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In the media

Wales walk-off, antisemitism, supernatural powers, feminism turmoil, saints, and sex

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By Bri, Smallbones, HaeB and Andreas Kolbe

Jimmy Wales walks out on "stupid question"

TKTK
Jimmy Wales bids his interviewer adieu (Jimmy Wales not pictured)

Jimmy Wales, in Germany to promote his book The Seven Rules of Trust, answered the same question four times in one minute in a Jung & Naiv video interview hosted by Tilo Jung – before walking out of the interview. The question posed by Jung, known for a faux-naïve interview style inspired by Stephen Colbert, was: "Are you the founder or co-founder of Wikipedia?" Wales's answer was: "It doesn't matter."

The incident attracted press coverage in Germany –

– and further afield, including British tabloids:

The Times of India noted that the incident has widely circulated on social media (see e.g. a Reddit thread with over 6,700 comments). – S, AK

"Grokipedia Is a Warning"

An article by The Intelligencer titled "Grokipedia Is a Warning" finds that Elon Musk's "Wikipedia clone is ridiculous" but "also a glimpse of the future":

Grokipedia, and Musk's AI projects in general, invite us to see LLMs as powerful and intrinsically biased ideological tools, which, whatever you make of Grok's example, they always are.

A somewhat similar argument is made in a London School of Economics blog post by Patrick Gildersleve (author of several peer-reviewed research publications about Wikipedia). He argues that Grokipedia has essentially fallen flat, with little Google visibility and dwindling traffic. But Gildersleve notes that Wikipedia is operating in an ever more hostile political environment, and describes Grokipedia as

a warning shot for AI’s real impact on Wikipedia and open knowledge. [...] AI is a threat to Wikipedia, but Grokipedia itself is little more than a politically charged sideshow to the deeper battles underway in the digital knowledge ecosystem.

An article by disinformation scholar Renée DiResta in The Atlantic, titled "The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia", states:

The free internet encyclopedia is widely used to train AI. That's why conservatives are trying to dethrone it.

As for the Grokipedia concept, she says:

It's pure algorithmic output with no community, no transparency, no clear process for dispute resolution. The irony is striking: Even as Musk and his friends attack Wikipedia for supposed bias, he is building something far more opaque and unaccountable.

As a concrete example, DiResta highlighted serious issues in the Grokipedia article about herself:

The remarkably thorough article about me contains nonsense that conspiracy theorists entered into congressional proceedings—including claims that my former research team at Stanford Internet Observatory censored 22 million tweets during the 2020 presidential campaign. [...] I reported these issues via the Suggest Edit tool included in Grokipedia’s user interface—so far, to no avail. On Wikipedia, I could appeal to an editor by dropping a note on a Talk page. But Musk’s version misses what gives Wikipedia authority: human consensus.

However, in a post on her Substack several days later, DiResta reported that Grok had resolved these:

Grokipedia also has hallucination issues—a known challenge with AI, but a particularly big one for an encyclopedia. I experienced this firsthand [...] I flagged the errors for the chatbot. Tonight, around two weeks later, just as I was getting ready to publish this post, it finally fixed them.

Journalist and novelist Stephen Harrison discusses Wikipedia and the role of an editor community in a Slate podcast titled "Wikipedia Enters the Culture Wars" (transcript).

– AK, H

"Scandals Erased, Editors Paid: How Big Law Firms Try to Control Their Wikipedia Pages" – that's the headline of a law.com article (published back in September, archive) that told its readers:

A deep analysis by Law.com shows how some law firms pay editors, flout the rules, whether consciously or not, and remove controversies to curate their image on one of the world's most popular websites.

The article looks at the editing history of several law firm articles. It gives examples of firms using PR consultants who openly disclosed their work in line with Wikipedia's rules and quotes a commercial editor who makes undisclosed edits. It also covers the politicisation of law firms:

Law firms with connections to U.S. President Donald Trump or his executive orders often show evidence of this on their Wikipedia pages.

The Verge published an article on Jeffrey Epstein-related Wikipedia editing. The article mentions and indeed quotes from a March 2020 Signpost piece by User:Smallbones. See the current issue's Disinformation report for more. – AK

Unionization efforts and political turmoil among Art+Feminism staff

A recent article in Nonprofit Quarterly, titled "We Stood Up: Organizing at a Feminist Nonprofit", details the author's critique of a 501(c)3 organization whose "founders were so assured in their politics that they placed the word 'feminism' in the organization’s name", but that

over time, and with new leadership, politics were treated more as an impediment than as a part of our mission. For example, developing a material commitment to complement the organization’s Black Lives Matter statement was a challenge, as was sustaining a disability justice praxis, or taking a clear stance against apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.

