Wikipedia is the world’s largest online encyclopedia and one of the most visited websites, attracting more than a billion visitors each month. It is fast, easy to use and often the first suggestion in Google search results. However, concerns have been raised about whether this extensive resource provides biased results.
For years, third-party analyses have indicated that Wikipedia exhibits a left-leaning bias in its content. A recent report from the Daily Caller suggests that Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent organization, has paid left-wing organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars based on a review of the foundation’s recent tax forms.
Wikipedia ads asking for donations have been seeing populating on the site for years. The Daily Caller obtained tax forms to find out where some of this money is going.
Among the nonprofits receiving grant money from Wikimedia are Art +Feminism, Black Lunch Table and Whose Knowledge, each receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars with the stated purpose of furthering their missions.
According to their websites, these organizations aim to edit Wikipedia pages with leftist ideologies. For example, Art + Feminism promotes a guide on how to write and edit Wikipedia content about transgender and LGBTQ+ individuals.
“When cis and trans women, non-binary people, Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities are not represented in the writing and editing on the tenth-most-visited site in the world, information about people like us gets skewed and misrepresented,” the website read. “The stories get mistold. We lose out on real history. That’s why we’re here: to change it.”
“Since 2014, over 20,000 people at more than 1,500 events around the world have participated in our edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 100,000 articles on Wikipedia and its sister projects,” the website read.
Whose Knowledge has similar objectives, emphasizing the need for more diverse representation in online knowledge, as noted in their “About Us” section, which says in part “most public knowledge online has so far been written by white men from Europe and North America.”
Whose knowledge hosts initiatives like “Decolonizing the Internet” to bring “thousands of images of women and non-binary people to Wikimedia.”
The nonprofit Black Lunch Table, which has also received over $300,000 from Wikimedia, also holds “edit-a-thon” events to “create and improve” Wikipedia articles to better represent Black artists.
The Daily Caller’s investigation suggests that following the flow of Wikipedia’s funding leads to support for organizations that align with leftist missions. This pattern of bias has been echoed by Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, who has criticized the site for straying from its original intentions, saying certain viewpoints have been “systematically silenced.”
Katherine Maher, the company’s CEO from 2016 to 2021, acknowledged that it was a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” advocating for the suppression of what she considered misinformation on the site. She now leads operations at NPR. The current CEO, Maryana Iskander, joined Wikimedia after serving as chief operating officer of Planned Parenthood.
Wikimedia, Art and Feminism, Whose Knowledge and Black Lunch Table did not respond to requests for comment.