The Heritage Foundation launched a new effort to track down volunteer editors on Wikipedia who are publishing what they believe to be antisemitic content.
The conservative think tank sent documents to various Jewish foundations detailing its intentions to “identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position,” according to a Tuesday report from the Forward, a Jewish nonprofit news outlet.
A pitch deck sent to the entities said the Heritage Foundation, which created the Project 2025 policy recommendation blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump, would track repeated phrases and content patterns, edit frequency, topic focus, and similarities across articles on the free online encyclopedia to identify biased editors.
Heritage staff members told the Jewish foundations that the initiative would try to identify editors consistently opposing Zionism or promoting antisemitism.
The initiative is part of Project Esther, a national strategy from the Heritage Foundation to “counter antisemitism in the United States and ensure the security and prosperity of all Americans.”
Other tactics mentioned in the pitch deck included making “curated sock puppet accounts to reveal patterns and provoke reactions,” as well as pushing “specific topics to expose more identity related details.”
A spokesperson for Heritage told the Forward that she could not respond to inquiries about the project, while the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization for Wikipedia, declined to comment.
The revelation about the new campaign comes as Wikipedia, which is one of the most popular websites in the world, receives criticism for leftist bias across its content.
Elon Musk encouraged social media users to “stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority” last month after Libs of TikTok revealed that the website spent $50 million of its $177 million budget from 2023 to 2024 on diversity initiatives.
The Manhattan Institute published a study last year which found that there indeed exists “a mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.”
The site has “prevailing associations of negative emotions” such as disgust with respect to right-wing figures, but “positive emotions” such as joy with respect to left-wing figures.
“Our findings suggest that Wikipedia is not entirely living up to its neutral point of view policy, which aims to ensure that content is presented in an unbiased and balanced manner,” the analysis added.
The organization said their findings about political bias on Wikipedia were “concerning” given the status of Wikipedia as “one of the most visited sites globally.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
Read the full article here
