When clicking on a Wikipedia page, users are often met with fundraising pleas that strongly imply the site is in dire need of funds to ensure its wealth of knowledge remains available to all. A closer look at the financials behind the website, however, reveals that the foundation running Wikipedia has enough surplus cash to bankroll groups responsible for inserting left-of-center viewpoints into its articles.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization responsible for administering Wikipedia, paid out more than $1 million in grants to groups that host mass-editing events aimed at introducing the perspectives of feminists and racial justice activists into the website’s articles, according to tax forms filed in April covering activities between July 2023 and June 2024. Wikipedia has recently faced scrutiny from conservatives, including members of Congress and Elon Musk, over its alleged left-wing bias.
Wikipedia, responding to these claims, has issued another fundraising request insisting that “it’s not here to push a point of view.” The groups that fund Wikimedia to edit its content, however, are very open about their desire to push certain views and abandon neutrality.
Whose Knowledge, which the Wikimedia Foundation disclosed giving $200,000 to in its most recent tax filing, asserts that its mission is to “center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet.” It defines marginalized communities as “women, people of color, LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples, and others from the global South.”
In a report Whose Knowledge submitted to the Wikimedia Foundation detailing its use of the grant funding, the organization described how it ran a “Decolonizing Wikimedia” program, which “continued centering the plurality of decolonial feminist practices” through “edit-a-thon[s]” to increase the presence of perspectives from feminists and racial justice activists in Wikipedia’s content.
Additionally, Whose Knowledge documented how it worked to “resist colonial violence” imposed by the “newly elected Republican government” by recording its “systematic removal of data on transgender rights and LGBTIQ, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, environmental and climate crisis, and health funding.”
Whose Knowledge reported editing 535 Wikipedia pages and creating 4,827 Wikimedia Commons pages in 2024, displaying the extent of its influence.
Far from being an exception to the Wikimedia Foundation’s general grantmaking, the system set up by the foundation incentivizes work similar to that done by Whose Knowledge.
In submitting annual reports, the Wikimedia Foundation asks that its grantees report how they “prioritize[d] gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate’s context”
Wikipedia has long faced criticism over its alleged liberal bias.
Back in 2020, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger declared that the website’s “neutral point of view” policy was “dead.” Sanger cited Wikipedia pages on Democratic politicians, not including mentions of their scandals, and articles on contentious issues like abortion, using wording favored by liberals as evidence for his claim. Others have pointed out that Wikipedia dismisses conservative news outlets as reliable sources while endorsing the use of left-wing activist organizations to corroborate claims.
These debates have recently reached a head, with Republican members of Congress submitting letters to the Wikimedia Foundation, demanding information about the platform—one such letter, spearheaded by Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) sought information on whether foreign actors are manipulating information on Wikipedia to shape American public opinion. Another, written by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), requested information on how the platform is addressing political bias, if at all.
Concern over bias at Wikipedia has increased in importance because, as Cruz puts it, the website’s influence “extends even further in the age of artificial intelligence, as every major large language model has been trained on the platform.”
The Wikimedia Foundation’s liberal grantees are aware of the influence Wikipedia has over the output of AI models and are seeking to leverage it.
Art+Feminism, an activist group that the Wikimedia Foundation gave roughly $405,000 to support between 2024 and 2025, claims that “AI and algorithms reinforce real-world biases,” but through editing Wikipedia to cultivate a “feminist internet,” it can “create digital spaces that promote equity, representation, and the right to be heard, especially for marginalized groups.”
In its report to the Wikimedia Foundation, Art+Feminism bragged about engaging in “abortion activism” by organizing a mass editing event alongside the Baltimore Abortion Fund to alter abortion-related content on Wikipedia to be more in line with their views. The event doubled as a fundraiser for the abortion fund, showing that the attendees were decidedly abortion-rights supporters.
Additionally, the group reported authoring guides for prospective Wikipedia contributors using “feminist pedagogy” and establishing virtual infrastructure for “feminist editors” to collaborate on changes to Wikipedia pages.
Art+Feminism is a giant in the Wikipedia editing community. The organization claims to have written or edited 370,000 articles on the website since its inception in 2014.
Some of the grants paid out by the Wikimedia Foundation appear to serve a non-ideological purpose, intended to improve the availability of knowledge. Grants to organizations such as Idea Beyond Borders and Margika, which collectively received about $100,000, focused on making content published by the foundation accessible in more languages, for example.
The Wikimedia Foundation spent hundreds of thousands of dollars more partnering with left-of-center organizations to increase the number of non-white Wikipedia contributors and the number of articles about non-white people. Black Lunch Table and AfroCROWD collectively received roughly $450,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation to fulfill those ends.
“Increasing the number of people of African Descent who edit Wikipedia and actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture, and software movements,” a description of AfroCROWD’s mission reads. “Our digital media projects improve the presence of people of African Descent in imagery, writing, and history. We help unhide the hidden figures of Black culture online using the multimedia and technology tools found in Wikimedia.”
AfroCROWD, which associated itself with the Black Lives Matter movement, seeks to “correct inaccuracies about the American historical narrative” through its editing workshops, according to one member.
CONGRESS OPENS INVESTIGATION INTO WIKIPEDIA OVER FOREIGN EFFORTS TO ‘MANIPULATE’ INFORMATION
The Wikimedia Foundation’s support of groups like Whose Knowledge, Art+Feminism, Black Lunch Table, and AfroCROWD is long-standing, with tax filings from past years showing hundreds of thousands of dollars more going to those groups.
Musk, expressing frustrations similar to those of GOP lawmakers regarding Wikipedia’s trajectory, recently launched an alternative to the website that relies on his Grok AI model to populate pages.
“The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia,” a spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation told the Washington Examiner. “In line with its vision to ensure everyone can share in the sum of all human knowledge, the Foundation also supports individuals, institutions, and organizations around the world through grants to make more reliable information available to more people.
“Wikipedia is built on the premise that it becomes better when more people of different backgrounds and beliefs contribute well-sourced and neutral information to the project; our grantmaking supports this goal,” the spokeswoman continued. “We provide grants to a number of organizations to fund research, conferences, events to engage new Wikipedia editors, software improvements, related travel, purchase of books and educational materials, and other initiatives. In our last fiscal year, we awarded over 400 grants to organizations and people around the world. All of these grants are transparently documented. Our grants do not determine content on Wikipedia. They support volunteers and editing groups who keep Wikipedia accurate, neutral, and representative of the world’s knowledge and full range of perspectives.”
