Wikipedia donations go toward embedding feminism, racial justice in world’s largest encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that maintains and manages Wikipedia, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars during the 2022-2023 fiscal year to activist groups seeking to bring the online encyclopedia more in line with traditionally left-of-center points of view, tax documents show.

Though Wikipedia’s readers are often met with solemn messages suggesting the site may lose its independence if they don’t donate, the Wikimedia Foundation had enough surplus funds between July 2022 and June 2023 to disburse grants to nonprofits dedicated to introducing feminist and racial justice perspectives to Wiki articles, according to tax forms. Wikipedia has been criticized by many for having a left-of-center slant, with the site’s co-founder in 2010 stating that it has a “liberal bias on most topics.”

“Feminism and racial justice are not neutral points of view; they are deeply political takes on the world that entail screening out contrary facts,” Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “If Wikipedia is actively trying to boost its feminist/racial justice content, it is guaranteeing that its entries will be one-sided, if not wholly inaccurate. The site is also betraying its original mission of anonymous, blind writing and editing, a mission that proved problematic for its leftist creators from the start.”

Art+Feminism, for instance, is an organization that received approximately $382,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation “to support work to further [its] mission,” according to tax forms.

The feminist organization “envision[s] dismantling supremacist systems and creating pathways for everyone to participate in writing (and righting) history,” according to its website. “From coffee shops and community centers to the largest museums and universities in the world, Art+Feminism leads a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign that teaches people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia.”

A core part of the organization’s mission is getting more women involved in contributing to Wikipedia to correct alleged “gender biases in biographical articles.”

“When cis and trans women, non-binary people, Black, Indigenous and people of color communities are not represented in the writing and editing on the tenth-most-visited site in the world, information about people like us gets skewed and misrepresented,” Art+Feminism’s website reads. “The stories get mistold. We lose out on real history. That’s why we’re here: to change it.”

Art+Feminsim has organized events that have resulted in over 100,000 articles being written or edited since 2014, according to its website. Among its recent contributions to Wikipedia are translating a guide encouraging people to upload LGBTQ+ biographies to the site written with a “human rights perspective” and editing Wikipedia articles on abortion while raising money for an abortion fund.

Art+Feminism did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

“I’m not surprised that Wikimedia’s liberal-left leadership would do everything in its power to drive left-wing narratives into Wikipedia communities,” Capital Research Center research director Michael Watson told the DCNF.

Though the Wikimedia Foundation is shuffling money to groups intended to embed racial justice and feminism into its resources, multiple researchers have found that the website is already biased toward liberal viewpoints.

A 2016 Harvard Business School analysis found that Wikipedia exhibited significant liberal bias in articles written about abortion, civil rights, government and taxes. Another Harvard Business School study concluded that left-wing editors were more active and more partisan than their conservative counterparts.

Researcher David Rozado in 2024 analyzed language used in a sample of 1,628 Wikipedia articles related to politics and found “mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.”

Whose Knowledge, a group the Wikimedia Foundation gave roughly $200,000 to in support of its mission, aims to “decolonize the internet” by “center[ing] the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet,” according to its website. Among the recent Wikipedia contributions supported by the organization have been coverage of “queer feminist knowledge from Bosnia and Herzegovina” as well as efforts to address the “tensions between indigenous knowledge and Wikipedia’s norms and values.”

The organization has spoken out in favor of increasing the availability of abortion, encouraging people to “document feminist and LGBTQIAP+ movements, our protests, parades and other forms of resistance” to aid the pro-abortion movement, social media posts show.

Whose Knowledge did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

Reproductive rights and the fight against gender-based violence are inextricably connected, in the streets or online. In this #VisibleWikiWomxn contribution, protesters in São Paulo resist anti-abortion regulation in Brazil. pic.twitter.com/v4L5CSnJ5O

— @[email protected] on Mastodon (@WhoseKnowledge) June 20, 2024

Black Lunch Table, which has a similar mission to Whose Knowledge and Art+Feminism but focuses on black artists, got over $300,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation to support its operations.

“Black Lunch Table Wikimedians mobilize the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikipedia articles that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists,” the organization’s website reads. “In the field of mainstream contemporary art, Black artists are still marginalized within their field.”

Black Lunch Table declined to comment.

Maryana Iskander, who drew well over half a million dollars as the Wikimedia Foundation’s CEO last year, has experience in left-of-center philanthropy, having previously served as the chief operating officer of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in New York .

“Apparently, Wikipedia has simply given up on the idea of crowd-sourcing and now is full on propaganda,” Mac Donald said. “No one should give it a damn cent of support.”

The Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

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