Is Wikipedia biased? Shortly before I met its co-creator, Jimmy Wales, in October, Donald Trump’s lead adviser on science and technology, David Sacks, posted on X that he considers Wikipedia to be “hopelessly biased” and controlled by “an army of left-wing activists”. The conservative commentator Tucker Carlson added that he thought Wikipedia was “the most comprehensive propaganda op in human history”. Elon Musk announced his team would build Grokipedia, a replacement for (and, he claimed, a “massive improvement over”) the online encyclopaedia that Wales and his community of Wikipedians have been building since its founding in 2001.
Wales’s response to Musk was to chuckle: “Well, good luck to you, man.” A right-wing replacement for Wikipedia (called Conservapedia) has existed since 2006, but very few people read it. The revealing part of Sacks’s post is the complaint that Wikipedia is “a trusted source” for AI models; the internet barons do not like to admit how much their shiny new product owes to an old-fashioned website, made by people who aren’t in it for the money. Wikipedia receives 11 billion visits per month, more than the combined traffic of all 50 of the world’s biggest news websites. It has gained a power plutocrats want – it is the biggest website in most countries, the top search result for most subjects, the world’s main source of facts – but it has done so by remaining outside politics. This may be about to change.
The day after the 2024 US presidential election, Wales received a message from Musk. “He’s very pleasant to me, in private,” Wales says with a laugh. Wales – who is, like Musk, softly spoken and polite in person – congratulated him on the election result. Musk wanted a correction: a friend of his had been described as “far right” on Wikipedia. “It wasn’t really a very interesting complaint,” Wales told me. Musk’s friend, whom Wales declined to name, was “definitely not far right, or even right wing… I thought, ‘OK’.” By the time Wales had reached this conclusion, the community had already corrected the page anyway.
Later the same month, a new Wikipedia entry was created, referring to the straight-armed salute Musk performed, twice, at Trump’s inauguration; the article says it was “interpreted by many as a Nazi or a fascist Roman salute”, which is inarguably true. For Musk this made Wikipedia complicit in “legacy media propaganda”. He asked his followers to “defund” Wikipedia, “until balance is restored”. Wales says it had the opposite effect: “We made a ton of money that day.”
In April, a more serious challenge arrived from the Trump administration itself. The interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward R Martin, wrote to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organisation, accusing it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public”. It was not the first time the foundation had experienced direct political intimidation. Wales said his first instinct was to say: “Go fuck yourself, and here’s the First Amendment.” The foundation’s lawyers drafted something a little more detailed.
Martin’s letter implied a threat to Wikipedia’s non-profit status, which confers tax exemptions on both donors and the organisation itself. The Wikimedia Foundation already runs one of the biggest platforms on the internet for less than $200m a year. This is peanuts to Big Tech – Mark Zuckerberg spent more hiring a single AI engineer – and without non-profit status, Wikipedia (which doesn’t allow advertising) would be in serious financial trouble. All the same, Wales told me he is “not that worried”; other, much more controversial organisations have successfully defended their status. “The idea that you could strip non-profit status for the ideas that an organisation holds would be astonishing, and unlikely to hit us first,” he said – not least because Wikipedia is, in his view, “clearly more neutral than a great deal of media”.
Is it? Early in our conversation, I asked Wales why the Daily Mail is “deprecated” as a source on Wikipedia (meaning editors typically do not link to it to substantiate facts). I pointed out that even on Wikipedia pages for important news stories that were broken by the Daily Mail, the paper might be mentioned but is not linked to. Is this not bias against a paper that is (unlike Wikipedia) regulated in the UK, written by identifiable journalists and legally responsible for its stories?
His quiet, affable manner did not change, but his reply was blunt: “The Daily Mail is full of misinformation on a daily basis. It’s a crap newspaper, and we all know that. When we have a choice between the New England Journal of Medicine and the Daily Mail, then we don’t accept the Daily Mail… It’s not a good source, and I will stand by that.”
This is important to understanding Wales: he is a nerd who has spent 25 years making an encyclopaedia. His politics are the politics of the dictionary. His bedtime reading, at the time of the interview, was a user manual for an open-source server platform. The Daily Mail’s politics are not what bothers him (plenty of other right-wing papers, including the Telegraph, are listed as reliable on Wikipedia). What matters to him is this: “It’s not an encyclopaedic source.” He tells me about a 2014 Daily Mail report that China had begun “televising the sunrise on giant TV screens because Beijing is so clouded in smog”. When the article was published, Wales looked into it personally – he seems to do this a lot – and found it wasn’t true; it was a misreading of a viral picture of an advertising billboard. It would be so easy for the Mail to edit or remove it. That, as he sees it, is what the internet is for. But more than a decade later, it is still there.
In 2004, when Wikipedia was approaching its first million articles (it now has more than 65 million, in 343 languages), officials in the Bush administration began to use the term “reality-based community” to deride their critics. The journalist Ron Suskind was told by an official that the world no longer ran on elite consensus. “We create our own reality,” the official said, “and while you’re studying that reality… we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.” The Trump administration has supercharged this project. It now produces a Watergate’s worth of scandal every day. Its opponents do not have time to form a consensus on the morning’s outrage because the afternoon circus has already begun.
