When I first meet someone, I can often tell if they’ve taken the time to Google my name and read my Wikipedia entry.
Having a Wikipedia page devoted to you is an unsettling experience for anyone: Strangers are able to glean a great deal of information about you at a glance, without ever meeting you.
And if you’re conservative, that Wikipedia portrait is rarely the first impression you’d choose to make.
Being a conservative with a Wikipedia entry means that everyone who meets you has already read a hit piece about you, crowdsourced by potentially hundreds of people who are determined to promote the worst possible vision of you for the world to see.
If you look at my Wikipedia entry, for example, there’s an outsized emphasis on a single tweet I posted ten years ago about nuking Hamas in the wake of a particularly brutal attack against Israeli teenage boys — framed to paint me as a genocidal lunatic.
It’s part of a well-documented trend: Conservative public figures, as well as right-leaning organizations, regularly fall victim to an ideological bias that persists among Wikipedia editors.
Even Larry Sanger, one of the site’s co-founders, acknowledges that long-standing slant.
“Since 2020, he has criticized Wikipedia for what he perceives as a left-wing and liberal ideological bias in its articles,” Sanger’s own Wikipedia page notes.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute confirms that perception, based on a computerized language study of thousands of Wikipedia articles.
As author David Rozado explains, the study found that “Wikipedia articles tend to associate right-of-center public figures with somewhat more negative sentiment than left-of-center public figures.”
Rozado’s analysis further found “prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures” — and noted how that very same slant appears to be “percolating into” artificial intelligence systems and products.
But the bias goes beyond Wikipedia’s phrasing tendencies.
Last week Wikipedia’s editors declared that the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that was founded to combat antisemitism, cannot be trusted as a reliable source on the Israel-Palestine conflict — and more shockingly, that the ADL is an unreliable source on antisemitism itself.
Who do the site’s editors find reliable?
Organizations with well-documented issues of not just bias, but of ideologically-driven unreliability in their reporting.
Amnesty International and B’Tselem, for example, are two organizations with longstanding and well-documented biases against Israel — but are frequently used by Wikipedia as trusted sources.
Another reliable resource, according to Wikipedia editors: the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has taken a sharp turn against conservatives in recent decades.
“The SPLC took the program it used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents,” writes Tyler O’Neil of The Daily Signal, whose upcoming book “Making Hate Pay” examines the SPLC’s overwhelming bias.
As antisemitism scholar Izabella Tabarovsky quipped on X, “What [Wikipedia’s editors] are basically telling us is that in their eyes, a source is ‘objective’ if it shares the editors’ antizionist & anti-Israel views.”
“From now on we can consider Wikipedia to be intentionally trafficking in disinformation on antisemitism and probably on much other content related to Jews — and, of course, specifically on Israel and Zionism,” she added.
Sanger deemed the site’s editors “clowns” in response to news about its war on the ADL.
He’s not wrong.
Just take a look at the edit history of my own Wikipedia entry to examine some of this clownish behavior close up.
Editors argue back and forth about the extent of my genocidal intent, not to mention my supposed Islamophobia and racism, as they make repeated changes to the text.
It would be absurd and laughable — if these strangers with axes to grind didn’t have such an enormous influence over the public perception of me and other subjects covered on the site.
Recently, one of my daughter’s friends was telling me how her grandfather was famous, and had become unfortunately infamous, online. I took out my phone as she was speaking.
“Don’t look at his Wikipedia,” she begged me, thinking I was looking him up.
My daughter kindly tried to reassure her friend.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The internet hates my mom, too.”
Bethany Mandel is the co-author of “Stolen Youth” and a homeschooling mother of six based in greater Washington, DC.