EXCLUSIVE: Wikipedia and its little-known ally, Wiki Education, have quietly enlisted and trained more than 140,000 college students to build an army of activists who have already edited thousands of pages on the site, reshaping its content to push left-wing narratives, the Media Research Center has learned.
Wikipedia’s activist editors have flooded the so-called online encyclopedia with millions of words that, among other things, explicitly promote radical leftist ideology across a wide range of woke topics, including transgenderism, feminism, critical race theory, environmentalism and more.
Framed as an educational initiative, the effort looks more like a coordinated campaign of ideological indoctrination. Its apparent goal: manipulate public perception and cement long-term political influence, with Wikipedia as the primary conduit for ideological narratives.
Behind this effort is California-based non-profit Wiki Education, a Wikimedia Foundation spin-off that openly recruits professors to put students to work editing Wikipedia articles. It proclaims to serve as “the bridge between academia and Wikipedia.”
The non-profit brags that since 2010, it has been responsible for 120 million words added on Wikipedia, spanning over 7,650 classes and impacting 145,000 students. These entries have collectively garnered millions of views.
Wiki Education attempts to conceal its politics by employing nuanced language in its advocacy. But MRC’s investigation found that the non-profit embraces radical left-wing ideology: prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), fighting alleged “disinformation” and presenting a partisan version of supporting “democracy” in classes.
Its goals have paid off. Wikipedia has become a powerful weapon for the left. Among other clear biases, the Media Research Center exposed Wikipedia editors for effectively blacklisting right-leaning media outlets from being cited on entries and rushing to target and vandalize pages about Trump cabinet picks.
Key Findings:
- Classes that centered on left-wing topics like “queering religion” and crude gay sex are the norm at Wiki Education.
- By Wiki Education taking advantage of provisions in the tax code and utilizing the vast resources of public universities across the country, taxpayers have largely footed the bill for this leftist agenda.
- The remainder of the costs of this program have continued to be quietly covered by the Wikimedia Foundation, shaping its operations while avoiding blame for Wikipedia entries.
What Exactly Is Wiki Education?
The thousands of professors who collaborate with Wiki Education assign Wikipedia entries to their course requirements. Students earn course credits for each entry they edit. Wiki Education provides training and coordination to teach students how to edit Wikipedia.
In its own marketing, the group describes the collaboration this way: “You’ll bring your subject expertise, we’ll bring ours in Wikipedia, and together we’ll empower your students to fill in content gaps, enhance representation, and improve citations on the world’s largest encyclopedia.”
The Far Left Classes Being Embedded in Wikipedia
The MRC found that many courses hosted by Wiki Education are based on left-wing theory. Examples collected by the MRC include:
- "Queering Religion" (Skidmore College, Fall 2025). This class seeks to explore queer reinterpretations of Abrahamic religions, including American Christianity, while excluding Islam. The course concentrates on “rituals, gender identities, same-sex eroticism, embodiment, the divine, and textual traditions with a focus on American Christian, Jewish, and Indigenous traditions of the 20th century.”
- “Queer of Color Critique” (UC Berkeley, Fall 2025). This class seeks to expand knowledge of topics related to “marginalized sexual communities and cultures.” Among the Wikipedia pages assigned was “LGBTQ Slang,” which explains gay terms like “bussy,” used to refer to the male anus, and “bottom” or “power bottom,” which refer to roles in gay sexual activities.
The fixation on social orientation and gender extends to classes like “Gender and Identity in STEM” (University of Oklahoma, Fall 2023), “Gender and Technology” (MacEwan University, Fall 2024), “LGBTQ Reproduction” (University of Michigan, Fall 2025), “Transgender Studies” (Western Illinois University - Quad Cities, Spring 2018) and “Gender and Sexuality in Latinx Pop Culture” (UC Berkeley, Spring 2023).
“Race” also appeared in Wiki Education’s classes. One class, “Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance” (Colby College, Spring 2020), uses tap dance to “understand and think critically” about critical race theory, black feminist thought and feminist performance theory.
