Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia?

Ashley Rindsberg has spent years investigating how ideological bias corrupts institutions that present themselves as neutral arbiters of truth. His book The Gray Lady Winked exposed how The New York Times got major stories wrong across decades of reporting. Now he turns his attention to Wikipedia, the internet’s default encyclopedia and one of the most influential sources of information in the world. Rindsberg finds that while Wikipedia remains a reliable resource for most topics, its most politically charged articles have been quietly captured by a small group of anonymous editors working to push a coherent ideological agenda. He and Coleman dig into how these editors operate, how a handful of people can dominate entire topic areas, and why almost nobody can stop them. They also get into the specific case of Wikipedia’s Israel-Palestine coverage, where a group of around 40 dedicated editors have made over a million edits across thousands of articles. And they discuss why all of this matters far beyond Wikipedia itself, as the encyclopedia’s biases are absorbed by Google, fed into AI systems, and baked into the information infrastructure and AI systems that will increasingly decide what counts as true. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can listen to Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia? is an episode from Conversations With Coleman by The Free Press.

This episode is 62:30 long.

This episode was published on Apr 20, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Conversations With Coleman when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.