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Anna Delvey, known for inspiring the hit Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” about her turn impersonating a German heiress, and appearing on “Dancing with the Stars” while still wearing the ankle monitor that followed the related convictions, announced last week that she has a problem with Wikipedia.
In a Friday Substack post, Delvey complained about the anonymity of Wikipedia editors, who were refusing (among other things) to respond to her paragraphs about her “own moral integrity” or to allow her to edit her Wikipedia page. She described Wikipedia’s policies on self-editing as “Byzantine,” and has been in what she describes as a “Wikiwar” trying to earn permission to remove content from a page that she wishes “didn’t exist in the first place,” she wrote.
“Compared to the Wikipedia kangaroo court, jail was the lesser punishment — at least you sort of know the people, and the sentence has an end date,” she wrote in the post. On Instagram, she posted, “Wikipedia editors with power over living people should have to verify who they are. Yes, all of them.”
What are Wikipedia’s editing policies?
Wikipedia was launched as an open-source information project in 2001 and invited anyone to contribute knowledge. The site strongly discourages editors from using their own name and identifying accounts, which can result in harassment or offline identification.
Wikipedia’s Conflict of Interest policy also strongly discourages users from editing their own pages, as well as those of family, friends, clients, employers or “financial and other relationships.” This is true for everyone, as “subjects may unintentionally downplay controversies, disproportionately emphasize achievements or remove unflattering (but accurate) information. Even with the best intentions, one’s perspective is inherently biased when they are the subject.”
However, while editors and contributors are anonymous, the Wikimedia foundation emphasizes attribution and transparency in editing history, meaning that edits and changes to any page are permanently recorded on the platform.
Inviting anyone to edit brings a range of perspectives, according to Wikipedia fan and editor D.F. Lovett. People misunderstand the organization and treat it like a “controlled corporate monolith with a political agenda”, he wrote in his own Substack post on the topic. But “no one should read a Wikipedia article and say ‘yes, this perfectly articulates my exact opinion and only my opinion on this issue,’” he added.
Delvey said she had first been alerted to Wikipedia’s rules after hearing that an early founder of the platform had been banned from editing there. As Straight Arrow reported last October, Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, has campaigned for several years to allow more sites with right-wing perspectives to be used as trusted sources on the platform.
Wikipedia’s influence on AI chatbots
Delvey’s Substack post also took issue with the fact that large language models (LLMs) and chatbots source heavily from Wikipedia, meaning that information on the page is now being propagated more widely.
“Ask a chatbot who I am, and what you’ll get is in large part just Wikipedia recited back in a different font,” she wrote in the Substack post. “What may have worked for a volunteer encyclopedia in 2001 no longer works for a major layer of global information infrastructure in 2026.”
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, shared a similar perspective last year. Cruz also cited Sanger’s campaign against the organization in his statements.
Wikipedia does filter through into chatbot answers — both from being incorporated into the training data of an LLM, and also from being retrieved live by the model during a search inquiry.
How does Wikipedia choose sources?
The sites Sanger highlighted to Straight Arrow as having been removed from the trusted sources list were mostly removed due to a lack of journalistic standards in their reporting or a tendency to describe people’s opinions as facts, rather than because of their right-wing perspectives, according to Wikipedia’s page on the topic.
Other sources like Rolling Stone’s politics and society vertical and TikTok have also been added to the “unreliable” sources list. The rationales for those classifications refer to deterioration of journalistic practices and low-quality reporting. Outlets like The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, People and Playboy are considered to be more reliably reported, and therefore treated as more reliable sources for validating facts on the platform.
As 404 Media reported last month, Sanger had echoed some of Delvey’s perspectives that Wikipedia’s community processes felt like being in court: “Larry tried to frame the community discussion as a pseudo-legalistic process, bringing a list of ‘charges’ and ‘counts’ from ‘prosecutors,’ instead of an open community discussion,” one volunteer admin told 404.
Sanger was permanently banned from the site last month after using his large X following for “off-wiki canvassing,” encouraging them to support him in his aim of changing the site’s policies.
As for Delvey, she told Straight Arrow on Monday that she plans to publish several more installments of her experiences with Wikipedia throughout this week.
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