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• Ed Martin accused Wikipedia of allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda.
• Martin’s letter questioned if Wikimedia’s actions violate its tax-exempt status, requesting details on editorial processes.
• The Wikimedia Foundation stated Wikipedia’s content is governed by policies ensuring accuracy, fairness, and neutrality.

Trump appointee Ed Martin has accused the online encyclopedia Wikipedia of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public”.

The acting US attorney for the District of Columbia sent a letter to the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, accusing the tax-exempt organisation of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public”.

In the letter dated April 24, Martin said he sought to determine whether the Wikimedia Foundation’s behaviour is in violation of its Section 501(c)(3) status. Martin asked the foundation to provide detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors.

“Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States,” Martin wrote. “Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission.”

The letter, which was earlier reported by the Free Press, is part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration and its allies, including Martin, against institutions, media outlets and online platforms they have accused of pushing liberal agendas or political views. It builds on growing conservative criticism of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is collaboratively written and edited by thousands of volunteer contributors from around the world.

Some of the contentions in Martin’s letter echoed a report published in March by the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights organisation, alleging “widespread anti-semitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia”. The ADL had criticised Wikipedia in 2024 after the encyclopedia’s contributors collectively downgraded the ADL’s reliability rating as a source on topics related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin. Photo / Getty Images

The ADL did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Martin’s letter.

Launched in 2001, Wikipedia is the internet’s most popular reference source and the ninth-most visited site on the global web, according to estimates by the analytics firm Similarweb. Its content is also influential in Google search results and in the datasets used to train leading artificial intelligence models.

In 2003, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales created the Wikimedia Foundation as a San Francisco-based non-profit to fund the site and other collaborative “wiki” projects.

“Wikipedia is one of the last places online that shows the promise of the internet, housing more than 65 million articles written to inform, not persuade,” the Wikimedia Foundation said Friday in a statement that did not acknowledge or address the letter from Martin’s office.

The foundation said Wikipedia’s content is governed by policies that ensure information is presented as “accurately, fairly, and neutrally as possible”, in a process involving nearly 260,000 volunteers.

“Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,” the foundation said.

Elon Musk has opposed Wikipedia in recent months. Photo / Getty Images

While Wikipedia has weathered occasional controversies throughout its history over the content of its articles, its emergence as a bogeyman of US conservatives is relatively recent. In 2018, an Atlantic column dubbed it “the last bastion of shared reality” in an ever more polarised country.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the owner of X, is among those who have grown disenchanted with it. In October 2023, he offered to donate US$1 billion to the Wikimedia Foundation on the condition that it change the site’s name to “Dickipedia”. Wales had implicitly criticised Musk earlier that year for X’s decision to comply with the Turkish Government’s censorship demands, which Wikipedia had successfully fought in court.

“This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan,” Wales wrote at the time.

In December 2024, Musk posted on X, “Stop donating to Wokepedia”, resharing a post from the right-wing account Libs of TikTok that claimed the organisation spent a chunk of its annual budget on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI – a set of programmes the Trump administration has demonised and targeted for cuts.

A June 2024 analysis by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found “suggestive evidence” of “mild to moderate” left-leaning political bias in the language used to describe US public figures.

Another conservative non-profit, the Media Research Centre, reported in February on a Wikipedia resource page that catalogues the perceived reliability of various information sources, noting that many conservative outlets were rated as unreliable.

Wikipedia editor and tech critic Molly White said Friday that she views Martin’s letter as part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration and its allies of “weaponising laws to try to silence high-quality independent information” sources that they can’t control.

Stephen Harrison, a journalist who has covered Wikipedia for years and wrote a novel inspired by it, said while Wikipedia’s mission is to serve as a global information source, Martin “seems to want an America First version of Wikipedia”.

Wikipedia is not the first institution to find itself in the crosshairs of Martin, a longtime Republican political operative with no background as a prosecutor before Trump appointed him interim US attorney in January. Last week he sent a letter to a scientific journal focused on diseases and medicine related to the chest, asking about its editorial policies.

Before being named US attorney, Martin appeared on Russia-backed media networks more than 150 times, the Washington Post reported last week. In one appearance on RT in 2022, he said there was no evidence of military build-up on Ukraine’s borders only nine days before Russia invaded the country. He further criticised US officials as warmongering and ignoring Russia security concerns.

Martin apologised this week for praising a pardoned January 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendant who supported Nazi ideology and said he hadn’t known about the man’s beliefs, despite having repeatedly defended him in public for years.

Earlier this month, the Post reported that the Trump administration had asked the top attorney for the IRS to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status as Trump clashed with the institution over its speech and diversity policies.

– Washington Post