Earlier this month, The New York Times ran an interview with Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales titled, “The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course.” There, Wales painted Wikipedia as a well-intentioned site trying its best to remain unbiased — and being unfairly targeted by those on the right.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
No matter how the NYT and Wales try to spin the narrative, reality remains: The culture wars didn’t “come for Wikipedia.” Wikipedia voluntarily threw itself into the fray — and contrary to its claims, it didn’t remain impartial.
It’s telling that even Wales’ co-founder, Larry Sanger, says the website is biased. He’s right: There’s no other way to describe a site that labeled Charlie Kirk, a mainstream conservative, a “far-right conspiracy theorist.”
Perhaps more telling is Wales’ response when the NYT asked him about that description. “The least controversial thing you could say about Charlie Kirk is that he was controversial,” Wales said. “He had these views, many of which are out of step with, say, mainstream scientific thinking[.] … [T]hose are the kinds of things that, if we do our job well, which I think we have in this case, we’re going to describe all of that.”
Nowhere did Wales apologize for the site’s maligning of Kirk after his assassination. Instead, he described Wikipedia’s use of the terms “far right” and “conspiracy theorist” as simply part of its “process.”
Of course, Wales also conveniently neglected to mention that less than a week after Kirk’s assassination, Wikipedia allegedly locked Erika Kirk’s page, and editors discussed deleting it entirely.
No wonder Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated alternative that’s designed to counter what he accurately called Wikipedia’s “editorial bias.” The need for a more objective, fact-based basic reference source couldn’t be more obvious.
Wikipedia’s wildly inaccurate treatment of Charlie Kirk isn’t the only example of its bias. Earlier this year, the site blacklisted The Heritage Foundation, the nation’s largest conservative think tank, ensuring all links to Heritage’s website are automatically blocked. The site has similarly cast aspersions on or blacklisted almost all right-of-center outlets, including The New York Post, The Federalist, Breitbart, and more.
Meanwhile, the site greenlights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, a now entirely discredited organization that includes mainstream conservative and Christian groups on its “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Nor are such comparisons simply anecdotal. In fact, one 2024 study found systemic bias in favor of leftists and Democrats. Yet Wales and Wikipedia still proclaim their “nonpartisan” bona fides to anyone who will listen.
The site’s bias has grown so blatant that it’s even the subject of an ongoing congressional investigation into its manipulation of entries on the war in Gaza. Yet Wales skated over those accusations too in his NYT interview, dismissing them as a “deep misunderstanding … of how Wikipedia works.”
Wikipedia shouldn’t be able to hide itself behind the anonymity of its editors (as Wales attempted to do multiple times in his interview) and decry responsibility for the vitriol it hosts. If Wikipedia editors have the authority to control information, they should stand behind their work. If specific sources and outlets are being blacklisted, readers have a right to know who made that decision and why.
Instead, it’s time for Wikipedia to pull itself out of the culture wars by taking reasonable steps, such as those Sanger suggested, to ensure it practices the nonpartisanship it preaches. If it doesn’t do so, Congress should consider expanding its investigation of Wikipedia to cover not just the site’s antisemitism but its active censorship of Americans.
It’s unacceptable for so-called nonpartisan outlets to disfavor an entire end of the political spectrum. Wikipedia must choose whether it wants to learn that lesson on its own or whether it needs Congress to make it comply.
