Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-05-22/In the media

Indonesian readers and editors can finally log in to Wikimedia projects again after the country had blocked access to the auth.wikimedia.org domain for nearly two months (see earlier coverage in the 10 March 2026 issue).

After repeated delays by the Wikimedia Foundation to register with Indonesian authorities since November 2025, Indonesia gave the Foundation a final seven days' grace on 15 April to comply or otherwise face a wider access block on all Wikimedia projects. In a statement on 25 April, the Foundation agreed to register after having sought "assurances that there would be no unlawful content takedown orders or data disclosure requirements that could put the Wikimedia community-led model at risk".

In a Diff post, the Foundation stated that it had completed the Wikipedia app's administrative registration process as an Electronic System Provider (PSE) on 30 April 2026, having been assured by the Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) that this was an administrative formality. A letter shared by Komdigi with the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team stated that the registration will not be a legal basis for content moderation or data disclosure that could undermine the Wikimedia community-led model. The completion of the registration was briefly delayed due to an issue with the registration platform. The community's open letter has 17,489 signatures at its closing on 2 May 2026, mostly from anonymous editors (some may be registered editors who could not login). – RS

Israeli media outlet Ynetnews has released a deep dive into alleged antisemitism on Wikipedia, claiming that "[t]he group 'Tech for Palestine' employs dozens of senior editors who have so far changed about 10,000 entries to create a false narrative in favor of the Palestinians, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah." Drawing on research by Israeli academic Shlomit Aharoni Lir, a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Haifa and a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (Israel), the article argues that Wikipedia's place in the information ecosystem, combined with freedom of editing and anonymity, makes it a key target for those who desire to manipulate human knowledge and public perception. Topics covered include suspicions of "involvement by external actors", the disqualification of information sources, and alleged fabrication of histories such as inventing the history of the Hellenistic Palestine.

The article favourably mentions the letter sent by James Comer and Nancy Mace – chair of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation – to the Wikimedia Foundation, in which Comer and Mace announced that the U.S. Congress was investigating Wikimedia because of "multiple studies and reports highlighting efforts to manipulate information on Wikipedia for propaganda" (see previous Signpost coverage, "US Congress probes Wikipedia"). It goes on to introduce the concept of knowledge poisoning as a form of "soft terrorism" and favourably compares Elon Musk's Grokipedia and Justapedia to Wikipedia, describing them as "two online encyclopedias that are also not free of problems and biases, but at least on the Israeli-Palestinian issue they do not take a clear side". At the conclusion of the article, Aharoni Lir asserts that as things stand –

Wikipedia plays a substantial role in the dumbing down of the masses, in which entire publics take part in a struggle based on shallow perceptions and a lack of understanding of reality. Wikipedia used to be the thing itself, but now it is a symbol of a dystopian reality, of a beautiful vision of democratizing knowledge that has become a source of exclusion, bias and deception.

The article's illustrations include a picture of Aharoni Lir pictured next to a Wikipedia puzzle globe decorated with a red swastika.

The article does not mention or explain relevant Wikipedia policies such as NPOV or verifiability. It also gives little space to Wikipedia's internal governance processes for dealing with violations, although it mentions that "From late 2024 to early 2025, English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, considered the site’s 'Supreme Court,' suspended nine pro-Palestinian editors, as well as two pro-Israel editors." Shortly after the article's publication on April 26, the Maghreb arbitration case resulted in another editor being banned indefinitely and two more being topic-banned. A May 8 article by Jewish News Syndicate quotes Aharoni Lir as acknowledging this indefinite ban and an earlier one from January as a "significant step", which however "does not repair the content contamination they left behind".

In 2020, Shlomit Aharoni Lir had published a peer-reviewed paper about gender bias on Wikipedia (Signpost coverage). In 2024, she authored a non-peer-reviewed report for The World Jewish Congress titled "The Bias Against Israel on Wikipedia", which was roundly criticized by the Wikimedia Foundation for "mak[ing] a number of unsubstantiated claims of bias on Wikipedia" (Signpost coverage). The recent Ynetnews article quotes Aharoni Lir as describing this response by WMF as "dismissive and contemptuous," however, she says, "later the atmosphere changed. The penny dropped. They understood there is bias against Israel, and that it is a problem." Aharoni Lir's later criticisms (amplified in an August 2025 Jerusalem Post article) of social media posts related to the October 7 attacks and Hamas, made by a shortlisted candidate in last year's Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees elections, appear to have contributed to the Board's controversial decision to remove that candidate from the community vote (Signpost coverage).

– M, AK, B, H

You would think that professionals with an ounce of respect for the public, or the volunteers here, would not follow the advice given by Law.com at "The Wikipedia Play: Overlooked Reputation Lever for Law Firms in the AI Era" (subscription required). The Signpost has been onto this sort of thing since at least our 2019 Special report, "Are reputation management operatives scrubbing Wikipedia articles?", if not our 2015 Op-ed, "We are drowning in promotional artspam". Or maybe it was 2012 thing 1 thing 2 thing 3? In any case, we don't call what we do a "Reputation Lever" over here. – B

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in conjunction with the Sweden and UK Wikimedia chapters, have signed a memorandum to "expand public access to reliable information on food, agriculture and related topics." The organisation plans to contribute various forms of content, and engage with the Wikimedia community across a variety of platforms. This continues an ongoing collaboration between the FAO and Wikimedia community, having collaborated with the aforementioned chapters since 2019, regularly engaging in the annual Wikimania event, and have hosted a Wikimedian-in-Residence. – M

