Karen Brown, Joe Sutherland, Abhas Tripathi, Mariana Iskander, Nahid Sultan, Arik Karani, Jan Eibfeldt by Wikipedia
The Wikimedia Foundation has failed spectacularly. The Foundation’s so-called Trust and Safety team is tasked with protecting users and upholding integrity. Instead, it is shielding abusers and silencing victims. The result: a white elite man, documented on video choking a woman, remains untouched, glorified, and whitewashed on one of the most trafficked platforms on the internet.
Despite the submission of over 40 sources including reputable news articles and visual evidence clearly showing physical assault, the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing. No internal review. No inquiry. No outreach to victims. No willingness to even engage. Even video footage showing the man violently assaulting his wife, as police arrive on the scene, was not enough to prompt a single, serious action. What exactly does it take for this institution to care?
The Foundation’s response has been silence, calculated, complicit silence, responses from Tom Paine and John Sullivan. Discussions pointing to abuse were swiftly deleted by a small handful of two editors, which one linked to the subject himself. Pages were locked. Talk topics were deleted, Evidence was scrubbed. And all the while, glowing descriptions of wealth, nobility, and ancestral estates remained untouched and unquestioned, even though they lacked any sourcing.
The Trust and Safety team, when contacted directly, refused to step in. Instead, they offered vague statements that the matter was “resolved.” Resolved by whom? By two users operating without transparency or accountability, who deleted public talk pages and discussion threads, erasing the only real record of dissent or concern. This was not a resolution. It was a cover-up.
What’s most alarming is how the Wikimedia Foundation allows its editorial policies and administrative tools to be weaponized by the powerful. In this case, one man’s privilege, his wealth, whiteness, and title, granted him protection that countless other subjects would never receive. His page remains a sanitized version of reality, carefully maintained to protect a reputation, while women are left with no voice, no platform, and no justice.
The Wikimedia Foundation claims to be a bastion of free knowledge, open to anyone, governed by community standards, and resistant to manipulation. But this case shows that the opposite is true. Behind its idealistic branding lies a broken system where the loudest, most connected, or most privileged voices win. The Trust and Safety team is supposed to protect users from harm, not ignore abuse, gaslight victims, and uphold legacy structures that have always favored the elite.
Where is the “safety” in allowing abuse to go unmentioned? Where is the “trust” when credible documentation is ignored in favor of glowing, unverified content that reads more like a press release than an encyclopedia entry? Where is the accountability when women, some of whom have risked everything to speak out—are met with indifference and buried by bureaucracy?
The Wikimedia Foundation had a choice. It could have acknowledged the evidence. It could have stepped in. It could have put victims above vanity. Instead, it chose silence. It chose complicity. And in doing so, it sent a loud, unmistakable message to women around the world. The Wikimedia Foundation owes the victims and future victims protection.
