The Trump administration is going after the free encyclopedia. Journalist Stephen Harrison explains how the site went from “the last bastion of shared reality” to “Wokepedia.” This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey with help from Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What did Wikipedia do to annoy the Trump administration?
I'm Stephen Harrison. I'm a journalist who has covered Wikipedia for the past eight years for sites like Wired and Slate. I'm also the author of The Editors, which is a suspense novel inspired by Wikipedia. And outside of that, I'm a lawyer, and my practice area is IT transactions.
So you write a lot about Wikipedia and you even wrote a book about Wikipedia called The Editors. Does that mean that you are a Wikipedia editor?
Well, I'd say I'm a low-key Wikipedia editor. I'm the type who fixes typos, uploads photos. I spent some time working on an article about the Stonely P, which is my favorite bar and restaurant here in Dallas. It's really famous. But I'm not like an extensive Wikipedia editor. And I think it really has to do with personality. Like I'm really driven to do investigative journalism and reporting.
And so I research a story and it gets published in a newspaper somewhere. And then that article ends up as a source, a reliable source, that's linked on Wikipedia. So I feel like I'm contributing to Wikipedia in that way more so than the actual editing.
Chapter 2: Why is Wikipedia losing its tax-exempt status?
So you seem like the person to ask, what is happening with Wikipedia right now?
The acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. And the Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that helps operate Wikipedia.
In that letter, he said that, It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. In light of these concerns, my office seeks information pertaining to Wikimedia's compliance with the laws governing its tax-exempt status.
There are a lot of consequences if Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation lose its tax-exempt status. One, they'd have to pay taxes, right? You know, state and federal taxes. And, of course, Wikipedia doesn't really have a way other than donations of bringing in money. Wikipedia famously doesn't have ads. It's not selling your personal information like every social media site does.
And so there would be a lot less funds for the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia, the servers. There would be a lot less staffing and educational initiatives. And I also just think that people would be a lot less likely to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation if it became a for-profit enterprise.
People want to donate to the nonprofit idealistic goal of a free internet encyclopedia, and they don't want to donate to just another big tech company. Where is this letter coming from? Yeah, I think that conservatives in recent years, not always, but in recent years, have really decided that they have a bone to pick with Wikipedia. Do leftists really now control the editing?
Well, it's working side by side with the media. This is not the first time that we've seen a kind of unspoken collusion between Wikipedia editors and their friends in the media.
Musk made headlines by offering Wikipedia $1 billion, but with one unforgettable condition — The platform must rename itself Dickipedia.
So Wikipedia doesn't reflect a MAGA or America First perspective. If you go to the article on January 6th, it's going to describe it as a riot. It's going to speak to the violence, all the things that were reported at the time. Whereas Ed Martin, this DOJ prosecutor that Trump appointed, would say, well, it was like a big party. It was a celebration, right?
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Chapter 3: How are global politics affecting Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia articles on that will say things like various... Human rights experts and organizations have described Israel's actions as war crimes, right? And they're drawing from the sources that say that.
And so organizations like the Heritage Foundation have pledged to go after individual Wikipedia editors to target them and intimidate them and try to get that information and that content removed from Wikipedia. And then lastly, I would say that we see this in a lot of authoritarian regimes around the world.
China has blocked all language editions of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has said he would rather have no Wikipedia in China than comply with any form of censorship.
We have in Russia, they have tried to find and they have fined Wikipedia several times.
On February 28, a Russian court fined the Wikimedia Foundation two million rubles for misinformation about the Russian military from Wikipedia.
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Chapter 4: Is Wikipedia biased or controlled by leftists?
Russian MPs voiced outrage that Wikipedia described Russia's capture of Crimea as an annexation. And then countries like Saudi Arabia have
arrested Wikipedia editors for putting views on the encyclopedia that go against the state. So I think that a lot of authoritarian governments don't like Wikipedia. They don't like this independent source of knowledge that they can't control.
In 2018, The Atlantic magazine called Wikipedia the last bastion of shared reality. It sounds like from what you're saying is going on right now with Wikipedia and the Trump administration, that's not the case anymore. How long has it been the case? Is this simply a Trump thing or is there something deeper going on in the United States?