Leaning both on provocation and intention, I began to assert that we ought to rename the organization, replacing "feminism" with "women" to more accurately reflect our focus on the representation of careered, cisgender women. (The organization, not surprisingly, did not budge.)

The name of the organization containing the word "feminism" is not directly provided in the article, but the author's biography on NPQ leaves little doubt which organization it is referring to: "She was terminated from her nonprofit job during a union campaign; she continues to organize with her former coworkers in Art+Feminism Workers United!"

(The Wikipedia article about Art+Feminism currently describes it as "an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about women artists, which started in 2014." According to the most recent Form 990 for Art Feminism Inc, the nonprofit had a budget of about 0.5 million USD in 2022/23; see also meta:Art+Feminism User Group. Its current grant request for the Wikimedia Foundation's "Wikimedia Community Fund" is for $1.3 million USD over three years, i.e. 2026–28. It mentions that the organization currently has three staff members – two full time and one part time – and that "[t]he biggest change [regarding staffing, from previous years] is sunsetting the Regional Ambassador Program. [...] This also resulted in the layoff of the Program Director role where the majority of the role was managing this program." A separate document details the rationale for this change.)

A more recent post by the aforementioned "Art+Feminism Workers United" follows up on the NPQ piece, clarifying that the organization had indeed justified the NPQ author's firing by "citing a 'lack of work' due to the elimination of the regional ambassador role as the reason", but still attempts to put it into the context of wider threats to open knowledge:

Across open knowledge sectors, the threats to our work are ongoing: whether it's recent threats at the Wiki North America Conference, the far right attacks on Wiki groups like Art+Feminism, or the undemocratic removal of two candidates, including the only woman and the only openly queer candidate, from the Foundation’s Board Election ballot, it can feel intimidating to do this work in a public sphere; but more than ever, the time to ensure A+F is operating in alignment with our values is now.

In an earlier post from around July 2025, the collective – all three of them still employed at A+F at the time – had focused less on external politics and more on internal organizational issues, which they claimed to have caused a concerning decline in the organization's impact:

Since 2019, the number of Art+Feminism events has dropped by 80%, and attendance has declined by 82%. Our global footprint, which once spanned 43 countries, now extends to only 27. Even our core Wikipedia contributions, new articles and edits, have collapsed by more than 94% in just the past year.

– H

In brief

A fine Pleistocene proboscidean, whatever its sex
From Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year
Illustration at Sexuality of Jesus: "unorthodox views under the guise of academic balance"?
  • No theories on Jesus' sexuality, please: Christian magazine Charisma questions the article Sexuality of Jesus, whose lede says it covers "alternative and fringe theories" on Jesus's sexuality. Charisma objects, saying the Wikipedia community "allow[s] activist contributors to insert unorthodox views under the guise of academic balance".
  • Saintly Wikimedia donors: Canadian news satire site The Beaverton pokes fun at Wikimedia's ongoing banner campaign, imagining a reader who achieves sainthood by responding "not with apathy, but with a one-time contribution of the minimum listed amount ($2.75)". But with fame comes scrutiny, and a fictitious journalist calls her "a fake and a phony! ... My sources have shared that she didn't even mean to donate to Wikipedia, she just accidentally clicked on 'Payment Method' and her Google Chrome extension already had the credit card info filled out. And it wasn't even her credit card, it was her dad's!"
  • "Wikipedia's Antisemitism": An article published by Orthodox Jewish outreach group Aish HaTorah welcomed Jimmy Wales' call to action regarding the Gaza genocide article, and said additional bias, antisemitism, and falsehoods could be found in the articles Jewish Supremacy, Well poisoning, Palestinian genocide accusation, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, and Jews.
  • American History X, but from a Nazi's AI's point of view: "Grokipedia cites the neo-Nazi website Stormfront as a source 42 times", NBC News reports based on Cornell University research that analyzed 883,000 articles. The Stormfront-love ironically included its citation six times in Grok's rewrite of the American History X overview. The NBC writers noted "Wikipedia and Grokipedia rely on some of the same sources, with 57 internet domains showing up in the top 100 source lists for both encyclopedias. But the two sites often diverge, especially when it comes to sources Wikipedia editors consider unreliable or even blacklist", another example being conspiracy theory site Infowars.
  • Wales gets Forked: The New York Times's Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviewed Jimmy Wales in the NYT podcast Hard Fork, titled "How Wikipedia Is Responding to the Culture Wars" (part of the book tour, see last issue). The podcast runs almost an hour long, with no walkouts as far as we could tell.
  • Superpowered, and lawsuit-proof: "Wikipedia's army of volunteers is its superpower", says The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The distributed volunteer base makes it "hard to sue even as it has been drawn into partisan political wars" (though we admit we aren't gods).
TKTK
Fruit? Vegetable? Movie star?
Footnotes:
  1. ^ The top ten editors are: WikiEditor50, Amygmain, Toytoy, Not Beethoven, Northamerica1000, Asamboi, Mlgc1998, Julia033, and two anonymous editors.



