Here's the letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ocNyx34Et19sKtlta0bTPPzSPcp...
No claims, no evidence. No sources, except "it has come to my attention" and "information received by my office".
Yikes that letter is alarming.
> In view of public criticisms, including those expressed by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding the opacity of editorial processes and the anonymity of contributors, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny?
Larry Sanger has been criticizing Wikipedia for more than 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Criticism_of_Wiki...
The author of that letter is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Martin_(Missouri_politician... - "the first U.S. attorney for D.C. in at least 50 years to be appointed without experience as a judge or a federal prosecutor".
The Heritage Foundation has been open about their desire to strip Wikipedians of anonymity, this is just the government putting that plan into practice:
https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/wikipedia-project-2025-...
If the HF is behind this, then Wikipedia is doomed beyond any legal defense. Back it up entirely and move it overseas.
Authoritarian regimes thrive on fatalism and despair. But they also inspire resistance. We did not have mass protests a few months ago. Our society is in deep crisis and the outcome can still swing either way.
For all the progress they’ve made in dismantling our democratic institutions, deep incompetence runs through this administration.
Our efforts should be still directed to fighting their overreach. It is not the time to retreat.
To be more clear, it's operatives of the Heritage Foundation who now work in the government putting this into place. Does anyone think Trump actually does much day to day? He often seems completely unaware of what's going on in his own government. I invite anyway to watch his evening press conferences where he's handed a bunch of Executive Orders, is told what he's signing (he has no clue), and signs it.
The easiest solution is for the Wikimedia Foundation to move out of Us jurisdiction to a more democratic country.
I don't think that would work. The US would just attack those countries as they are doing right now, trying to force us to give up DEI and ESG.
It’s questionable whether this bully continues to have as much influence as it thinks it does.
I don't see any signs of succesful resistance yet.
Their entry on Wikipedia is well worth a read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
Kind of explains a lot in the balancing act in Trumps rise to power while trying to look like a marionette for various interests this term. They should remember Hitler's rebellion from his masters.
Trump is dumb and 80 though. But if he had been 40 and intelligent.
Vance is 40, I wonder how intelligent or not is he?
Getting really bad vibes from this. Plenty of people in power are unhappy with Wikipedia for years. So far it’s an amazing source and surprisingly neutral given the complexity of the problem. Would not want to lose it in a political fight.
This is legal communication written by a lawyer and intended to be read by lawyers.
Consistently, the first thing every lawyer has said to me when preparing for any interaction with third parties that had a legal aspect was "never volunteer information you were not explicitly asked for". Of course lawyers would practice this among themselves. The law requires him to suspect something wrong to investigate, so he states "I hereby formally suspect something wrong". If the investigation leads to a court filing, the law would then require him to submit evidence, so he will strategically decide which evidence to submit and submit it. Why would he commit in advance to what evidence he believes relevant if not required by law?
But also, if reading the letter as if written in good faith - which I find hard to do - those are all true reasons to suspect something wrong (it is common knowledge and well established that Wikipedia is a very influential source of knowledge, and that there are attempts at foreign influence), and great questions to ask to investigate whether the Foundation is making a reasonable effort to fight it if you were a regulator or auditor or other investigator, all of which have great answers already written up that prove the foundation is doing a very good job at establishing and maintaining processes to ensure the neutrality of its articles. In my headcanon, Wikipedia's lawyer responds simply with a list of URLs.
What is happening is very scary. Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I think this has been the case at anytime in history. However, now, with the internet, it is easy to spread such lies to mass and easy for such leaders to make blind followers.
Clearly people care very deeply about sources and evidence -and they're attacking things (wikipedia, various gov websites) which can be used as objective sources.
If you don't have objective sources, it's easier to lead people around by the nose -hence the attack.
Here's the root of the problem though: wikipedia isn't an objective source by its very nature. Wikipedia requires mainstream established news sources for a lot of articles that aren't academic in nature, and especially for articles about people. You cannot include information that isn't supported by corporate news articles, which means corporate news is now the arbiter of truth, and corporate news lies all the time about everything.
Wikipedia is, and always has been, the encyclopedia of the elite and billionaire narrative, and especially the left-wing narrative, which dominates nearly all corporate news groups. I say this as a far left person myself.
> Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say.
I’m one of those people you complain about. When I did deep research about DEI, I presented evidence and sources to people like you, including judges that I knew in my private life.
It seems you didn’t care, to a point that I had in my hand a document printed from a department of justice’s own website (about mothers’ own violence on their children, which is as high as men’s given the scope you decide to choose) and the person who in his public life is a judge, didn’t even bother discussing the thesis and just told me: “This document is false. You changed the figures before printing the document”.
You may say that Trump is bad for dismantling your administration, but you guys don’t care an inch about truth, evidence, sources, honesty, bad faith, or even for the number of children who are beaten to death by their mothers.
"given the scope you decide to choose"
By changing the scope, you changed the effect. Unless you did every statistical validation here... Yeah. That reads exactly like data manipulation. t-distribution approaches standard normal distribution, when the degree of freedom increases. That's not something that anyone should ignore and give credit to. It's the same bullshit that Donald has repeatedly tried to do, to prove himself doing the right thing, even as everything falls apart.
Caring about the truth, requires caring about the methodology, and not just the conclusions.
That’s not what the judge argued. He accused me of falsifying the document by doctoring it before printing.
Which shows:
- How much bad faith you have, assuming I argumented to a judge on a false hypothesis,
- Condescension to assume that I’m not a scientist who masters p-values,
- And ultimately, you confirm the hypothesis that you lead your research in bad faith, knowing full well the true level of violence from women and hiding it, which leads to more child deaths. You are accessory to criminality.
Your attitude confirm as well that it’s good this entire field of researched be defunded, it is a net win for science.
I'd really appreciate to hear about your research and where I could read about the violence. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username. Thank you!
It was probably Elon
Can we stop bringing up annoying people in every single comment section when they have nothing to do with the topic at hand?
Elon Musk has been waging a war with Wikipedia[1] for a couple of years now, and has the ear of the president. Of those in the administration, he is the single name that really stands out as a guy with a Wikipedia beef.
Seems like he has lots to do with the topic, and it is absolutely likely that he is the one who elicited this. Recall that Musk also basically appointed his own head of the IRS (though Bessent then ousted that person and installed his own stooge).
1 - https://www.the-independent.com/tech/elon-musk-wikipedia-naz...