What’s Going on With Wikipedia?

By Jonathan Gibson

Friday, July 03, 2026

 

In a 2004 interview with the social news website Slashdot, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales described his vision for his nascent online encyclopedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” At the time, the site had fewer than 200,000 listed articles.

 

Since then, Wales’ dream has largely been realized: Last year, the site hit 7 million articles, with a 1958 memoir about schizophrenia called Operators and Things claiming the coveted spot. Wikipedia remains among the 15 most-visited websites and, with the rise of artificial intelligence, has become a major source for large language models like ChatGPT.   

 

But with Wikipedia’s high profile comes concerns about its reliability. In recent weeks, editing wars over hot-button issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accusations of bias from sitting lawmakers, and the site’s decision to ban its own co-founder, Larry Sanger, from editing entries have all resurrected debates about the platform’s reputation as an impartial, crowd-sourced repository of information.  

 

Although concerns about Wikipedia’s role in training AI are relatively new, criticism surrounding its reliability and objectivity is not. Sanger, who left the company more than 20 years ago, has long warned of the site’s ideological capture. “It faithfully represents the establishment view, especially the establishment left view,” he told The Dispatch. “It is a mouthpiece of the establishment.”

 

Yet it wasn’t Sanger’s views on the platform that saw him banned from the Wikipedia community last week. Days earlier, he had submitted a proposal to establish a reform group called WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, with the goal of “broadening the range of permissible sources on Wikipedia” to include views beyond those of the establishment, such as those “of traditional Christians, Hindu ... and Israeli nationals, and of course conservatives and libertarians.”

 

After publicizing the initiative to his 93,000 followers on X, he was deemed by Wikipedia volunteers to have violated guidelines around canvassing to influence the site’s content. A post by an anonymous editor known as ScottishFinnishRaddish described a “clear consensus for a community ban,” and concluded that Sanger was “not here to constructively build the encyclopedia.” Other commenters accused him of supporting past meatpuppetry, in which individuals recruit others who hold similar views to edit the site.  

 

Sanger disagrees. “I was tried essentially by a self-appointed mob,” he told The Dispatch. “My accusers were also my judges.” Despite long-standing disagreements between the two co-founders of Wikipedia over who founded the organization and how it should be governed, Wales also came to Sanger’s defense, describing his X post about WikiProject Intellectual Diversity as “unambiguously fine.”

 

In theory, anyone can edit Wikipedia. In practice, doing so is quite difficult, particularly when it comes to sensitive topic areas. Wikipedia relies on volunteer “administrators” to monitor changes to articles and block users who violate the site’s editing rules. When it comes to high-profile and controversial issues, in particular, this oversight is significant. For topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, editors are required to have made 500 prior edits on an account that is more than 30 days old. This means that a small group of anonymous editors plays an outsize role in shaping the site’s portrayal of some of the thorniest issues of the day.

 

Sanger believes that people should have to identify themselves when making edits. Last year, Sanger published his “Nine Theses on Wikipedia,” which called on the site to allow for competing pages on topics, abolish blacklists of particular sources, and maintain neutrality on controversial issues.

 

The last recommendation may be easier said than done. State actors and ordinary individuals have for years sought to convey their preferred narrative on Wikipedia’s pages, often in subtle and sophisticated ways. “Every movement worth mentioning is currently trying to manipulate Wikipedia in some way. Every one of them,” Wikipedia editor and administrator Tamzin Hadasa Kelly told The Dispatch.

 

Topics related to Israel and its adversaries are perhaps the perfect illustration of these efforts. Last year, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee reported that “sock puppets,” or fake online accounts, had conducted large-scale campaigns aimed at influencing pages related to the topic. With entries such as “Zionism” and “Israel-Hamas War” respectively garnering some 11 million and 8 million views over the last three years, there has been strong blowback around questions of bias and manipulation.

 

In 2024, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) published a report claiming Wikipedia entries show a consistent anti-Israel bias, pointing to examples such as the “Zionism” page, which reflects a one-sided narrative in its opening two lines alone:

 

Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through colonization in the region of Palestine which roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel in Judaism—itself central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

 

The same year, an investigation by the Times of London suggested that entries have been systematically edited to downplay Iranian atrocities, with editors reportedly facing bans for minor challenges to the anti-Israel narrative. More recently, both Sanger and Wales have spoken out against the site’s “Gaza genocide” page, arguing that the page presents the information as factual and conclusive, rather than debatable.

 

“We’re witnessing what looks like open manipulation in favor of the Iranian regime in Tehran that’s been called out multiple times by myself, other journalists, and people on Wikipedia, and it has had no effect,” Ashley Rindsberg, a chief investigative officer at NPOV, a platform investigating coordinated ideological campaigns, told The Dispatch. “Wikipedia is an American 501(c)(3), something that everyone should be concerned about—and nobody is,” he added, referring to its parent organization’s status as a tax-exempt nonprofit.

 

Part of the issue may come down to Wikipedia’s preferred sources. For example, the Qatari-funded news agency Al Jazeera, which routinely makes unverified claims about Israel’s war conduct and has been accused by the Israeli military of employing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza, currently enjoys the community’s highest reliability rating.

 

But the pressure appears to be coming from both directions, even if not all campaigns are equally successful. Last year, The Forward, an American-Jewish news organization, reportedly uncovered a Heritage Foundation scheme to identify and target volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it claimed were abusing their position by publishing antisemitic content. Meanwhile, Kelly claimed that Israel itself seeks to influence Wikipedia’s entries: “There is one country involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict that has a lot of state-funded or state-adjacent sock-puppets. It is Israel.”

 

Kelly attributes the bias to the growing global support for the Palestinian cause. “The reason that there are lots of people on Wikipedia who are pro-Palestinian is because there are lots of people that are pro-Palestinian,” Kelly said, claiming that an emergent bias toward pro-Palestinian narratives is due to right-wing editors getting “kicked out for being assholes.”

 

Yet others believe that the problem is more complex. “Wikipedia is just one visible downstream manifestation of a broader cultural trend among the sort of people that are inclined to edit Wikipedia,” argued Jack Despain Zhou, an independent journalist who has written extensively on Wikipedia on his Substack.

 

Wikipedia bias is emblematic of a broader, left-leaning internet culture, Zhou told The Dispatch. “Once you have a dominant local culture, it builds on itself and enforces its own norms,” he noted. Rather than being the “central node that has brainwashed everyone,” Zhou perceives Wikipedia to be “reflective of the broader left-liberal knowledge work consensus that exists.”

 

Whether that ideological consensus will be absorbed by many internet users’ newest source of information—AI—remains unclear. As large language models continue to use Wikipedia as a source of information, there is a risk that the technology will begin to parrot unverified, ideologically driven information.

 

But some analysts—including Timothy Lee, author of the Substack Understanding AI—argue that the broader information ecosystem is too large for Wikipedia alone to have a major impact. “It’s unlikely that Wikipedia is big enough to move the needle,” he said.