The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, selected Bernadette Meehan, a former Obama Foundation executive and Ambassador to Chile for Joe Biden, as its new CEO last year. Shortly after her selection, editors found the Wikipedia article on Meehan was created in early 2015 by an account later banned on suspicion of undisclosed paid editing, a violation of the site’s Terms of Use. In an interview with an in-house newsletter, Meehan denied knowledge of the account.
Edits were also made to Meehan’s Wikipedia page from Georgetown University, where she held a position. Multiple throwaway accounts further made promotional edits after Meehan began working for former President Barack Obama’s Foundation and removed mentions of her involvement in controversial foreign policy decisions by the Obama Administration. Following her selection as CEO, editors corrected most issues.
Meehan’s appointment as Wikimedia Foundation CEO was announced on December 9, 2025. Until early that year, Meehan served as United States Ambassador to Chile under President Joe Biden, taking office in 2022. Previously, she was Executive Vice President for Global Programs at the Obama Foundation. Meehan before that worked in the State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton and as spokesperson for Obama’s National Security Council. She also worked at JP Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Board Chair called her “the right leader to . . . center Wikimedia’s role as a trusted source of knowledge from humans around the world.”
Wikipedia’s article about Meehan at the time of the announcement included considerable promotional material. On the article’s discussion page, a paid editing banner lists the account “Feelingfancyfree” as making contributions to Meehan’s page, in fact being the account that created her article in February of 2015. Another account named “Factsonlyplease39” is listed, but has not made edits to the page. Both accounts were banned as “sockpuppet” accounts, multiple accounts operated deceptively by a single person. During a 2015 investigation, an administrator with “checkuser” privileges, which allow someone to view confidential user data, suggested the accounts were tied to a public relations company.
Shortly after being announced as CEO, she was questioned about the account by the Signpost, a Wikipedia community newsletter. The interviewer also noted edits by an apparent Georgetown University IP address later in 2015, noting this was after Meehan became a fellow at the university. Meehan stated she didn’t know who created her page or made the edits mentioned. She cited the situation as “a solid example of the Wikipedia model working in practice” and editors “working together to spot and block undisclosed paid editing,” while “improving the content by removing anything that might not be written from a neutral point of view or be verifiable.”
Paid editing is a common and controversial practice on Wikipedia. Site policy technically permits paid editing provided there is prominent disclosure of the connection, though even such “white hat” paid editing has proven contentious, particularly when it involves administrators with advanced privileges. However, the Terms of Use explicitly forbid paid editing that isn’t properly disclosed and such schemes being exposed leads to accounts involved being banned and articles deleted en masse. Despite this, political figures such as 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Biden Coronavirus Czar Jeffrey Zients have previously been found employing undisclosed paid editing.
Aside from edits mentioned by the Signpost, numerous other questionable changes were made to Meehan’s page since its creation. These edits were made by a variety of “single-purpose accounts” over the course of years, though none have been identified as paid editors. Single-purpose accounts, called simply SPAs on Wikipedia, are accounts whose edits mostly or entirely concern a single topic and may function as “burner” accounts that make a few edits and are then discarded. One such account edited Meehan’s page not long after she began working for the Obama Foundation to add promotional details relating to her work at the Foundation and prior work for his Administration.
Other accounts removed information tying her to controversial aspects of Obama’s foreign policy. An account adding numerous promotional details and self-aggrandizing quotes from Meehan, also removed mention of her justifying Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen’s civil war, which eventually saw significant criticism over Saudi conduct of the war, particularly from the left. Edits made after that by a different account were largely innocuous, but also removed a section noting Meehan’s crucial role in promoting to the public the Obama Administration’s politically unpopular Iran deal regarding its nuclear enrichment program. Following Meehan’s departure as ambassador, another account added extensive promotional material regarding her tenure.
Despite some effort to address these problems during this time, it was only after Meehan was announced as the next Foundation CEO that Wikipedia editors began intensively reviewing her page. Content with sourcing or tone issues were systematically gutted from the article. A consequence of this effort to cleanse Meehan’s page is that much of her article is now cited mainly to sources closely connected to Meehan or organizations associated with her. Such sources are considered “primary sources” on Wikipedia, which site policy states should not serve as the main sourcing for an article with subjects expected to have significant coverage in sources independent of the subject.
In the second part of Meehan’s Signpost interview published in March, she cited her diplomacy background as “experience that feels especially relevant as the Wikimedia movement navigates growing external challenges.” One aspect of that challenge has been increasing criticism of Wikipedia’s bias, particularly left-wing bias, including by members of Congress and President Donald Trump’s Administration. However, Meehan’s background with Obama and the Clintons does not dissuade such concerns, though such political affiliations have been consistent at the Foundation. Meehan’s predecessor Maryana Iskander was an executive at abortion provider Planned Parenthood, which the Wikimedia Foundation announcement at the time labeled “a volunteer-led social movement focused on access to healthcare.”
Most discrediting was Iskander’s predecessor and current NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who also had ties to groups linked to the Democratic Party. Maher’s public statements challenging a free and open Internet and criticizing how the First Amendment protecting free speech made dealing with supposed “disinformation” difficult on Wikipedia prompted significant criticism, including from site co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger, a long-time critic of Wikipedia’s left-wing bias, was recently banned from the site he helped establish and attacked by its editors over his reform efforts aimed at increasing the site’s intellectual diversity.
During her time at the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher presided over a highly politicized shift in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. An audit by Minassian Media, run by the Head of Communications for the Clinton Foundation, advocated presenting Wikipedia as a challenge to “fake news” and encouraged getting more involved in political causes. Maher subsequently touted a purge of conservative media from Wikipedia through a sourcing blacklist as validating the site’s “verifiability” policy. The Foundation would also sign on to opposing Trump policies, even endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement and claiming there was “no neutral stance” on the topic amid 2020 protests and riots.
T. D. Adler edited Wikipedia as The Devil’s Advocate. He was banned after privately reporting conflict of interest editing by one of the site’s administrators. Due to previous witch-hunts led by mainstream Wikipedians against their critics, Adler writes under an alias.