots to an extent that harms Wikipedia. A new warning template was created to warn readers about articles containing LLM content (as of this writing its only usage is on the article Monorail).

Off-wiki, at Wikiconference North America, it was practically all that anyone could talk about. Formal responses have been initiated, with mixed results: efforts to create a new policy about usage of LLM content on Wikipedia has yet to solidify, and likely never will. WMF created a ChatGPT plugin to attribute specific information in answers to Wikipedia, which had a brief moment but then faded quickly. And the New York Times Magazine ran a 6,600 word article asking if Wikipedia is doomed.

As of the end of 2023, we just don’t know. AI could help editors create more content faster, or it could overrun Wikipedia with garbage content, driving readers away—or even pull them away with a better experience. But the current version of AI is none of these: it’s nifty but not uniquely helpful, nor is it threatening in a serious way to Wikipedia’s model. You certainly can’t use it to write Wikipedia articles—who knows what it will make up.

Many have also noted amusing parallels between early responses to ChatGPT and Wikipedia. Both debuted quietly, gained early media attention, became a favorite of students and early adopters, only for the olds to warn that it was not to be trusted. Whether these comparisons will prove to be superficial or not, we’ll just have to see what 2024 and beyond brings.

Thank you for reading to the end, unless of course you immediately scrolled all the way down to see what #1 was first. In which case, thanks for reading anyway! Before I close out this year’s edition, I want to give a shoutout to some who have continued producing Wikipedia journalism while my focus was elsewhere. 

First among these is the editorial staff at The Signpost, whose comprehensive coverage of the Wikimedia movement is unrivaled. Stephen Harrison of Slate has waded into more discussion pages and explained more Wikipedia controversies than anyone in the professional news media. And Annie Rauwerda, whose Depths of Wikipedia media brand came out of nowhere to build impressive audiences across multiple channels, has made Wikipedia accessible to new audiences. 

In 2024 I look forward to contributing more of my own observations of Wikipedia’s unusual inner-workings, and next week The Wikipedian will return with the next installment of the series “All the News That’s Fit to Post”.

Jimmy Wales photo by Zachary McCune, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Wikimedia fundraising chart by Wikimedia Foundation and Jayen466, CC-BY-SA 4.0; A photo-realistic image representing Wikipedia influenced by artificial intelligence, featuring a multicultural group of Wikipedia editors, by DALL-E and William Beutler

Reviewing the news over the past year, there is plenty new that was not in play the last time I placed Wikipedia news into an arbitrary but satisfying order, including the rise of AI and Elon Musk’s unwanted attention. There are also returning topics which may never be truly resolved, such as internet speech regulations and censorship by authoritarian regimes.

Because Substack informs me the complete article is too long to be delivered in one email, today’s post will present stories 10–6, and 5–1 will follow tomorrow.

10. The Lourdes Maneuver

The least consequential item on this list is also the weirdest: an administrator who claimed to be a semi-famous musician started making trouble out of nowhere and, when called on it, abruptly announced they were in fact a different editor banned years earlier, then promptly blocked their own account, and disappeared.

In a little more detail: back in 2015, Wifione was an administrator who got caught doing paid editing for an Indian education company, and bullied other editors on their way to getting indefinitely blocked from editing. Flash forward to late 2015, a new editor using the name Lourdes claimed their IRL identity was actually indie musician Russian Red, real name Lourdes Gonzalez. Eventually, other editors started turning to Lourdes for advice about articles related to her career. 

But this fall, something snapped: Lourdes started bullying other editors and was brought before the Arbitration committee (Arbcom) for what might well have been a slap on the wrist. Instead, Lourdes revealed a secret: “[This] might be quite dramatic… So here goes. I am User:Wifione, the admin who got blocked years ago. My RL identity has nothing to do with any celebrity or anyone like that. I am not writing this to have any final laugh.” But that’s exactly what they had: Lourdes’ final act as an admin was to indefinitely block their own account, disappearing into thin air like Keyser Söze.

9. Wikifunctions Debuts

Wikifunctions launched in August, the first new project from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) since Wikidata in 2012. The Wikipedian will struggle to explain what Wikifunctions is, much as it struggled to articulate the value of Wikidata when it first rolled out. I’ll do my best: Wikifunctions is a library of computer functions intended for use in the next WMF project, Abstract Wikipedia, whose goal is to use structured data to create articles in functions that can be easily translated into any language.

