This article gives the opinions of the author, Smallbones. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signpost, The Wikimedia Foundation, or of any other Wikipedia editor.

Larry Sanger wants to have a conversation about federal government employees who edit Wikipedia. In a tweet to Elon Musk, as shown in the video, Sanger tells Musk

Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia? Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we'd like to know. Agree?"
— User:Larry Sanger
— X

After a quick "Good idea" acknowledgement from Musk, Sanger tweeted to President Trump.

Hi, @realDonaldTrump—co-founder of Wikipedia here—could I persuade you to use an executive order to make it a policy that neither federal worker hours nor federal moneys may be used to edit Wikipedia or pay for Wikipedia editing?
Thanks in advance. (I voted for you.)
— User:Larry Sanger
— X

Sanger likes to call himself the "ex-founder of Wikipedia because I want to distance myself from it" due to what he views as the encyclopedia's lack of neutrality (see video at 0:33). He has campaigned in the media, especially on Fox News, against Wikipedia and its purported bias.

He also advocates in the video that federal employees – those under the control of the U.S. executive power – should be prohibited from editing Wikipedia while on the job. I more or less agree, not for all government employees of course, but especially for those in policy making and intelligence positions.

Government workers who edit when they are not working, about topics not related to their jobs should not be targeted. What they do with their free time is essentially none of the government's business. I don't mind if the government monitors, rather than edits, Wikipedia, as long as they don't violate editors' privacy. C.I.A and F.B.I. agents might actually learn something. Maybe even something about Russian or Chinese governments attempting to edit.

But there are many less-clear cases than these simple ones. This article is my attempt to get this conversation started.

The U.S. federal government does not donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Elon Musk cannot fire Wikipedians just because they contribute to Wikipedia.

It's important for our critics to remember that there is no freedom of speech in Wikipedia articles. Indeed, anybody's contributions may be edited or even removed by anybody else, subject to our rules on neutrality, no original research, verifiability, and paid editor disclosure through the use of reliable sources. It may take newbies a while to get the hang of these rules, but we invite every person on earth to edit Wikipedia as long as they follow our rules. If you don't like our rules, you are free to form your own encyclopedia project with your own rules, as Sanger has attempted several times.

A dozen years ago, I saw a summer intern from the Commerce Department ask how she could edit the article about the Commerce Department. Our rule on conflict-of-interest editing strongly discourages that type of editing, but employees can leave notes and links on an article's talk page. We also ban any editors who are paid to contribute to articles, including those paid by governments, from editing unless they declare that they are paid and who their employer and clients are.

Even though the government's fingerprints are all over some articles, in most cases Wikipedians cannot be blamed. We are just making use of information that the government has collected or processed and intentionally released to the general public.

The U.S. government has many public outreach programs meant to inform the media and general public about things like census numbers, national parks, American history, Congressional biography, weather, and geology. In fact, almost all departments and agencies have some sort of public relations office, even the Secret Service! The feds must have one of the largest PR operations in the world. But I don't think any of them offer special services to Wikipedia editors beyond what the general public receives.

The Feds also help fund many other organizations such as schools and universities, tech companies and research centers, state highway departments, and health programs and facilities. Our rules apply to these organizations as well, but most of the time the people working there are not federal government employees. Let's limit the conversation to actual federal employees, politicians, and intelligence operations.

Sanger seems to be talking about federal employees who secretly edit articles, perhaps inserting propaganda. That would be a clear violation of our rule requiring paid editor disclosure. I've never seen a disclosure saying "Hi, I'm John Smith at the C.I.A. and I'm just going to insert some of our best information into a few articles." Of course, C.I.A. agents wouldn't disclose that, would they? But I wouldn't be surprised if that type of information were to be accidentally exposed. And there have been many similar types of editing over the course of Wikipedia's history.

Way back in 2006, there was a scandal when it was discovered that computers in congressional offices were being used to secretly edit Wikipedia. This Signpost article identified editing coming from both U.S. Senate and House of Representatives offices, as well as from U.K., Canadian, and Australian Parliaments. Two months later, this Signpost article discussed how congresspeople and parliamentarians were citing Wikipedia, and the question of which (or both) parties were editing the article on then-Senator Joe Biden.

Politicians of all stripes and levels are caught editing Wikipedia fairly regularly. For example: Pennsylvania's current governor Josh Shapiro (then state attorney general) and three other high-level officials were caught in 2019 assigning Wikipedia editing duties to their office staff members, who were paid by the state.

In a 2024 case, Portland, Oregon City Councillor and mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez was caught hiring an oddly named public relations firm, Codename Enterprises, to supply suggested text for the Wiki-article about him and to train his city paid office staff to insert the text into the article.

Unfortunately for Gonzalez and Codename, the contract was paid by the city, making the contract between them a public document which can be released by the city to anybody who files a freedom of information request. The contract states that for the initial services the fee was $6,400. In cases of "contentious matters" perhaps involving taking a "hostile editor" to an "administrative review noticeboard" fees would start at $3,200.

