The NYTimes Cannot See Wikipedia's Biases - Because It Shares Them ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, July 06, 2026

The NYTimes Cannot See Wikipedia's Biases - Because It Shares Them

The New York Times published a piece this weekend on Wikipedia's many enemies. AI companies are scraping it. The MAGA right is smearing it. The US government is hectoring it. Authoritarian regimes are locking up its editors. Through it all, we're assured, Wikipedia remains a bastion of objectivity — "beloved," "credible," a "trustworthy source," per CEO Bernadette Meehan, who gets to make her case in her own words at length. Only crackpots have a problem with Wikipedia, we are reliably told.

There's just one problem with that framing. Wikipedia itself has admitted its Israel-related articles were hijacked.

For at least two years, reporters and bloggers — Aaron Bandler at the Jewish Journal and then JNS, the pseudonymous Wikipedia Flood blog, Ashley Rindsberg at Tablet — documented what Rindsberg dubbed the "Gang of 40": a network of editors who racked up 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 Israel-related articles, rewriting the opening line of "Zionism" to say the movement wanted a Jewish state with "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible," stripping Hamas's charter references to the destruction of Israel, deleting Israel as the origin of the Jewish people from the article on Jews. This wasn't a fringe accusation. In January 2025, Wikipedia's own Arbitration Committee — the "Wikipedian Supreme Court," in the site's own description — banned eight editors from the topic area by name, six identified with the pro-Palestinian side (Selfstudier, Nableezy, Nishidani, Levivich, Iskandar323, Makeandtoss) and two with the pro-Israel side (BilledMammal, AndreJustAndre). More sanctions followed this year, including an indefinite ban for an editor called TarnishedPath in the weeks before the Times piece ran, with a University of Haifa researcher calling it "an important, if overdue, step."

That is Wikipedia, using its own procedures, concluding across multiple cases that its own coverage of Israel had been captured by organized editors. Even after the bans, Wikipedia let the disputed "as few Palestinian Arabs as possible" line stand — an administrator froze it in the article's lead for a full year, shielding the banned editors' preferred wording from challenge until they could appeal. Wikipedia did the same thing to the title of another page, freezing debate over the name "Nuseirat rescue and massacre" — which accuses Israel of a massacre for a hostage-rescue raid — so that no one could even discuss changing it until August 2026. And it wasn't content to let these articles sit quietly in the archive: Wikipedia's own editors linked the "Gaza genocide" article in the "In the news" section of the site's main page, the highest-traffic real estate on one of the ten most visited websites on earth, putting an accusation Wikipedia's own arbitration process was simultaneously investigating in front of millions of readers a day.

This should be the single most relevant fact to a story asking whether Wikipedia's neutrality is a settled matter or an open question, and the Times left it out entirely. Instead, the Times lists a set of critics and files them all under one label: Elon Musk, Ted Cruz, David Sacks, Tucker Carlson, "and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001" — five names, one sentence, one bucket: "the MAGA right." Most of them would object to that label. None of them would say they mean the same thing by their criticism. Musk thinks Wikipedia is "Wokepedia." Sanger, an actual co-founder who wrote much of the site's original neutrality policy, has spent years arguing the site abandoned it. Those are not the same complaint, and lumping them together does exactly what it's designed to do: it lets the reader dismiss all five with one word instead of engaging any of them.

Sanger's case is the giveaway, because the Times itself knows better. Eleven days earlier, on June 25, it ran an entire article on Sanger's ban — his "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity" proposal, the procedural vote that got him banned "indefinitely" days later, his own furious response that he'd been blocked "by the 'consensus' of a mob" with "no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury." That piece treated him as a serious subject worth understanding on his own terms. This piece drops him into a list next to Tucker Carlson and moves on. Nothing about Sanger changed between June 25 and July 5. What changed is which narrative he was being used to serve.

And the criticism of Wikipedia isn't new, and it certainly isn't MAGA. The ADL spent months documenting the same "Gang of 40" pattern the arbitration committee eventually acted on — a report the Times never mentions. Wikipedia's own editors, for their part, responded to the ADL's findings by voting the ADL "generally unreliable" specifically at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism, while keeping it "generally reliable" everywhere else, including on hate groups and extremism. The administrator who closed that vote wrote that the ADL has "a habit... of conflating criticism of the Israeli government's actions with antisemitism." Think about that: Wikipedia's own governance apparatus adopted, as an official sourcing rule, the argument that criticism of Israel is being mislabeled as antisemitism — while Wikipedia's own arbitration committee was simultaneously banning editors for exactly the kind of rabid anti-Israel distortion the ADL had flagged. Wikipedia disqualified the messenger while acting on the message. You wouldn't know any of this reading the Times piece, which treats Wikipedia's reliability as a foregone conclusion rather than a subject with an actual paper trail. (An earlier interview with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales last November likewise doesn't even touch on the anti-Israel bias as he defends its entries on topics like abortion and how well opposing editors work together.)

Maybe the reason the Times can't see any of this is that it suffers from the same affliction it's covering for. A newsroom that already shares Wikipedia's general politics — anti-Israel by reflex in places, reliably left of center, comfortable treating its own instincts as neutral — isn't equipped to notice when an institution built on the same instincts calls itself neutral too. It isn't hiding the evidence. It doesn't register as evidence, because the lens producing Wikipedia's judgment calls is the same lens the Times used to write the story.

This matters well past Wikipedia's own pages, which is what makes the Times' AI section so thin. The piece frames artificial intelligence as a threat to Wikipedia — chatbots "gorging on a data buffet," "polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia." This has some truth to it, but it doesn't mention the real danger from AI.. Nathan Marcus, a former Education Department civil rights official, told JNS that what's frightening isn't just how many people rely on Wikipedia, but that AI models "rely so heavily on it" too — the site can "launder accusations" from anti-Israel sources and "turn them into encyclopedia entries," which then "become the basis for AI-generated materials that become the basis for all sorts of education, indoctrination and decision-making." A ruling like "the ADL is generally unreliable on antisemitism where Israel is concerned" doesn't stay contained to one article once a model has trained on it — it becomes background assumption, repeated with the same confidence as any other fact the model learned. An article asking whether Wikipedia deserves the trust it's given had every reason to ask what happens when that trust gets inherited automatically by the tools answering a growing share of the world's questions. It asked instead whether the AI companies are treating Wikipedia fairly.

Either way, this is a case study in why the Times has bled the trust it used to have. The information was sitting right there — the arbitration committee's own bans, the ADL report, the Times' own reporting on Sanger three weeks earlier. The paper had everything it needed to write the piece its own headline promised: a real look at a real controversy over Wikipedia's objectivity. It chose not to. That's not an accident of space constraints. It's an editorial decision, made by editors, about what the story was allowed to say.

Which puts the Times in exactly the position it's describing. Wikipedia's article on Zionism isn't biased because facts are biased. It's biased because a group of editors decided what counted and what didn't. The Times' article on Wikipedia isn't biased because facts are biased, either. It's biased because a group of editors decided what counted and what didn't. This is the same failure of hubris, with both Wikipedia and the NYT insisting that their own policies inoculate them from bias, that blinds them to the bias itself.

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