A month-and-a-half after the deadline that a House panel gave the Wikimedia Foundation to provide documents about how it responds to bias, including Jew-hatred, on Wikipedia, the San Francisco-based nonprofit has yet to send the required materials, Carlie Baker, press assistant to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), told JNS.
“The Wikimedia Foundation is engaging with the Oversight Committee about its request, but it has not satisfied document production at this time,” Baker said on Tuesday.
Mace, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation, and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, penned a letter to the CEO of the foundation on Aug. 27.
On Oct. 24, a spokesman for the Oversight Committee told JNS the same thing that Baker did, adding that the committee remains in communication with the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation told JNS on Oct. 23 that it “responded to the House Oversight Committee’s Aug. 27 inquiry and has since been in regular contact with committee staff, as recently as today.”
“Any reporting to the contrary is flatly inaccurate,” the foundation said. (JNS sought comment from the foundation about whether it thinks that it satisfied the committee’s document request.)
The lawmakers stated that they sought “documents and information related to actions by Wikipedia volunteer editors caught violating platform policies,” as well as the CEO’s “efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into sensitive topics.” They gave the foundation until Sept. 10 to provide the documents.
The Republican lawmakers stated in their Aug. 27 letter that a recent report “raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.”
An Anti-Defamation League report in March found that 30 Wikipedia editors have been coordinating to “introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias and misleading information.”
Wikipedia, which was created in 2001, is one of the most visited sites on the internet.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, sent a letter to Wikimedia’s CEO on Oct. 3 requesting “information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation.”
The senator stated that there is “detailed evidence of a coordinated editing campaign to push antisemitic content on the platform.”
“Through more than 1.5 million edits over the past decade, a coordinated group of editors pushed antisemitic narratives on Wikipedia while whitewashing the activities of groups like Hamas,” he wrote. “These were not ‘organic changes that occur on Wikipedia as editors update pages to reflect evolving understandings of complex issues,’ but rather a ‘long-running, coordinated scheme that involved serious infractions to Wikipedia’s anti-bias policies.’”
