Today, Explained - What did Wikipedia do?

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

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

What's the best thing you've ever stumbled upon on Wikipedia? One of my favorites was buried deep in the Rice Krispies entry, better known as Rice Bubbles in Australia and New Zealand according to Wikipedia. I digress, about four or five scrolls deep, right near the end of the entry there's a subheading which reads Snap, Crackle and Pop Sound. It states that, the cereal is marketed on the basis of the noises it produces when milk is added to the bowl. The onomatopoeic noises differ by country and language.

And at this point I was like, go on. Turns out in Danish it's piff, puff, puff. In Swedish it's piff, paff, puff. In German it's Nysper, Naspernusper, KKK. Weird, Spanish, Pimpampum, Finnish, Rix, Racks, Pox, French, Crick, Crack, Crack. I love Wikipedia. Most of us do. But the Trump administration doesn't.

And they're threatening the free encyclopedia. How come? On Today Explained. And we're back folks. It looks like Jim from Sales just got in from his client lunch and he's gotten receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes the team is asking can he get through his expenses in that time. He's going for it is that his phone? He's snapping a pic he's texting Ramp. Jim is fast but this is unheard of.

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is for you. Bird's Eye View is coming May 16th. Follow the show on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You're listening to Today Explained. 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 that'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 as 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. So you seem like the person to ask what is happening with Wikipedia right now. The acting US attorney in Washington DC, 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.

And so there'd be a lot less funds for the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia, the servers, there'd 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, you know, donate to just another big tech company. Where is this letter coming from?

Yeah, I think the 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 Dicapedia. So Wikipedia doesn't reflect a MAGA or America First perspective. If you go to the article on January 6th, it's gonna describe it as a riot, it's gonna 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? So it's Wikipedia's first and foremost, not really reflecting the MAGA or America First point of view. Then secondly, there's a specific issue with how Wikipedia has been describing the conflict in Gaza, the Israel-Gaza war. Well, a new report by the Anti-Defamation League has found evidence of pervasive anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bias on Wikipedia. Wikipedia editors will no longer use the Anti-Defamation League as a source for entries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 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 2 million rubles for misinformation about the Russian military from Wikipedia. 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 he more recently He's been tweeting that Wikipedia should rename itself quote-unquote woke a pedia 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 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.

You know, in the early days, people were saying, this is anarchy, right? You know, anyone can edit this. How could you possibly trust it? We all remember Stephen Colbert's phrase, truthiness, but he actually had another one, w can edit this. How could you possibly trust it? We all remember Stephen Colbert's phrase truthiness, but he actually had another one. Wikiality. Last year, I defined the concept of Wikiality. When Wikipedia becomes our most trusted reference source, reality is just what the majority agrees upon. But here are a couple main transitions in the story of Wikipedia's credibility. main transitions in the story of Wikipedia's credibility.

One was in 2005, Nature ran this article comparing Encyclopedia Britannica's scientific articles and Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles. And what they found is they were roughly about the same amount of errors between them, that they were basically the same in accuracy. And so that was a big credibility boost for Wikipedia as opposed to the traditional print encyclopedia model and I also think that in terms of Wikipedia just getting better I mean it just got better because there were more eyes on it there was the mobile revolution people could look at Wikipedia pages really quickly and say hey this is wrong I'm going to fix it and so that just made Wikipedia better and better.

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 Wikipedia 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?

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Okay, today Explain is back. Steven Harrison, when we left off, we were talking about this guy, Ed Martin, who is at the center of this Trump administration fight with Wikipedia. Tell us who Ed Martin is. So Ed Martin is the acting U.S. attorney in D.C. appointed by Trump. So he was appointed by Trump day one, and he hasn't yet been confirmed by the Senate. And he comes out of Missouri, which, um, and the organization that he was working with there is called the Eagle Forum.

The Eagle Forum was founded by Phyllis Schlafly. The biggest myth connected with the Equal Rights Amendment working with there is called the Eagle Forum. The Eagle Forum was founded by Phyllis Schlafly. The biggest myth connected with the Equal Rights Amendment is that it has something to do with equal pay for equal work. It doesn't. She's very famously an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.

I'm convinced that I speak for the majority of women. They don't want to be treated just like men. 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. He's been on Russian state media over 100 times trying to promote Trump's image. I'm a member of the 74 million clubs. 74 million Americans voted for this guy, Donald Trump.

And they didn't vote, as you point out, for all of his policies in office. They voted for a personality who was fighting on their side, who believed that we could be America first. We don't. And we know that Trump famously likes TV. This is going to be great television, I will say that. And Martin just jumped on TV a lot and really praised Trump early and often, right from the very beginning.

