The People Behind Project 2025 Want to Reveal the Identities of Wikipedia Editors
The Heritage Foundation sets its sites on the world's free online encyclopedia.
gizmodo.com
The People Behind Project 2025 Want to Reveal the Identities of Wikipedia Editors
The Heritage Foundation sets its sites on the world's free online encyclopedia.
By Matthew Gault Published January 8, 2025 | Comments (89)
Wikipedia, an organized and evolving repository of all human knowledge, relies on an army of anonymous volunteer editors to keep running. Wiki editors spend hours of their lives tweaking entries, fighting with each other, and attempting to create a clear picture of the truth online. According to leaked documents obtained by Forward, the Heritage Foundation is planning 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 out a pitch deck that detailed a plan to dox Wikipedia editors to Jewish foundations as part of what it claims to be an ongoing effort to combat antisemitism.
The three sides are slight but paint an unpleasant picture. The goal is to “identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position by analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, HUMINT, and technical targeting,” the first slide said.
Heritage’s plan involves using a mix of methods to draw out Wikipedia editors so that the think tank can discover their real identities. To that end, Heritage would “engage curated sock puppet accounts to reveal patterns and provoke reactions, information disclosure,” and “push specific topics to expose more identity-related details.”
The slides explain how Heritage’s operatives would create fake accounts to interact with Wikipedia editors. It also said it would use “neuro-linguistic programming” to “identify writing style, repeated phrases, and content patterns.” Operatives would even cross reference the editor’s activities 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 antisemitism and of being “too woke.”
Israel supporters have been upset over the site’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza for years, and multiple Jewish news outlets have accused the site of anti-semitism. It’s a complicated topic that goes back years, but 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 an unreliable source of information about the conflict. Holocaust scholars have since come out to say that the site’s editors are distorting the memory of the tragedy.
The conservative campaign against Wikipedia heated up two days before Christmas when Libs of TikTok got mad on X that the site had spent money on “equity.” Wikipedia is supported by donations and it publishes its financials every year for the public to go over. According to those disclosures, the foundation spent $31.2 million on “equity.” This was too much for Libs of TikTok and Elon Musk, who called for people to stop donating to the site.
What did Wikipedia do with that $31.2 million? It gave much of it out as grant money. In the Middle East, it funded the Arab Reports for Investigative Journalism, which helps train journalists in Arab countries. In Brazil, it funded the InternetLab which spent the money researching racial disparities and internet access in the country. In North America, it gave money to the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which helped fund local newsgathering.
Editing Wikipedia is always a fight. The volunteer editors don’t move in lockstep, they’re constantly tweaking, discussing, and arguing over the nature of the truth. It is, in effect, a giant community note on all human knowledge. And we know how much social media site CEOs love community notes.
Wikipedia even maintains a history of the edits and discussions, on every entry. The discussions are often more fascinating than the entries themselves. Wikipedia’s long history of writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict has its own dedicated article, complete with its own complicated and sprawling history of edits, discussions, and fights.
