This has not gone unnoticed by those seeking to delegitimise Israel and harm the Jewish people. On Wikipedia, a small group of power users, whose activity appears closely aligned with the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has reshaped the historical and intellectual landscape concerning Israel and the Jewish people.
In just a few years, the Gang of 40, as I’ve called them, has made over one million edits to more than 10,000 related articles.
One of the most prominent Gang of 40 editors, Iskandar323, led efforts to scrub Iranian human rights abuses. The same editor worked to entrench the classification of the MEK – a prominent Iranian dissident group – as a terrorist organisation, while doing the opposite for Hamas and Hezbollah, whose attacks he, along with other Gang of 40 editors, sought to downplay or remove.
Following my reporting, Iskandar was site-banned from Wikipedia in late January. But the activity continues.
Just weeks after the December-January protests in Iran, I uncovered that more than 10,000 images and videos created by IRGC-linked state media – including from US-sanctioned Tasnim News and Khamenei.ir, the former Supreme Leader’s official website – had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the site’s media repository.
Many of these videos and images carried slogans including “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.
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Illustration of the Wikipedia website application (Getty Images)Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Others displayed open calls for the assassination of President Trump.
One collection of images featured military-style targeting graphics in red, with the slogan “we will not release you” – a phrase employed by then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during the protests as a threat of retribution against demonstrators.
This month, I reported that Wikipedia is saturated with citations from sources linked to Iranian terror networks.
I identified more than 29,000 citations to IRGC-linked media. Outlets tied to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are cited more than 8,400 times. Sources linked to al-Qaeda and its affiliates appear hundreds of times. In some cases, text from these sites has been directly copied into Wikipedia articles.
Last year, I reported on an effort by Gang of 40 leaders to capture the lead section of the “Zionism” article, introducing a phrase in the all-important opening that equates Zionism with ethnic cleansing.
The effort was successful, and the second sentence now reads: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.”
But this was only the tip of the spear. Other activities include systematically scrubbing mentions of Hamas’ 1988 genocidal charter from dozens of entries, severing ties between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, and deleting references to Iranian government human rights abuses from numerous articles.
In one case, editors removed an image of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the article on Israel.
They altered the framing of another entry by changing its title from “Hellenistic Judea” to “Hellenistic Palestine.” They also fought successfully to keep a photo of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem touring a Nazi concentration camp off his article.
The wholesale revision of the Zionism article – which remains the single most important online resource defining the Jewish movement for self-determination – represents a significant ideological achievement. But the group did not stop there.
After revising the lead, Gang of 40 editors and allies implemented a “moratorium”, freezing it for a year. An article that was stable pre-October 7 became contested and, ultimately, captured. This matters. Unlike X, Facebook, or Instagram, Wikipedia is a core pipeline for what passes as verified truth in the digital realm.
The entry defining Zionism, which uses the word "colonisation" in the first three lines[Missing Credit]
Google places Wikipedia articles at the top of millions of search results, giving them unparalleled influence over how topics, conflicts, religions, and countries are framed.
The search giant pulls from lead sections into its knowledge panels, defining people, places, and ideas at a glance.
Because these systems treat Wikipedia content as high-quality and verified by default, LLMs inherently trust it.
This has opened a backdoor into the information ecosystem – now exploited not only by ideological editing clusters like the Gang of 40, but by actors advancing state interests.
Wikipedia’s credibility rests on the idea that its claims are backed by reliable sources.
Yet this very mechanism – combined with anonymous, open editing – has made it an ideal target for actors seeking to hijack the information pipeline.
Despite a congressional investigation in the US, the Wikimedia Foundation does not appear to grasp the scale of the problem. Wikipedia was approached for comment on the allegations in this article but had not provided a comment at the time of publication.
In reality, most observers remain in the dark as to the seriousness of this threat.
This is precisely what makes the strategy effective: while attention has focused on Chinese influence on TikTok or Russian bot networks on X, efforts targeting the infrastructure layer of knowledge have gone largely unnoticed. They now operate with near impunity.
Data is being poisoned far upstream, where the quiet trickle of informational headwaters escapes the scrutiny given to the rapids downstream. But this is where the real danger lies. The next generation of AI will not just reflect this distortion. It will learn from it, repeat it and scale it. Most critically, the educators, policymakers, law-enforcement officials, parents and journalists who increasingly rely on these systems will believe it.
Ashley Rindsberg is an American journalist and author
