Let's face it: all of us use Wikipedia at times because it is so damn convenient.
And on nonpolitical subjects it can be very useful to get up to speed on a topic of interest. If you need to know the overview on something fast and don't have the time or inclination to do a deep dive, Wikipedia is often your first stop.
Before you go too far down the "It's not as good as the old encyclopedias" road, I happen to know some of the people who wrote articles for the old, printed, and bound Encyclopedia Brittanica. Most of the articles were written by one scholar, who did it because they could use the cash, and they were hardly paragons of scientific perfection. Like any other human enterprise, encyclopedias could be useful, but were no better or worse than very good research from very good scholars.
They weren't infallible, although as kids we were encouraged to believe they were a gold-standard source.
Wikipedia tried to ruin the reputations of @PeteHegseth, @TulsiGabbard, @Kash_Patel and @russvought
— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 24, 2025
Read more: https://t.co/pa8Sj9ztgo pic.twitter.com/A7jOA9EdDb
But Wikipedia's advantage and its flaw is that it is user-written and edited, which means that on any subject that even remotely touches on a controversial topic, it can be manipulated, and on hot topics it most certainly is. People with resources can create authoritative-seeming Narratives™ that are even more deceptive than those that come from the Pravda Media, because we are less prepared to expect blatant bias.
Hot political topics, anything tied to big money, or controversial people get special attention from highly motivated people. And people can be motivated by money, power, ideology, or any of a number of motives.
Shortly after President Donald Trump announced key cabinet nominees, Wikipedia editors changed their pages in an apparent attempt to highlight damaging information. The editors appear to have carefully timed these cunning changes to be made during the lead-up to the confirmation process when the Trump nominees were under the microscope.
The infamously biased online encyclopedia substantially altered its entries for now-Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, now-FBI Director Kash Patel and now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The Wikipedia page for Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, was also impacted. MRC Free Speech America compared the last archived versions of each nominee’s Wikipedia entry before Trump announced their nominations versus archived pages after their nominations.
The changes made by Wikipedia were significant, including:
- Manufacturing entirely new negative sections on the nominees’ pages.
- Overhauling nominees’ “Personal life” sections.
- Changing the characterization of incidents described.
- Substantially increasing existing coverage of controversial material/events.
Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world, appears on the first page of 99 percent of Google searches and is the number one result for a majority of all searches, according to Search Engine Watch. This is likely a direct result of Google frequently using Wikipedia as a source for its “knowledge panels,” which often appear at the top of many basic online searches. This was the case in Google searches for each of the nominees that MRC researchers included in this study.
The search giant has also given no less than a combined $7.5 million to the encyclopedia’s parent company, Wikimedia Foundation, and its fund, Wikimedia Endowment.
As somebody who has a Wikipedia page dedicated to little ol' me, I have seen a tiny bit of the ideological back and forth over my page. It has been dormant (as far as I know) since I got out of the public eye in Minnesota politics, but when I was active in politics as the President of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, I remember one of my employees pointing out a number of unflattering characterizations of me.
So it goes, and it never bothered me much because it hardly mattered. I was never going to run for office, so who cares what they say about me? It was nothing that never got said to my face, and in fact much more mild. I got death threats, so a line in Wikipedia trashing me hardly got to me.
On the other hand, in the midst of a battle over Cabinet appointments or a Supreme Court Justice, manipulating a source like Wikipedia matters a lot. Rewriting history can rewrite the path of the future, and when you are fighting people whose major tool for political manipulation is controlling "narratives," information warfare is their primary tool.
Wikipedia is, when necessary, a weapon used by the enemies of truth, which is why I quite donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. I was motivated to do so and did for years because, at its best, it contributes mightily to the public access of information, and I found it was a useful tool in many cases.
But it is also a weapon against truth, and as such, can be a plague upon our Republic. That doesn't mean I think it should be censored, but it does mean that it needs to be discredited to a great extent on any matters that touch public policy.
When people are fighting over control over trillions of dollars, manipulating information on a free encyclopedia is hardly an ethical line people won't cross.
What would YOU do for a billion dollars?