In 2025, Wiki Education hosted “Race and Power in the Renaissance” (University of Toronto, Winter 2025) to explore the ties between race, imperialism and culture in the 14th-century movement.
Wiki Education’s activism runs so deep that it transforms seemingly neutral subjects into vehicles for left-wing narratives. For instance, take “Hidden Figures-Neuroscience through Diversity” (University of Virginia, Spring 2024), a class that describes itself as a neuroscience course but explicitly focuses on “bias in citation rates” and “tools to fight it.”
Another example is “Environmental Politics” (University of Michigan-Dearborn, Fall 2025), a course that trains student activists to inject political framing into environmental topics. A third class, “Asian Religions in America” (Skidmore College, Fall 2025), turns the study of faith into a project on “(mis)representation” and “racist caricatures.”
Additionally, “Environmental and Climate Justice” (University of Lynchburg, Spring 2025) proclaims to focus on the “disproportionate impacts of environmental decisions and underprivileged social groups.”
Two classes studied so-called disinformation and how to counter it: “Media and Mis-Disinformation” (Methodist University, Spring 2023) and “TAS 223 DisInformation” (Nazareth College, Spring 2023), teaching students to identify and counter mis-, dis- and malinformation, and even “conspiracy theories.” Tellingly, the first class zeroed in on how alleged disinformation “breeds social mistrust, worsens public health outcomes, and disrupts political processes, among other social ills.”
What could be studies of science or faith are twisted into activism, with students rewriting Wikipedia to push policy narratives. The focus on left-wing topics has been evident in classes since 2013, according to Wiki Education's publicly available database.
Inside the Master Plan Behind Wiki Education’s Origins
Wiki Education began inside the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010 and spun off as a separate nonprofit in 2013. At the time, Wikimedia framed the move as putting the education program under volunteer controls.
“As part of Wikimedia’s goal to have the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada directed by volunteers, the program will formally move to a new nonprofit organization, the Wiki Education Foundation, beginning this month,” then-Wiki Education board member Mike Christie said in a statement Nov. 7, 2013. [Emphasis added.]
However, a closer look at statements from that period suggests a different motive. Wiki Education was born out of Wikimedia’s desire to steer Wikipedia’s radical content without taking responsibility for it.
By spinning off the non-profit, Wikimedia created a convenient way to influence Wikipedia while keeping its hands clean. This control was visible through direct funding, staffing and public endorsements, making it clear that Wikimedia's oversight of Wiki Education was significant.
Such a tight connection was evident in 2017 when the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously approved a resolution to facilitate the funneling of tax-exempt donations to Wiki Education. The board affirmed that “for purposes of eligibility to submit funding requests,” it “should treat the Wiki Education Foundation as it would treat a Wikimedia-affiliated entity.”
Wikimedia Controls Wiki Education Through Staffing
Wikimedia's influence on Wiki Education extends directly into staffing and board appointments. Glancing at the staff roster, something unmistakably reeks of Wikimedia, as many Wiki Education staff and board members are former Wikimedia employees or operatives.
Frank Schulenburg, a German native and self-described Wikipedia writer, leads Wiki Education. According to his LinkedIn profile and a publicly available Wikimedia profile, he spent half a decade working at Wikimedia, directly reporting to embattled former Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner.
He held various jobs within Wikimedia before landing the top job of Senior Director of Programs, overseeing the early implementation of the non-profit's education initiatives. He is now the first executive director of Wiki Education, earning over $200,000 a year, according to IRS documents reviewed by MRC.
Wiki Education Deputy Director LiAnna Davis was a top Wikimedia official who served as the communications manager for the initial pilot program that evolved into Wiki Education. She currently earns a six-figure salary.
Nearly 40 percent of Wiki Education’s board members have ties to Wikimedia. Gardner, the controversial former long-time Wikimedia executive director, sits on the board.
Current Wiki Education board member Garfield Byrd previously served as Chief of Finance and Administration for Wikimedia and also served on the Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee.
Richard Knipel, another member of Wiki Education’s board, is the president of Wikimedia’s New York City chapter.