The Washington Free Beacon addresses when deeds and misdeeds of a public figure, whether or not micro-, get included in a Wikipedia article about them. More precisely, the media coverage is about Wikipedians debating whether self-declared deeds or misdeeds (depending on your ethical stance presumably) including microlooting, are suitable for a biography of a living person (BLP). – B

Indonesian outlet Inilah reports that a deadly train collision in Jakarta, Indonesia, involving a taxi and two trains sparked off a brief edit war in the incident article as well as that of the taxi company, Green SM. One of Green SM's taxis first stalled on the tracks at a crossing and caused a collision with a train. Editors were fleshing out details of the incident, including Green SM's initial response to the collision (that the public found lacking), when anonymous editors began to remove mentions of the company and related information from both pages, with one edit summary stating (in Vietnamese) that it was done under directions of their superior to remove negative information about the company. The removed content was restored and both pages were semi-protected to stabilise them. The anonymous editors earned a sockpuppeting report and corresponding blocks. – RS

The New York Times reports that Mac Cummings's Terakeet reputation management firm charges its customers "on average" a $5–$10 million annual fee for ongoing reputation management, which might include polishing clients' Wikipedia pages, among other online activities. Some of those customers have included "MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital" (links added), though we don’t know if Terakeet edited Wikipedia on their behalf.

Of particular interest is Goldman Sachs and its outgoing General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, who was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

See this issue's Disinformation report for further coverage. – SB

In the lead-up to his trip to Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation conducted an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Topics included his opinion on AI and how it impacts Wikipedia's "vision", Elon Musk's development of Grokipedia, and how the projects maintain trust.

Wales has also participated in several other recent interviews, such as this one with The Guardian referring to the recent Australia social media ban as an 'unmitigated disaster', and this other one with Forbes, discussing Nupedia, and their "seven-step scrutiny process", making sure to advertise his latest book. – M

• One side is being paid and ...: Air Mail covers some of the basics of paid-editing, reviewing The Bureau of Investigative Journalism's (TBIJ) stories on Qatar, and other reports on Vivek Ramaswamy, and even George Santos. Stephen Harrison is quoted throughout. (link; free with registration)
• Who is corrupting whom?: In "Who Decides What's True on Wikipedia?", Coleman Hughes from The Free Press interviews Ashley Rindsberg on the influence of anonymous editors on shaping "the internet's encyclopedia through ideological bias, and corrupt[ing] the AI systems being trained on it."
• And another one: Boing Boing reports on another "much more engaging" Wikipedia game called "Catfishing", "The Wikipedia guessing game I can't stop playing".
• Training (AI) in progress: Reuters has reported that plans by tech giant Meta to record keystrokes on employees across websites will include Wikipedia, as well as on hundreds of other sites. Internal Meta messages allegedly suggested this was for the purposes of training their artificial intelligence models. CNBC followed up on the report.

• AI brain on drugs: "A new Wikipedia-style site is purportedly made entirely of AI-hallucinations, treating visitors to preposterous insights beamed from a nonexistent reality." (Futurism); "A Wikipedia Clone Built on AI Hallucinations Is Here to Hasten Along the Death of the Internet: If we're all going to drown in a sea of nonsense, it might as well at least be funny." (Gizmodo) No surprise, unfortunately, that the most-read pages on Halupedia are "dominated by topics that cross the line from dark humor into unabashed or dangerous bigotry" despite "some light moderation" by the site's owners (Fast Company).
• Doing justice: "A room of one's own on Wikipedia: The editors who have been doing justice to women on the internet for over a decade", "The initiative seeks to correct biases and show the protagonists of history beyond their role as daughters or wives" (El País in English)
• Secretly influential: Twenty-somethings and a 16-year-old contributor to Wikipedia's music articles are profiled by Pitchfork, who says they combat "music journalism's slow erosion" by joining the "secretly influential cabal that edits Wikipedia". If you haven't heard of hyperpop, dariacore, hexD, digicore, landfill indie, recession pop, shitgaze, or SoundCloud rap, try to keep up – read up, that is. And maybe help out with that SoundCloud rap draft.
• And Jimmy said, Let there be light: and there was light.: We may have misquoted just a bit there, but The Economic Times does assert that "In 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger Opened a Simple Wiki for a Slow Project: That Fix Established the Foundation for Wikipedia".
• Vandal lies on Wikipedia, fools AI and calls it an experiment: The Register reports that Ron Stoner named himself world champion of a card game on Wikipedia and fooled a couple AI bots. It's an old game that doesn't really fool anybody. Should we blame Stoner, the AI bots, or The Register?
• Wikipedia ethos, but for country data: OpenFactBook is "the same data the [U.S.] government long offered [in the CIA Factbook], only now it’s maintained by dedicated volunteers" (Fast Company)
• Larry Sanger repeats himself: The Washington Examiner posts What happened to Wikipedia’s neutrality? by Sanger. Ho hum.
• Wikipedians give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to soccer match articles: The Athletic, part of The New York Times, asks "What makes a match worthy of Wikipedia?"

• Vulnerability is what makes it work: "The Backstory: The Night Wikipedia Almost Vanished" talks (literally) about when the Wikimedia Foundation decided to make Wikipedia a donor-funded enterprise – casting it somewhat imprecisely as a bit of a story about a single night's decision about the late 2007 fundraising campaign (Signpost coverage: "Fundraiser ends, $500,000 donation received") and its banner messages. The central idea is this quote from the podcast (around the 9:29 mark): "Why did it work? Its vulnerability...if people stop caring, it disappears." (Elvis Duran and the Morning Show on demand)