I think there's something deeper going on because Elon Musk is... famously one of the biggest critics of Wikipedia. But now, back in 2017, he said, I love Wikipedia. It just keeps getting better and better. And now, more recently, he's been tweeting that Wikipedia should rename itself quote-unquote Wokipedia.
He's been getting his followers on X and saying, hey, you shouldn't donate to the foundation.
Since legacy media propaganda is considered a valid source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda. Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored.
So I think that there's just been a really significant effort, particularly from the right wing, whether that's Musk or the Heritage Foundation and now Ed Martin, to discredit Wikipedia and tarnish its reputation.
Is there bias on Wikipedia? I mean, obviously it is footnoted, but I remember, you know, back in college when my professors would say like, and don't use Wikipedia as a source, as if it were some sort of, you know, information wasteland. I feel like it eventually grew out of that negative space it was in. And now it feels like it's, what, upsetting the right.
Well, it's fair to say that Wikipedia has had a pretty big reputational change over the years. I remember that in college myself. In the early days, people were saying, this is anarchy, right? Anyone can edit this. How could he possibly trust it? We all remember Stephen Colbert's phrase, truthiness, but he actually had another one, wikiality.
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Chapter 5: How has Wikipedia's credibility changed over time?
And so we get to the point by 2018, Facebook and YouTube are starting to link to Wikipedia pages when there's a piece of content that might have misinformation. So even today, if you look up flat earth theory on YouTube, you'll see the Wikipedia page for flat earth theory that says that it's been debunked and that it's pseudoscientific and that we know that the earth is not in fact flat.
So Wikipedia throughout the years gets more and more credible, more and more thorough. And yet here we are in 2025 and it's in the crosshairs of the federal government. How has Wikipedia responded to this threatening letter from the Trump administration?
Well, the Wikimedia Foundation first put out a statement saying that it's committed to its principles, which include neutral point of view, no original research, the kinds of things that make the articles the way they are. It made the point that the foundation... The entity that the Trump DOJ sent the letter to isn't actually the one who's editing the articles.
That's the community of volunteers around the world. And it said that Wikipedia in many ways is one of the last sites that fulfills the promise of the early internet and that it's nonprofit. and that it's designed to educate and not persuade people. I will say that some Wikipedia editors are saying, hey, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco in the United States.
But this has always been a global project, a free encyclopedia that anyone can use. And so the Wikipedia editors themselves are saying, hey, is this maybe time to move to Germany or some other country in the EU that isn't experiencing what Wikipedia editors are perceiving as the democratic backsliding under the Trump administration. Wow. How do you say Wikipedia in German? Oh, you got me there.
Deutsch Wikipedia. I don't know.
Wikipedia.
More ahead with Stephen on the man behind this threatening letter to Wikipedia. Will his story intersect with Nazism? Place your bets now. This is Today Explained.
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Chapter 6: What is Wikipedia's response to the current threats?
In that organization, the Eagle Forum is very much anti-LGBT, anti-feminist, just an ultra-conservative organization that really focuses on social conservative issues.
I would say most women would like to have a husband and children if they devote their prime years of childbearing years and when they have good looks and good figure and virtue, if they pass all those by and devote it to working 60 hours a week in a profession, time passes them by.
I think it's really two things that made him become part of the Trump orbit. One, he came out really early for Trump and then he repeatedly boosted Trump in the media. So he co-authored a book with Phyllis Schlafly called The Conservative Case for Trump. And this was really early. This is 2016. He has this podcast called The Pro-America Report.
This is The Pro-America Report with Ed Martin.
So much happening. I think the title we put on this program is Trump's winning. Trump's winning. America's winning. It's unbelievable, really.
He just continuously boosted Trump.
And people feel great. The market's way up. There's talk of deals. There's talk of peace in the world. There's talk of progress. Trump is winning over and over again.
Then he appeared on Russian state media outlets.
Who's got the power to use the woke movement and the cancel culture to damage how we're living together? That's what's happening in America.
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