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It's terrible! Wikipedia is just as bad as the BBC, a source we consider reliable and which is regularly accused of anti-Palestinian as well as anti-Israel bias. /s but surely that shows how seriously we should take these complaints. (t · c) buIdhe 02:43, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Most political parties and pressure groups accuse the BBC of bias against them. This is a good thing, as it means they’re getting the balance about right most of the time by not being biased in favour of any of the complainants (which is of course what they all desire). Neiltonks (talk) 20:33, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming that if "both sides" dislike the BBC, the BBC must be right, is an example of the golden mean fallacy. (t · c) buIdhe 20:38, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily. We're not trying to come down halfway between, we're trying to get it right according to the facts and this will always mean that we're condemned by groups that find anything but 100% agreement unacceptable. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 23:30, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
facts reliable sources. Polygnotus (talk) 23:47, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If there was a debate whose sides are "2 + 2 = 4" and "2 + 2 = 5", is it bad that the equals-4 side finds "anything but 100% agreement unacceptable"? LightNightLights (talk • contribs) 13:45, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think Hank Green's take on Jimmy Wales' reaction to that question makes the most sense to me. Was it a good response? Probably not, but I don't blame him for having reacted that way. Larry Sanger has contributed significantly less to what Wikipedia is today relative to Wales, but Sanger criticises Wikipedia from the right as if he has had the same influence on Wikipedia as Wales. A better answer may have been something along the lines of "I am a co-founder on paper but the founder in spirit", but given that the interview was about his book on trust and not Wikipedia, I could understand him getting frustrated over a bad first question that is arguably irrelevant to the topic at hand. Yue🌙 03:59, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I love that there's so many people on Reddit and elsewhere defending the interviewer, saying "His show's 'Jung and Naive', the point is to be ignorant", when of course ignorant has nothing to do with being a terrible interviewer and an a-hole. The Jung guy is just terrible at his job and if he really is that popular in Germany, it makes me seriously question the German public's ability to properly socially interact. Though I suppose it is a common stereotypical joke that Germans don't know how to interact socially with other people in a positive way? So I guess that tracks. SilverserenC 05:28, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I personally know Germans who are smart, sensitive and have great social skills. Imagine having to answer the same dumb question for year after year as if its some kinda gotcha when it is nothing more than meaningless semantics. Polygnotus (talk) 05:49, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's why I'm confused on why this specific interviewer is popular at all within the country. It seems like he exemplifies the negative stereotypes about Germans and is actively harmful (such as in this case) to non-German understanding of German culture and social norms. SilverserenC 05:53, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The whole idea is that I play a bad reporter, who’s unprepared, who’s not very good at his job, who asks seemingly naive questions,” Jung said. “When I need to I can always play dumb, I can always say, ‘Huh? What? Why?’ I think especially politicians are not really used to being asked such fundamental questions. [2] Its this whole genre of uncomfortable/cringe stuff which started with Kaufman, and then moved to Eric Andre and Nathan Fielder and then got adopted by people far less talented like Bobbi Althoff. It used to be funny when Kaufman, Andre and Fielder did it. Polygnotus (talk) 05:59, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about the German version, but that sounds a bit like the Colbert Report back in the day. Where Colbert simultaneously interviewed people but was also playing a character. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 06:10, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah that same source says The character he created for his interview segments is modeled in part after Stephen Colbert’s approach to his ultra-conservative alter ego[3]
You'd expect Wales to have someone working for him who tells him what to expect but I guess not. Still, there are way better gotcha questions. Polygnotus (talk) 06:12, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've tried to think of another more substantive question I would want Jimmy Wales to be asked that might actually be interesting to people outside Wiki projects and I'm not coming up with anything. I think it was useful for showing that Wales is just another Silicon Valley type who lives a life insulated from people disagreeing with him and that his book is probably a bit trite. The kind of thing most people could write with the help of a professional ghost writer, but don't because they're not famous enough to sell a book. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 23:52, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@MtBotany We don't really use Jimbo as a wise wizard on a mountain top; that is not his role.