Sage Ross, Wiki Education’s chief technology officer, joined Wikimedia in 2010 for the same early development of the program. Kelly Doyle Kim, a project manager focusing on expanding equity, served for at least seven years as a board member of Wikimedia’s D.C. chapter.
How Wikimedia Controls Wiki Education Through Funding
Wikimedia’s operational support has been continuously augmented due to steady and substantial cash infusions to fund the core operations of Wiki Education. The first seed grant was provided in 2013, with millions more provided over the following 12 years, bringing the total to at least $3.9 million allocated for Wiki Education’s core operations.
These donations are mere supplements to the massive taxpayer subsidies provided by the public colleges and universities, which largely fund the professors who train students to become activists for Wikimedia.
While the total taxpayer contributions to this agenda are not known, the MRC has identified several grants from the Wikimedia Foundation to Wiki Education. These allocations are spread across multiple, at times confusing, grant pages. The funding appears to include the following:
Funding requests and approvals included the following:
- $1.4 million (2024-26) — General Support Fund
- $1.03 million (2022-23) — General Support Fund
- $400,000 (December 2019) — Annual Planning Grant
- $400,000 (January 2018) — Annual Planning Grant
- $25,000 (2018) — Tech contract (Q1 2018)
- $99,996 (2017) — Simple Annual Plan Grant
These figures are non-exhaustive and were compiled from publicly available records reviewed by the Media Research Center. Wikimedia has not disclosed the full scope of its material support, including guidance, meetings or advisory input. The foundation operates multiple grant programs, which Wiki Education has tapped into.
Together, they have constructed an intricate system to achieve their goals. Wiki Education must show progress as part of its grant agreement with Wikimedia, creating a regular reporting loop between the two entities.
Wiki Education’s Donations to Democrat-aligned Campaigns
The partisan bias of Wiki Education staff is apparent in their campaign donations, which have been directed exclusively to Democratic candidates. According to Federal Election Commission disclosures reviewed by the Media Research Center, top staff and board members of Wiki Education contributed a total of at least $36,838.13 to Democratic politicians and liberal causes.
The largest combined contributions came from Wiki Education Senior Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal, who gave $13,276.25 to various campaigns and PACs from 2020 to 2024, and LiAnna Davis, who contributed $12,323.67 between 2015 to 2025, according to FEC disclosures. Their money flowed through ActBlue to the Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the presidential campaigns of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Other relatively unknown yet radical PACs also benefited. According to FEC disclosures, Sage Ross gave $5,000 to Swing Left in 2018 — the same PAC that helped Democrats win the House majority that year.
LiAnna Davis also contributed $2,000 each to Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund, as well as $500 to Courage to Change, the super PAC launched by “Squad” member and self-described democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Consequences
These findings expose a deep-seated ideological bias within Wikipedia, a site that once proclaimed to embrace neutrality but now functions as a gatekeeper for left-wing narratives while shutting down conservative viewpoints.
In February, the MRC uncovered that Wikipedia had effectively blacklisted right-leaning media from its source materials under the guise of “reliability.” Its “Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources” list, where editors decide which publications are acceptable, functions as a censorship tool, ensuring conservative perspectives are excluded.
Among the outlets effectively blacklisted are Breitbart, Fox News, The Daily Caller, Daily Mail, Newsmax and OANN.
The bias extends beyond media sources and plays out in real time.
The MRC documented multiple cases where Wikipedia pages for Trump administration nominees were vandalized following their nominations, including those for Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
These attacks reveal an activist editing culture that punishes dissent and weaponizes information against the left’s political opponents, and it has now been built into colleges and universities.
Wiki Education’s campus programs and Wikipedia’s editorial culture form a seamless pipeline of activism: courses instill left-wing narratives, students embed them into pages and Wikipedia cements them as alleged fact.
Backed by Wikimedia funding and staffing, the effort enables ideological actors to reshape public knowledge under the cover of academia and volunteerism.
MRC Free Speech America Intern Evan Redding provided crucial research for this report.
