The hostile takeover of Wikipedia

Around two-thirds of Britons trust Wikipedia to tell the truth – a far higher proportion than trust broadsheet journalists. But should we really put our faith in the online encyclopaedia? Ashley Rindsberg – editor of NPOV – has been investigating what goes on behind the scenes. He recently sat down with Fraser Myers to discuss the policies that entrench pro-establishment bias, and the bad actors waging ‘edit wars’ to manipulate the truth. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Fraser Myers: You’ve done extensive research into Wikipedia. What has been going wrong with the site lately?

Ashley Rindsberg: On Wikipedia’s interface, everything seems fine. What we don’t see are the ‘edit wars’ going on underneath – the ideological battles, the propagandists, the state-aligned messaging. Even the cabals working on behalf of foreign terror organisations. There’s a lot of really ugly stuff going on that the average user isn’t going to be aware of.

The general rule with Wikipedia is that it will follow the mainstream media on any given topic – that would be the BBC or the Guardian in the UK, or the New York Times, CBS and NBC in the US. During the last US presidential election, there was contention surrounding whether or not Kamala Harris had been named Joe Biden’s ‘border czar’. Democrats argued that nobody had ever reported her as such – that she had just been given this informal role by Biden and she had no role to play in the border crisis. But Axios reported that he did give her that title. So if you’re a Wikipedia editor, you have to make a decision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the editors chose the Democrats’ version of events, because that’s the way they always fall on any given issue. This is a particularly instructive example, because Axios is a reputable source. There was reporting on both sides of the issue, and editors still elected to side with the Democratic Party.

Myers: Presumably, there are similar battles over other key controversies of our time, such as the Israel-Hamas war. How has that particular story been played out on Wikipedia?

Rindsberg: When you have a site like Al-Jazeera that’s considered by Wikipedia to be a reliable source – when we know for a fact that a number of its ‘reporters’ were working with or for Hamas during the war – it is inevitably going to impact the information that makes it into the encyclopaedia.

The other issue with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict is that there is an entire ‘edit gang’ trying to control the narrative. There’s about 40 editors – all pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, some even openly pro-Hamas or Hezbollah. These users have made about one million edits to around 10,000 articles in the Palestine-Israel topic space, completely reshaping that landscape. They have done everything from whitewashing the crimes of the Iranian regime in Tehran to removing references to terror attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as Hamas’ 1988 genocidal charter. They also deleted all connections between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. This has been going on for years.

Myers: Would it make a difference if more of us simply stopped using Wikipedia?

Rindsberg: Not really. Wikipedia is one of the major training data sources for virtually every large language model and AI out there. This information gets fed into ChatGPT, into Claude, into Perplexity, even into Alexa and Siri.

Wikipedia also dominates Google. If you type something into Google as a topic, not only is the Wikipedia entry the first result, it also appears on Google’s knowledge panel, giving you a break-down of the issue before you’ve even clicked on anything. Whatever Wikipedia says is essentially accepted across the board – which is why it’s so pernicious.

Wikipedia editors know there is this backdoor vulnerability into the information ecosystem. They know how to hack it. This is how highly ideological and inaccurate information is now laundered into the mainstream.

Myers: Is the problem fixable?

Rindsberg: Certain competitors, like Justapedia and Grokipedia, are at the very least putting pressure on Wikipedia to get its act together and to address its issues. That kind of pressure really matters, because it’s also encouraging public scrutiny. For too long, people have been unaware of what’s going on with Wikipedia. There has always been a bit of reporting about editorial shenanigans, but not enough questioning of how this affects society in general.

Thankfully, you now have people looking very closely at what’s happening and who’s involved. The competitors are having an impact in the sense that an LLM-creator can now say, ‘You know what? Maybe we won’t kick Wikipedia out of the training data altogether, but we can also include any number of other online encyclopaedias to dilute whatever bias Wikipedia might have.’ Then we might start to get some balance.

Ashley Rindsberg was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch the full interview below: