Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia?
4/20/20261 hr 3 min
Ashley Rindsberg has spent years investigating how ideological bias corrupts institutions that present themselves as neutral arbiters of truth. His book The Gray Lady Winked exposed how The New York Times got major stories wrong across decades of reporting. Now he turns his attention to Wikipedia, the internet’s default encyclopedia and one of the most influential sources of information in the world. Rindsberg finds that while Wikipedia remains a reliable resource for most topics, its most politically charged articles have been quietly captured by a small group of anonymous editors working to push a coherent ideological agenda. He and Coleman dig into how these editors operate, how a handful of people can dominate entire topic areas, and why almost nobody can stop them. They also get into the specific case of Wikipedia’s Israel-Palestine coverage, where a group of around 40 dedicated editors have made over a million edits across thousands of articles. And they discuss why all of this matters far beyond Wikipedia itself, as the encyclopedia’s biases are absorbed by Google, fed into AI systems, and baked into the information infrastructure and AI systems that will increasingly decide what counts as true. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Coleman Hughes· Host0:27
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Ashley Rindsberg. Ashley is the senior editor at Pirate Wires, a new media company. He's also the author of Tel Aviv Stories and The Gray Lady Winked, which we talked about last time he came on the show a few years ago. Today, we talked about the threats to objectivity in journalism. In particular, we talk about how Wikipedia has evolved from an unbiased source of information to a source controlled by small cliques of self-interested admins. We also talk about alternatives to Wikipedia, like Crocopedia. We talk about the implications, uh, of Wikipedia bias on LLMs and the future of information and much more. So without further ado, Ashley Rindsberg. [upbeat music] Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at a coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time