Pun Salad

On Aug. 27, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a probe into the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, to determine the role and the methods of foreign individuals in manipulating articles on the platform to influence U.S. public opinion. In the committee’s letter to the foundation’s CEO, committee Chair James Comer and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity Chair Nancy Mace requested “documents and information related to actions by Wikipedia volunteer editors” to uncover “potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles.”

I shed light on these organized efforts in an October 2024 investigative report. Specifically, I identified a network of more than three dozen editors—whom I dubbed the “Gang of 40”—who systematically pushed the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives on Wikipedia. These editors have made 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 articles related to Israel, effectively reshaping the entire topic area. Last month, the group scored its latest and perhaps most brazen victory when a Wikipedia administrator issued a final rejection to an appeal on an extraordinary 12-month freeze these editors had pushed to place on the lead section of the “Zionism” article, thus prohibiting any changes to their edits during that period.

Those are the facts. But a number of Wikipedia editors don’t want you to know about the attack. Since the online encyclopedia’s article “Killing of Iryna Zarutska” was created on Saturday, Wikipedia editors have fought to have it deleted, as I wrote in a post on X.

“An editor has nominated this article for deletion,” says the text in a box near the top of the article with a red stripe running down the left.

It was another sign of how Wikipedia’s idealistic mission to provide all the world’s information for free has been compromised by editors who battle over their version of the truth. Last year, I wrote that the consensus achieved by all that jostling often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has criticized the site as too left-wing.