While congressional, state, and local politicians instructing their staffs to edit Wikipedia is not direct evidence of whether federal employees are paid to edit Wikipedia, it does indicate a culture of impunity in those politicians who may someday be called on to make laws and budgets that affect federal employees.

Like me, Sanger seems especially concerned about intelligence services – including U.S., Russian, and Chinese – inserting propaganda into Wikipedia articles. That's the last thing most Wikipedians would accept. It's also one of the most difficult types of harmful editing to stop.

Our system of ongoing reviews and editing of any article by any editor is good at quickly catching mistakes in most individual articles. The system for catching more complex propaganda schemes, such as commercial editing firms using sockpuppets to insert advertising, is fairly good but takes a bit more time. But our ability to counter American, Russian, or Chinese intelligence agencies could likely use some help.

How could the few thousand independent active Wikipedia unpaid editors fight a coordinated attack by the same number of well-trained, well-paid state-controlled intelligence agents?

There are, however, a few indications that this type of editing exists and might sometimes even be stopped.

Perhaps the article most likely to have been written mostly by Russian propaganda efforts is the International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The article is ridiculously long and one-sided. Written by 811 editors in 3,729 edits, it is much longer than the Foreign relations of the United States article. It could accurately be condensed into one paragraph. For example:

"Following its early August 2008 invasion of the country of Georgia, Russia recognized the independence of the two breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on 26 August. Russia then encouraged other countries to recognize the regions' independence, succeeding in the long term only with Nicaragua and Venezuela. Four other countries, Syria under Bashar al-Assad, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, recognized the regions for shorter periods, but none of them currently do."

The rest of the article is just trivial misleading detail. But it has been featured on the main page five times: in "In the news" on August 27, 2008 and in "On this day..." on August 26, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021.

The article was created on the morning of August 26, 2008, by a native Russian-speaking editor who was later blocked for "persistent battleground editing, edit-warring and personal attacks". Twenty later-blocked sockpuppets also edited the article.

The editor with the most edits on the page was User:Russavia with 321 edits. He was a very active administrator on Wikimedia Commons, who specialized in promoting the Russian aviation industry, and in disrupting the English-language Wikipedia. He created dozens of sockpuppets on Wikipedia. In 2010, he boasted, on his userpage at Commons, that he had obtained permission from the official Kremlin.ru site for all photos there to be uploaded to Commons under Creative Commons licenses.

Another article that appears to have been edited by a Russian propagandist is Maria Butina. She was convicted in 2018 of being an unregistered foreign agent of Russia. Earlier that year, The Daily Beast broke the story that Butina herself was editing the article. Four other reliable sources reported similar stories. She was deported in 2019 and later became a member of the Russian Duma.

The only time I felt like I might be in direct contact with a state-sponsored propagandist was during my research on a 2021 story for The Signpost titled "Hardball in Hong Kong". A mainland Chinese editor, User:Walter Grassroot, had been accused in the Hong Kong Free Press of posting messages on an online message board threatening to turn in Hong Kong users to the security police. I'd run into Walter two years before when he very crudely responded to a Hong Kong user's article in The Signpost.

In the same 2019 issue, another mainland Chinese user, User:Techyan, had written a full article, at my request. As his editor, I thought I got to know Yan fairly well.

After the 2021 Hong Kong Free Press articles, I emailed Walter for a reaction and we exchanged half a dozen emails over the next month. Walter's English was still crude and he may have been the thug depicted in the HKFP, but at least he was straightforward.

He had forwarded my first email to Yan, who responded the same day to me using his usual email address, reinterpreting everything Walter had written. "Yan" just didn't seem to be the same person I knew from two years before. Was he an imposter? We continued this charade with each email I sent to Walter that month.

Does this mean that I was dealing with state-sponsored propagandists? I think so; Walter was the better propagandist, just by being himself.

Were they real "spies"? I think not. They obviously had some connection with the Hong Kong security police, but I doubt they had any direct connection with provincial or national level intelligence services. Walter and Yan just didn't seem professional enough.

I've never run into editors I suspected of being U.S. intelligence operatives, but back in 2007, WikiScanner identified the CIA as editing the article on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as reported by the BBC and The Signpost. Russian and Chinese governments appear to be operating on Wikipedia. Aside from legal and ethical questions, why wouldn't the U.S. government?

So far in this one-sided conversation, I've identified several types of government-Wikipedia interaction that don't seem to be a problem. But editing by politicians / policy makers and by intelligence agencies does need to be discussed and here the main problems seem to be on the government side.

I contacted Larry Sanger too late for him to submit a proper reply. He said he will consider responding, most likely on his blog.

Anybody, Wikipedian or otherwise, is invited to contribute polite comments below.