This puts it in direct opposition to Wikipedia, the diligently sourced consensus reality of 15 million editors. Trump began his second term by inviting conspiracy theorists Wikipedia declines to cite – including the Epoch Times and Breitbart – into the White House press pool. I asked Wales: for such a regime, isn’t the truth the first and most important enemy? “It is. It is, yeah.”
Trump’s court has also shown an appetite for seizing platforms. Musk’s takeover of Twitter – and subsequent reprogramming of the network to promote his political views – appears to be the model for Trump’s “saving” of TikTok. It is easy to imagine the plutocracy orchestrating a similar saving of Wikipedia, which would then be infused with their kind of balance.
Wales runs Wikipedia from London (he has dual British and US citizenship, and has lived here since 2011). Does he worry about travelling to the US, now? “I don’t,” he said, although he added: “I have given it thought, in a different kind of way than I have in the past.” He worries more about the “bigger picture” beyond Wikipedia. “The thing I do care about… one of the big campaigns in any authoritarian administration is to undermine trust in institutions that are independent, and that will be independent journalism, that will be Wikipedia.”
Undermining trust is one area in which generative AI seems to be an exceptionally effective tool; Trump himself often shares videos that are clearly fake. Wikipedia might be a trusted source for AI companies, which use its carefully compiled data for training their models, but it is also losing traffic to them, as the bots use what they’ve learned from it to provide instant answers. But Wales isn’t against AI, of which he is a regular user. Wikipedia, as a community of people, is “robust” against AI editing: “The community does say we’re dealing with a fair amount of AI slop coming in,” he told me, although this seems to be mostly “well-meaning people” using chatbots to write articles, rather than a coordinated attempt to rewrite the platform.
“It would be difficult for an AI to come to Wikipedia and make a hundred edits and interact with the community in a way that wouldn’t give away that it’s an AI,” he told me. “I think that’s very different from social media, where there’s good evidence that it’s happening broadly.”
Spending a quarter of a century on an altruistic community project has given Wales a sunny view of human nature. In his new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, he describes himself as a “pathological optimist”; he rejects the Hobbesian idea that life without a sovereign authority to enforce cooperation would be nasty, brutish and short. “Hobbes was mostly wrong,” he writes cheerfully. He has more time for Francis Galton, the British statistician who proposed that a crowd of amateurs presented with a difficult question (the weight of an ox, in Galton’s example) would guess their way, once their guesses were averaged, very close to the right answer.
A more cynical character might suggest that it is possible to have such an outlook when you have a nice job, plenty of money and a secure position in the reality-based community. Wales is married to Kate Garvey, who was Tony Blair’s diary secretary (their relationship blossomed at Davos). “I married into the Labour Party,” he said, although this “doesn’t mean I’ll vote for them”. He is good friends with Nick Clegg. He lives in a house in Kensington that he described to me as “middle class”. (I said I doubted there were any middle-class houses in Kensington, and he assured me: “Mine is.”)
He was also friends with Jo Cox, the MP for Batley and Spen who was murdered by an ethnonationalist shortly before the Brexit referendum. He writes about Cox’s death in The Seven Rules of Trust as a warning sign of the breakdown of consensus reality, the instability that comes from a society in which “there are no shared facts”, and the power this hands to the unscrupulous. There is a risk, he writes, that Cox’s murder could come to be seen as “a straw in the wind of the coming storm”. Then, a line or so later, the sun comes out again: “Sorry,” he writes, “I know that was a downer.”
“We are in an era,” Wales told me, “where we have elected quite a number of broadly untrustworthy politicians.” He remembers the 2008 presidential election, when he was “really happy and proud of the US”. Barack Obama and John McCain were “both proper people… just, they’re OK, they’re not lunatics”, they were both “presidential enough”. But the nature of political trust has changed. After long periods in which mainstream parties did not appear able to solve growing economic and social issues, voters have decided that the personal integrity of politicians is irrelevant.
The form of trust that is important to modern voters is the trust that a politician will actually do something about a given issue. This is why some polls show a lower trust rating for Keir Starmer, whom you would trust to borrow your car, than they do for Nigel Farage, who would leave your vehicle covered in parking tickets, in a canal. Farage’s voters trust that he will give them what they want on a specific issue. Wales sees this as a symptom of a failure to address underlying problems. For all that he is a nice, polite centrist, a devotee of “reasoned culture”, he is loyal to the crowd, and when people vote for untrustworthy politicians it is because “basically, they don’t feel like you’ve done anything for them”. This is not, he said, a positive trend: “We don’t really want to be in a world that’s [in] such an emergency that we have to overlook moral failings.”
W hen Wales was a student, he read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. He’s not an obvious choice as a fan of Hayek, whose free-market libertarian outlook was so influential on Margaret Thatcher (who once brandished Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty and declared “This is what we believe”), but Hayek’s essay described a principle that he has followed ever since – that knowledge is dispersed, and that no central authority can presume to know more, or to make better decisions, than the sum decision of all the market participants, each of whom acts on their own knowledge. This became his tenet: have faith in the crowd.
It suits his quiet, demure character. At a dinner I attended earlier this year where Wales was speaking, I saw a woman jump in her seat, suddenly realising that Wales, the guest of honour, had quietly taken the chair next to hers. This is someone who had the chance to become a tech billionaire and decided against it. He has never felt the need to be CEO of Wikipedia. To the insecure crooks of Silicon Valley and Washington this must be embarrassing, an affront: who is he, to refuse the power they would grasp?
[Further reading: Abolish the monarchy]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, No More Kings