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Wikipedia, an organized and evolving repository of all human knowledge, relies on an army of anonymous volunteer editors to keep it running. Wiki editors spend hours of their lives updating entries, fighting each other, and trying to create a clear picture of the truth online. According to leaked documents obtained from Forwardthe Heritage Foundation plans to “identify and target” those anonymous editors.
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank and the authors of Project 2025. According to Forward, Heritage sent a pitch deck detailing a plan to dox Wikipedia editors to Jewish foundations as part of what it says is an ongoing effort to combat anti-Semitism.
The three sides are light, but paint an unpleasant picture. The goal is to “identify and target Wikipedia editors who abuse their position by analyzing text patterns, usernames and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, HUMINT and technical targeting,” said the first slide.
Heritage’s plan involves using a mix of methods to cross Wikipedia’s editors so that the think tank can discover their true identity. To this end, Heritage “engages curated sock puppet accounts to reveal patterns and provoke reactions, disseminating information,” and “push specific themes to expose more details of identity.”
The slides explain how Heritage operatives create fake accounts to interact with Wikipedia editors. It also said it would use “neuro-linguistic programming” to “identify writing style, repeated sentences and content patterns.” Operators have also cross-referenced publisher activity on other sites in an effort to unmask them.
Neither the Heritage Foundation nor the Wikimedia Foundation responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Wikipedia has become a conservative bugbear in recent years, fending off both accusations of anti-Semitism and being “too woke.”
Supporters of Israel have been angry over the site’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza for years, and many Jewish media outlets have accused the site of anti-Semitism. It’s a complicated topic back years agoBut the recent dustup involves the legal definition of “Genocide” and how Wikipedia frames what Israel is doing in Gaza. Wiki editors have also been criticized for labeling the Anti-Defamation League as a unreliable source information about the conflict. Holocaust scholars have since come to say that the editors of the site are memory distortions of the tragedy.
The conservative campaign against Wikipedia heats up two days before Christmas when TikTok Libs he got angry in X that the site had spent money on “equity”. Wikipedia is supported by donations and publishes its financials every year for the public. According to these disclosures, the foundation spent $31.2 million in “equity.” This was too much for TikTok Libs and Elon Musk, who called people stop donating at the site.
What did Wikipedia do with that $31.2 million? He gave a lot of it give money. In the Middle East, he funded Arab Reports for Investigative Journalism, which helps train journalists in Arab countries. In Brazil, he funded the InternetLab which spent the money on researching racial disparities and Internet access in the country. In North America, he gave money to the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which helped finance local news gatherings.
Editing Wikipedia is always a struggle. Voluntary editors do not move in lockstep, they are constantly tweaking, discussing, and arguing about the nature of truth. It is, in effect, a giant community note on all human knowledge. And we know how much CEOs of social media sites love community notes.
Wikipedia also maintains a history of edits and discussions on each entry. The discussions are frequent more fascinating than the entries themselves. Wikipedia’s long history of writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict has its own dedicated articlecomplete with its own complicated and story unfolds of edits, discussions and fights.