Both are led by a co-creator of Wikidata, Denny Vrandečić, so there is a track record here. However, the new projects were subject to a “sympathetic critique” by visiting Google Fellows, who argued Abstract Wikipedia should be built on a programming language already in widespread use. Vrandečić’s team disagreed strongly, and stayed the course. Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia are a long way from making a serious impact, but it does sound pretty cool.

8. Regulatory Threats

Attempts to regulate online speech have posed various threats to Wikipedia for years; The Wikipedian’s top story of 2012 was Wikipedia’s one-day blackout to protest—and ultimately help derail—a pair of controversial “anti-piracy” bills in the U.S. Congress.

In 2023, the UK Parliament passed the Online Safety Act, giving Ofcom regulators broad new powers to discipline technology firms hosting a broad range of “harmful and illegal content”, especially pornographic content. Before it passed, WMF and Wikimedia UK called for an exemption for projects like Wikipedia, which was ignored. As the bill was about to become law, they scaled back to merely ask for “protection and fair treatment”. Ofcom has not yet chosen to exercise all of the new powers granted to it, so the law’s ultimate effect on Wikipedia remains to be seen.

Meanwhile back in the U.S., amendments to all-important Section 230 have been debated for years. In 2023 the Supreme Court considered Gonzalez v. Google, targeting YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which it has sent back down to lower courts for the time being. Wikipedia hasn’t been destroyed by overprotective regulation yet, but the stakes are always high.

7. Wikimedia Conferences Return

The last prior installment of this list series, in 2020, listed at #2 “Effects of the global pandemic on the Wikimedia movement”, mostly about conferences being postponed, canceled, or moved online. This year they started coming back, even if many attendees still played it safe and masked up:

• Wikimania, the biggie, was canceled in 2020 but this year went IRL again, in Singapore. Wikiconference North America, which had enough advance warning to hold its 2020 meeting online, reconvened in-person in Toronto. 

• Other conferences returned from dormancy or online-only status: GLAM-Wiki was back, in Montevideo, Uruguay, and WikidataCon, occurring every other year since 2017, was in Taipei after being online-only in 2021. Another conference devoted to education, held for the first time in 2019, returned for its second iteration, in Belgrade, Serbia.

• There was one precursor to all of these: Wikimedia Summit, a meeting for affiliate groups held annually in Berlin, was canceled in 2020, but was the first major conference to return in September 2022.

Going into the pandemic, it seemed like online or hybrid conferences would become a thing. With a couple of years experience, it’s absolutely clear there is no substitute for actually holding conferences in-person.

6. Elon’s Vendetta

Elon Musk had a very strange year, yet the bothersome billionaire still set aside time to continue his mostly one-sided feud with Wikipedia. Because it seems that absolutely everything Musk does is news, this resulted in three utterly moronic yet still somehow global news stories over the last twelve months. 

Last December, a Wikipedia article was created about the “Twitter Files” kerfuffle, which was nominated for deletion, as is fairly common for article topics editors consider potentially faddish. But Musk viewed it as evidence of Wikipedia’s “left-wing bias”, even though the article survived the hit. When a Musk follower suggested he consider buying Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales butted in: “Not for sale.” This made news in at least the U.S., UK, Turkey, and India, some taking the idea of Musk purchasing Wikipedia a little too seriously.

In September, Musk and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu took lazy potshots at Wikipedia during a live conversation hosted on X/Twitter. Netanyahu: “History is written by the people who can harness the most editors.” Musk: “Yeah, I mean, the losers just got a lot of time on their hands and it’s like, what are they going to do? Edit Wikipedia. Literally!” The best part was when they laughed at their own jokes. News websites turned the not-quite-viral news clip into a story in the U.S., Israel, India, and Russia.

A month later, it was unclear if Musk was aware of his inspirational role in a Wikipedia fundraising banner that declared “Wikipedia is not for sale” as he indifferently asked “why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money?” X users fact-checked him through the site’s Community Notes feature, pointing to readily available answers. He then added: “I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia”, among other barbs. Dumb as this was, it was actually the biggest story of the three, generating headlines from dozens of sources around the world. Of course, this also says as much about the state of global news as it does about Musk.

The thrilling conclusion of this post is now available here: “The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2023 (Part 2)”. Thanks for reading!

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Wikifunctions logo by Jon Harald Søby and Stevenliuyi, CC-BY-SA 4.0; Elon Musk photo by Tesla Owners Club Belgium, CC-BY 2.0