The community doesn't actually need someone like that.
Because our system is consensus-based we just need someone who is generally a good egg and is willing to take on some responsibilities, not an infallible superhuman that answers questions in the style of the oracle(s). After a few beers he'll probably have an interesting story or two, but I am not sure if they are for public consumption. Polygnotus (talk) 05:57, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it's worth going into what's the specific distinction between Sanger and Wales as project founders. Both ended up criticizing Wikipedia from the outside (instead of voting on new rules) but Wales in a paroxysmal way, over the appearance of specific topics, and Sanger in a radical way, over the appearance of specific editors. Lumbering in thought (talk) 15:12, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sanger was a paid employee who was laid off in February 2002, just a bit over a year after Wikipedia started, at the point where Wikipedia had about 20,000 articles [no, that's not a typo]; he has essentially not contributed since, not counting his frequent critiques. Wales provided not only things like the servers that the website ran on, but massive amounts of **upaid** time as he worked with the community to establish all the policies and guidelines that - I'm guessing - most editors, today, think somehow sprang up on their own. In 2003 he **donated** Wikipedia to the new Wikimedia foundation; he never got a dime from it, and he never was a "Silcon Valley type", though his reputation from the success of Wikipedia got was worth money, indirectly. (And no, Wales and other Wikimedia Foundation Board members aren't paid, so that's yet more time he has contributed to the foundation.)
The edits of User:Larry Sanger and User:Jimbo Wales are quite different - Wales has almost 15,000, compared to Sanger's less than 2,00. Only about 2,000 of Wales' edits are in mainspace (articles). The rest are mostly his efforts to make Wikipedia an ongoing success. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:31, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have to agree with Buidhe about the importance of the opinion of an organisation that works with Israel's Foreign Ministry on "hasbara fellowships". Likewise we're citing Spiked (a fringe / alt-right British "magazine") and 2 British tabloids that we explicitly describe as not being reliable sources. Perhaps we should all pay less attention to the opinions of propagandists — especially on Contentious Topics such as Israel/Palestine, where we have a long history of working to ensure our content is neutral and objective? — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 11:05, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I brought up the question of the Spiked coverage specifically in the Newsroom. We discussed it and decided that In the media is the correct forum for coverage about Wikipedia, without necessarily adding commentary about the merit of that coverage, though we may provide context. Until it's archived, you can see the discussion at "Ashley Rindsberg, again?" ☆ Bri (talk) 17:55, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If by "citing" you mean it's mentioned on this Signpost "In the media" page, it's quite appropriate for the Signpost to mention stuff we explicitly describe as not being reliable sources. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:04, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On Art+Feminism, thanks for drawing our attention to their current problems. It is indeed sad to see the negative influence of political attitudes towards feminism and related "woke" issues on this enterprise. Those involved in A+F have helped to contribute to Women in Red's coverage of many hundreds of notable women around the world, thanks to the efficiency of their annual editathons over the past eight or nine years. In my opinion, their contribution deserves our full recognition and continued support.--Ipigott (talk) 16:20, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • Wikimedia's ongoing banner campaign: I just wanted to point out that Wikimedia could completely stop bothering readers for donations other than a simple donate link in the corner, and keep the website running for well over a hundred years, depending on how ineffective the donate link turned out to be and how the endowment performs. I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:55, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Pretty sure WW3 will increase server costs. You can already buy a pretty decent fleet of electric cars for what I spend on RAM each year. Polygnotus (talk) 10:37, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We seem to be having a big antisemitism problem. The problem is... how do we fix it? How do we identify things as antisemitist (and things that are false positives)? --ISometimesEatBananas (talk) 00:26, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

They usual way: we discuss. Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_223#Should_we_have_an_essay_or_something_on_"Jew_tagging"? etc. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:07, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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