For years we were told that
Wikipedia was the great democratiser of knowledge. A free, open encyclopedia written by volunteers, corrected by the wisdom of crowds, and guided by the noble principle of “
neutral point of view.”
That comforting myth is now collapsing.
Two recent pieces — a detailed academic paper Toxic Truth: How Wikipedia Poisons Global Knowledge and an investigation by HonestReporting — lay bare what many of us have suspected for some time. Wikipedia is no longer a neutral reference work. It has become a highly politicised gatekeeper of “truth”, shaped by activist editors, ideological capture, and in some cases by foreign state interests.
And the danger is no longer confined to Wikipedia itself.
Today, Wikipedia is one of the primary training sources for large language models — the very AI systems that will soon answer our children’s questions, write our news summaries, and provide “authoritative” explanations on everything from history to medicine to geopolitics.
If Wikipedia is biased, then tomorrow’s AI will be biased — permanently, invisibly, and at scale.
Captured From Within
The Toxic Truth paper documents something deeply troubling. Wikipedia is not shaped by millions of casual contributors. It is controlled by a relatively small group of highly motivated editors who dominate sensitive political topics.
These editors decide which sources are “reliable,” which viewpoints are “fringe,” and which facts are “undue.” In theory this is meant to protect quality. In practice it allows ideological activists to quietly rewrite history.
On contentious subjects — Israel, terrorism, race, gender, climate, COVID — the same pattern appears. Critical voices are removed. Alternative perspectives are downgraded. Language is carefully adjusted to frame one side as legitimate and the other as suspect.
This is not censorship by force. It is something more effective: narrative control disguised as neutrality.
Foreign Influence and Qatar’s Shadow
The HonestReporting investigation takes this even further.
It reveals how Qatar — a regime that funds Hamas, hosts extremist clerics, and runs the propaganda network Al Jazeera — has built deep influence inside Wikipedia’s editorial ecosystem.
Editors linked to Qatari interests have shaped articles on the Middle East, terrorism, and Israel for years. Sources hostile to Israel are elevated. Israeli perspectives are minimised or framed as propaganda. Terror groups are softened into “militants” or “fighters.”
All while Wikipedia continues to present itself as a neutral educational charity.
This matters because Wikipedia is no longer just an encyclopedia. It is becoming the backbone of global digital knowledge.
When AI Learns From a Corrupted Source
Here is the truly alarming part.
Modern AI systems are trained on massive datasets, and Wikipedia is one of their core reference sources. Not one of many. One of the most important.
That means every distortion, every omission, every ideological framing embedded in Wikipedia today will be replicated tomorrow across countless AI platforms.
Future students may never read Wikipedia directly. But they will read AI summaries trained on Wikipedia.
If Wikipedia teaches that Israel is uniquely evil, that Western democracies are colonial oppressors, that Islamist violence is “resistance,” or that certain scientific debates are settled beyond discussion — then that becomes the default worldview of artificial intelligence.
And unlike Wikipedia, AI will not show its sources. You won’t know what has been filtered out.
Bias will become invisible.
The Greatest Danger: Monopoly on Truth
The real problem is not that Wikipedia contains errors. All reference works do.
The problem is that Wikipedia is rapidly becoming the single source of truth.
Schools rely on it. Journalists consult it. Search engines rank it at the top. AI systems ingest it wholesale.
When one platform becomes the foundation of knowledge, ideological capture becomes catastrophic.
A biased newspaper can be challenged by another newspaper.
A biased academic can be challenged by another academic.
But when the reference layer itself is compromised, the entire knowledge stack above it becomes distorted.
That is not just misinformation.
That is civilisational risk.
A Warning We Cannot Ignore
The authors of Toxic Truth and the investigators at HonestReporting are not arguing for censorship. They are arguing for transparency, pluralism, and accountability.
Wikipedia must not be allowed to present activism as neutrality.
AI developers must not be allowed to train on politically contaminated data without disclosure.
And governments, universities, and educators must stop treating Wikipedia as an unquestioned authority.
Because if we allow one ideologically captured platform to define reality for both humans and machines, we will not be living in an information age.
We will be living in an engineered one.
And once artificial intelligence learns a poisoned version of truth, correcting it later may prove impossible.
(I strongly recommend reading the attached paper. This is not an academic curiosity. It is about who controls knowledge itself. https://honestreporting.com/wikipedia-qatar-and-the-future-of-knowledge/ )
