Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia?

About this episode

Ashley Rindsberg discusses the ideological biases in Wikipedia and its impact on information integrity.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Coleman

Guest: Ashley Rindsberg

Topics covered

• Wikipedia
• ideological bias
• information integrity
• media criticism
• Israel-Palestine coverage

Keywords

• Wikipedia
• ideological bias
• Ashley Rindsberg
• The New York Times
• Israel-Palestine

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The New York Times, Wikipedia

Books & works: The Gray Lady Winked

Places: Israel, Palestine

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