Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales couldn’t keep his facts straight while defending the online encyclopedia, admitting it relies on legacy media while downplaying its effective blacklist of right-leaning outlets.
Wales admitted that Wikipedia prioritizes the legacy media in its "reliable sources" list during a Saturday interview with The New York Times. However, he quickly dismissed concerns of bias, claiming that these choices were a matter of quality control and arguing that the platform should not be "pandering to this raging mob of the moment.”
“The idea that everything is an equally valid source and that it’s somehow wrong that Wikipedia tries to prioritize the mainstream media and quality newspapers and magazines and make judgments about that is not something I can apologize for,” Wales, who has acted as an advisor to the anti-free speech media ratings firm NewsGuard, bloviated.
By strange coincidence, Wales’ “quality newspapers and magazines” and his other reliable sources turn out to be nearly exclusively left-of-center. In February 2025, MRC Free Speech America exposed the truth about Wikipedia’s “reliable sources” list.
Popular right-of-center media sources like Breitbart, The Daily Wire and New York Post were listed as “blacklisted,” “deprecated” or “generally unreliable.” By contrast, Wikipedia greenlit leftist legacy media sources like The New York Times, MSNBC, Mother Jones, The Intercept, CNN, and the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
MRC showed that 100 percent of right-of-center media sources, as determined by AllSides Media Bias Chart, were effectively blacklisted at the time. Meanwhile, 84 percent of leftist media sources were deemed “generally reliable.” Wikipedia has since added one token right-leaning news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon, to its reliable sources list.
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MRC VP Dan Schneider blasted Wales' absurd defense of Wikipedia’s “reliable sources” list, saying he smeared critics as anti-science conspiracy theorists.
“We have completely exposed Wikipedia for perpetrating an endless war on conservatives and their media sources,” Schneider added. “Wales’ arrogance is so great that he can’t even tell that Americans see right through him. No one can take Wales seriously when he frames banning the New York Post and The Daily Wire as a fight against people who hate science. He clearly has an agenda and hides good journalism to push it.”
The Times interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, never questioned how Wikipedia’s absurd “reliable sources” list undermines the site’s purported neutrality. For example, the list approving Mother Jones even admits that “almost all editors consider” the leftist outlet “a biased source.”
Wikipedia claims to enforce a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy, but as other Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has pointed out, that rule has been completely hollowed out over time to justify, rather than prevent, bias.
Instead of confronting Wales about this, Garcia-Navarro buttered him up by claiming he had “created something that scores very high on trust.”
In turn, Wales brazenly touted the biased encyclopedia’s supposed commitment to understanding all sides of each story. In this answer, he didn’t mention the blacklist or the discriminatory language carefully added to Wikipedia’s NPOV policy. Instead, the Wikipedia co-founder provided an excellent case study of Wikipedia bias as an example of its alleged neutrality.
“Take a controversial issue like abortion. We can report on the dispute,” said Wales. "So, rather than trying to say abortion is a sin or abortion is a human right, you could say, ‘The Catholic Church position is this, and critics have responded thusly.’ I believe that that’s what a reader really wants. They don’t want one side of the story. They want to understand what people are arguing about. They want to understand both sides.”
Wales framed the abortion debate as a matter of sin versus human rights, and not the human rights of the baby being slaughtered. Presenting abortion as a matter of expanding women’s rights or restricting them for religious purposes is exactly the type of framing one gets when blacklisting every pro-life source.
In response to Wales’ absurd defense of Wikipedia’s neutrality, Schneider took him to the mat. “Wales is so completely devoted to silencing the voices of half of America that he is incapable of fairly presenting their arguments. The very example he picks to show Wikipedia’s fraudulent commitment to discussing both sides of key issues is itself a sterling example of how his website regurgitates the leftist slop at MSNBC,” Schneider said.
MRC has repeatedly called out Wikipedia’s obvious bias, showing their heinous treatment of individuals from the late Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk to President Donald Trump’s nominees like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel.
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