And so he's kind of without a position and he hasn't landed as a politician himself. So I think he was probably really happy when he got the call from Trump to take up this position as US Attorney in DC. Tell us about that gig. What's the day-to-day of US Attorney? So US Attorney anywhere is the top prosecutor in the district, but in DC that's especially important because of all the federal agencies that are there. It's obviously the headquarters of federal government. So the prosecutor is supposed to do everything in the district from handling prosecutions for minor drug cases to

murder to all the civil litigation and lawsuits that go on. And lately Ed Martin's been sending a lot of these threatening letters to various nonprofit organizations that he has political disagreements with. He has sent a similarly threatening letter to the New England Journal of Medicine to Chest, which is a medical journal that doctors who specialize in the lungs and chest read. And he says, you need to start including a variety and a diversity of opinion in your medical coverage. And so instead of just reporting or including studies that the New England Journal of Medicine thinks are scientifically credible,

he wants them to report more outlier or alternative medicine and include that in the coverage for doctors. His use of this office so far, is it in line with previous US attorneys for the District of Columbia, or is he, I don't know, pushing the boundaries? I'd say right from the very beginning, it's been pushing the boundaries. For one, Ed Martin

defended a lot of the January 6 accused criminals, right? So when he arrives as the prosecutor in DC, he finds himself in the unusual position of being named on both sides of the case. He's both the prosecutor and the defense. So, I mean, that's never happened before, right? And then he gets there and he immediately fires all of the prosecutors who are working on cases against January 6th defendants. And then he says, he's reportedly said that,

we're President Trump's lawyers now. He's also sent just another letter that he sent. I think he's really interesting was one to Elon Musk and Doge and said, hey, if you need anything from the Justice Department, we will protect you. We are here to serve you. Another thing about this is the procedure. Really, if there's an issue with a nonprofit that is not following the rules that it needs for having tax-exempt status, then that issue is supposed to be brought and decided by the IRS. And if the IRS revokes tax-exempt status, then the prosecution gets referred to the

DOJ. So Ed Martin here is doing entirely the reverse. He's sending this vaguely threatening letter to Wikipedia from the DOJ. And when really all of these issues are supposed to be decided by another part of the federal government, and that's the IRS. Hmm. And maybe that's the reason he hasn't been confirmed by the United States Senate. You mentioned that there was some trouble there. What's it look like?

On the one hand, you have democratic opposition, you have Dick Durbin, who read all of the things that Ed Martin failed to disclose to the Senate, such as the fact that he has been on Russian state TV over hundreds of times and he did not disclose that in his statements to the Senate. Huh. On his podcast, Mr. Martin said, and I quote, you show me a Jewish American who feels good about the Democratic administration, and I'll show you someone who's not really Jewish. He called prosecutors who handle the January 6th cases despicable.

The Washington Post uncovered nearly 150 appearances by Mr. Martin on RT and Sputnik. Here's what he said at the event. You're not a racist if you don't like Mexicans. I'm appalled that anyone would make a statement like that. But more importantly, we're getting some cracks among Republicans in the sense that Tom Tillis has said he's a no vote for him, the January 6th language was too much.

Other Republicans have expressed concerns. We know that the president's had a pretty successful track record with his appointments this time around. What has Ed Martin said or done that is so strong that it's turning off Republicans? Ed Martin has this relationship with this guy named Tim Hale Cusinelli. An alleged Nazi sympathizer who stormed the Capitol on January the 6th just got sentenced to four years in lockup. This is a picture of Timothy Hale Cusinelli proudly sporting a Hitler mustache

in photos revealed by prosecutors in a court filing. And he's someone who's a convicted January 6 rioter and has also espoused anti-Semitic views. And Martin has appeared on multiple events with Hale. He's called him a great friend. They were on the podcast together. With a great friend of ours too, Tim Hale. The only thing you did that was really egregious to me was at one point on camera, you were sort of dancing in one of the basic that one of the areas as celebrating America It wasn't that your best dance moves. So in his response to the Senate We Ed Martin said that he is not very close with

Tim Hale Kuznayli in response to Chairman Grassley's question to mr. Martin He said quote I am not close with mr Hale Cusinelli and I otherwise do not have close consistent interactions with him and of course That answer is contradicted by mr. Martin's own words and actions Ed Martin has a lot of baggage and a bone to pick with Wikipedia. If all the baggage prevents him from being confirmed

as US attorney in DC, does that mean that Wikipedia gets a free pass and doesn't have to move to Germany or whatever? If Ed Martin isn't confirmed, then that position is temporarily appointed by the DC court, right? You would think that that person might not be as openly partisan as Trump's pick, we will see.

But then Trump does get a second chance because he's in the executive branch and he gets to appoint his pick for the position. So, I mean, it could go away with Ed Martin if Ed Martin doesn't get the role. The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are very against Wikipedia. They're against what they see as establishment,

institutions, and sort of mainstream media perspectives. So I don't think that the right, and I should say the far right's political attacks on Wikipedia will stop, even if Ed Martin doesn't get this position. Steven Harrison writes about the website Wikipedia for other websites, but he also wrote about it in his debut novel, The Editors. You can find it wherever you find your books.

Just as we were about to hit publish on this episode, we got the news that President Trump would be withdrawing Ed Martin's nomination as US Attorney in the District of Columbia. He said, I just want to say Ed is unbelievable. And hopefully we can bring him in too whether it's DOJ or whatever in some capacity. Unbelievable. We got the news just as we were sitting down to lunch to celebrate our executive producer Miranda Kennedy's birthday. Gabrielle Burbae shares the birthday with Miranda. She

made our show today with help from Hadi Mawagdi, who is somehow also celebrating a birthday within a week here in the month of May. Also shout outs to Jolie Myers, whose birthday we missed. It's Taurus season, folks. Amina Alsadi edited with footnoting by Laura Bullard. Andrea Christen's daughter mixed the show along with Patrick Boyd. This

has been Today Explained.