10 Questions The New York Times Should Have Asked Jimmy Wales

NYT's interview was a missed opportunity—but we're here to help

The New York Times recently interviewed Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, about the direction of the site. The overarching theme of the interview is that the “culture wars are coming for Wikipedia.” It’s an appealing headline, especially for New York Times readers. But, unfortunately, it misses the mark entirely.

The truth is that Wikipedia is locked in overlapping crises, ranging from a pay-to-play scandal, the presence of pro-Hamas edit gangs, and a drastically under-resourced admin/arbitration structure. And that’s just what’s happening on the website.

At Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, a sharp left turn toward social justice means that, while the foundation is laser-focused on its DEI-driven mission, it is falling down on its traditional, core mission of serving as a steward of the platform.

One case the Times reporter, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, mentions is the public response to Wikipedia’s smear of Charlie Kirk. This is a story I broke in an article for Fox News, where I reported how Wikipedia editors called Kirk a conspiracy theorist, antisemite, and member of the hard-right.

But the New York Times took a soft approach to the Wales interview, and, in so doing, missed a number of opportunities to pose critical questions that could help readers understand the exact nature of the crisis Wikipedia is facing—and the one it’s precipitating.

In light of this, NPOV has written 10 questions we believe the New York Times should have raised in its interview with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales.

1. Why does WMF funnel millions to far-left NGOs?

   Wikipedia aggressively fundraises with red banners on the top of articles and large boxes on the home page asking for money. “Don’t scroll past this,” the site says in its appeal for money. What it doesn’t tell potential donors is that the Wikimedia Foundation is sitting on around $400 million in assets. Rather than use donor money to fund the site, Wikipedia passes these funds through, often to far-left, politically charged, activist NGOs.
   
   The question New York Times should have asked is: How does this grant-making activity further Wikipedia’s mission of creating and growing an online encyclopedia to make knowledge accessible to all.
   

2. Why was Jimmy Wales allowed to edit his own article?
   One of the core principles of Wikipedia is that editors should not edit if they have a conflict of interest. This applies most directly to editing your own article. Despite this, Wales has edited his article numerous times, over the course of many years. In one prominent case, he did so to airbrush out the fact that Bomis.com, the site Wales started in the mid 1990s and which he used to fund early Wikipedia, drew much of its revenue from porn. (Read NPOV’s coverage here.)
   

   Wales also edited the site to scrub mention of Larry Sanger as Wikipedia’s co-founder. Yet, despite all the prohibitions on this kind of editing—prohibitions that existed under Wales’ own authority—Wales was able to self-edit over and over. The question we would like him to answer is (a) why he did this and (b) how was it possible that he got away with it for so long?

3. How does WMF propose to deal with terror-aligned edit gangs?
   In October 2024, I ran an investigation revealing that a group of around 40 anti-Israel editors worked in small cells to make 850,000 edits to around 10,000 articles in the Palestine Israel Articles topic area. These edits whitewashed Hamas’ genocidal 1988 charter from numerous articles, severed the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, and removed human rights abuses committed by the Iranian government.

   
   Six leaders from the “Gang of 40” received topic bans—but these bans were for their behavior, not for their editorial decisions. This means their edits, now numbering over 1 million, remain in place. How do Jimmy and WMF plan to deal with this kind of malicious propaganda-based editing?

4. How does Wikipedia safeguard against state-sponsored propaganda?
   Propagandists around the world understand by now that Wikipedia is one of the biggest backdoor into our information ecosystem—if not the biggest. A small group of dedicated, skilled operators can easily capture a topic area. For propagandists backed by a nation-state, this is trivial. Given that, does WMF investigate state-backed propaganda efforts on the site? What tools and methods of detection are in place to guard against this—assuming there are any at all?

5. Why are so many conservative news outlets black-listed?
   In my recent interview with Larry Sanger, we discussed the phenomenon of “Reliable Sources,” a list of media outlets that can be cited on Wikipedia, and those that can’t. What’s evident is that while virtually all of the left-of-center mainstream media is coded green for “Generally reliable” a disproportionate number of conservative outlets are coded red for “Generally unreliable.” Meanwhile, Qatar-controlled Al Jazeera gets a green rating, while Chinese-government-operated China Daily is yellow—better than many conservative US news outlets.

   
   How does Wales explain this discrepancy? Who is the person who created the Reliable Sources list, and by what process was it ratified or approved by the community?

6. How does “pay-to-play” activity on Wikipedia impact its neutrality?
   The cottage industry of paid Wikipedia editing isn’t so “cottage” anymore. There are hundreds of agencies that will create, edit, or remove Wikipedia articles on behalf of paying clients, in contravention of Wikipedia rules. Other “white hat” agencies do this more transparently (and probably more effectively).
   
   Clients of these agencies include major news outlets, like NBC News and Axios; big pharma like Pfizer; major tech platforms, including Reddit; and even Defense Department officials. Given the scale of this pay-to-play activity, how can Wikipedia remain neutral?

7. What should be done about Wikipedia’s proven bias?
   Wikipedia’s bias has been numerically quantified by researcher David Rozado. (Read NPOV’s coverage here.) Given that this bias tilts leftward on articles concerning American senators, representatives, judges, presidents and even journalists, what steps should Wikipedia take to ensure content is balanced and does not reflect the political biases or agendas of its most dominant editors?

8. What impact will Wikipedia bias have on the future of AI?
   Wikipedia is known for being one of the top sources of AI training data, feeding every major frontier AI model from ChatGPT to Anthropic’s Claude to Google’s Gemini. Given the many serious issues touched on above, how can Wikipedia ensure that the political, financial, and ideological biases now endemic on the site do not skew AI models that will increasingly shape our shared future?
   

9. Why is Wikipedia fighting UK transparency laws?

   WMF is strongly opposed to legislation in the UK that is designed to make platforms safer for children. To most, this seems like a good idea. Why is Wikipedia fighting this legislation so hard? What does WMF propose in place of this legislation as a way of protecting the public from bad actors working on major information platforms?
   

10. Why did WMF shift its mission to social justice in 2017?

    WMF’s Movement Strategy represents the most profound shift in Wikipedia history. Overnight, WMF’s mission went from building an online encyclopedia to creating a social justice movement powered by DEI. Why would WMF make such a drastic decision, and at such a sensitive moment in the history of information? And is it possible for Wikipedia to unwind this decision and return to its traditional mission of creating a knowledge resource for all?

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