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Two House Republicans are on the hunt for problematic Wikipedia contributors.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and Cybersecurity Chairwoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina allege there are “organized efforts…to influence US public opinion on important and sensitive topics by manipulating Wikipedia articles.”
The lawmakers are seeking “documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies, as well as [Wikipedia’s] efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics,” they wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander.
That includes “records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within academic institutions,” the letter says.
Comer and Mace point to a Russia-based disinformation network that “infected” AI chatbots with pro-Kremlin misinformation by publishing millions of articles in different languages and pushing its narratives across the web in the hope they would be incorporated as training data used by large language models (LLMs).
They also cite a March study from the Anti-Defamation League that alleged “extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages.”
“Americans, and increasingly AI chatbots, rely on Wikipedia to disperse credible and unbiased information on a variety of topics and persons of interest,” Comer and Mace argue.
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Wikimedia tells us it has “received the request from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and we are reviewing it closely. We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Committee’s questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform.”
In April, Wikipedia said it had been overwhelmed by an “exponential” increase in AI bots scraping its content for more than a year. They downloaded images to feed into AI image generators, a curious number of less popular articles, and even the site’s developer infrastructure.
Of course, AI models do not need to train on Wikipedia articles, but the high volume of free information is hard to pass up. Chatbots like ChatGPT have faced accusations of liberal bias. It’s one of the reasons Elon Musk (who accused Wikipedia of bias in 2023) started xAI and Grok. Things didn’t really go according to plan there. After Grok gave some answers Musk didn’t like, he tweaked the AI. About a week later, Grok endorsed Hitler, forcing xAI to issue an apology.
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About Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
