• Top leadership roles at Wikimedia have been filled by figures with deep ties to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, including its former executive director, general counsel, and chief advancement officer

• Wikimedia has since funneled millions into DEI initiatives, framing Wikipedia as a social movement designed to “subvert” power structures

• Guided by Soros’ ‘open society’ philosophy, embracing “Knowledge Equity” as a core principle, Wikimedia’s 2017 Movement Strategy positioned Wikipedia as an instrument to drive radical change around the world

• Soros has spent $22 billion to achieve his vision of an “open society,” free from traditional societal structures like borders, national identities, and religions

--

“I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes, or, even better, like Einstein… As I made my way in the world, reality came close enough to my fantasy to allow me to admit my secret, at least to myself.”

“It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

–George Soros

--

In 2017, Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, implemented the most profound shift in its history. The Movement Strategy, as this effort is called, would vastly expand Wikipedia’s mission. From its humble roots as a user-contributed encyclopedia, Wikipedia would now set out to become “an influencer in shaping world policy in access to knowledge.” (My in-depth explainer on the Movement Strategy, “How the Regime Captured Wikipedia,” is here.)

In her keynote at the Movement Strategy launch, Wikimedia Foundation’s then-executive director Katherine Maher revealed the motivations behind this shift. “We have always wanted content to be open, as Wikimedia, but we want the world to be open too,” she said. “And we’re going to do our best to convince [people around the world], cajole them, and advocate and push to make the world a more open place.”

Maher’s emphasis of a single, endlessly repeated word — “open” — was loaded with ideological import. This wasn’t about open source software or collaboration. It was about making “the world” an open place.

Since the 1970s, George Soros has built a global political machine, anchored by his biggest NGO, the Open Society Foundations, on the concept of openness. Taken from the work of philosopher Karl Popper, the idea of an open society opposes any creed or system that might privilege one group over another.

Getting to this point of openness requires continuous political, social and economic disruption, even subversion, of the structures — borders, courts, currencies, armies, religions, police — that keep society tilting toward closedness. Openness, Soros believes, is a global equilibrium, not a national one. The world is one place; our job, Soros believes, is to advance toward this fundamental tenet of reality.

Soros has spent more than $22 billion attempting to move the world closer to this vision. In the 1990s, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalism, he advocated for the internationalization of state economies, arguing in The Alchemy of Finance for the creation of an international central bank, an international currency and, later, for an international regulator of state credit. (It’s not a coincidence that Soros’ signature trade, shorting the British pound, took place in the realm of currency disruption.)

In the early 2000s, as the locus of change shifted to geopolitical conflict, Soros worked towards ending American dominance, or, in his terms, “puncturing the bubble of American supremacy.” So deep was his loathing for George W. Bush and the War on Terror — which, he argued, had turned Americas into “perpetrators” of terrorism — that he called for regime change in America.

In 2015, with the rise of mass migration, he pushed Europe, in a speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos, to adopt a policy of admitting one million refugees a year “for the foreseeable future.” Soros argued that the EU should finance the biggest migration in history with state debt, while funding an additional four million refugees in Jordan and Turkey.

As the migration crisis arrived on American shores, Soros funded dozens of organizations in an effort to implement the same policy (successfully, as it were) at the southern border. And as America became engulfed in domestic crisis, he infamously spent years, and tens of millions, electing radical district attorneys with a do-not-prosecute approach to crime.

Amid this maelstrom of change, another conflagration erupted — the War on Information. In December 2016, Hillary Clinton, reeling from her devastating loss to Trump, declared a “fake news epidemic.” Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, expanding the mandate of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center from counter-terror to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” And the effort to delegitimize Trump’s presidency by falsely labelling it the product of Russian disinformation was well under way.

In this context, the Movement Strategy would leverage Wikipedia’s invaluable role as an arbiter of truth in a world where fact and fiction had blurred. The Strategy rested on three prongs. First was a total embrace of DEI, distilled into what WMF called “Knowledge Equity,” which funneled millions of dollars to activist NGOs. Second, the Strategy would seek to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, including with the launch of a university-style endowment and an Enterprise API. Third, it would fulfill its new mission of “shaping world policy” by expanding its advocacy for “open knowledge” into Africa, Central Europe and Asia.

At that time, Soros (who built his career and his political philosophy on the principle of never letting a crisis go to waste) was focused on leveraging the chaos surrounding the War on Information to advance his open society agenda. In January 2018, he gave a landmark address at the World Economic Forum where he spoke about the threat posed by Big Tech’s control of information:

The business model of social media companies is based on advertising. Their true customers are the advertisers. But gradually a new business model is emerging, based not only on advertising but on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer and use discriminatory pricing to keep for themselves more of the benefits that otherwise they would have to share with consumers.

Four months later, Maher echoed Soros in a speech on the “threat ‘big tech’ poses to our open societies”:

[On the internet today] propaganda stokes violence, and data brokers sway elections, and our most personal and intimate information is for sale to the highest bidder. We’re on a hamster wheel of clicks driven by broken advertising models that are set out to sell out our societies.

Maher argued that what the world needed was free knowledge — an explicitly “radical act” designed to “[subvert] power structures.”

It was no coincidence that Soros, the architect and funder of a radical progressive agenda, and Maher, who led the world’s most influential non-profit information platform, were mirroring each other on this issue. The war on information was the new battleground for social and political change. Both understood that advances there would translate into deep, long-lasting gains in the effort to create an open society. It would be the Movement Strategy that would help them seize this opportunity.

--

The groundwork for the Movement Strategy had been laid in 2016, when WMF commissioned the PR agency Minassian Media to do a major communications audit after suffering a scandal when it attempted to launch a search engine, called Knowledge Engine, to compete with Google. Knowledge Engine had fallen apart amid accusations in the Wikipedia community of backroom dealing, leading its embattled executive director, Lila Treitikov, to step down.

But, looking to Soros’ philosophy of seizing the opportunity in crisis, WMF saw the fiasco as a unique moment to catapult the organization into a remade future. This was true for Maher as much as for the broader organization. As chief communications officer until 2016, Maher would have worked closely with Minassian Media to shape its recommendations, giving her a powerful seat from which to steer a rudderless WMF.

But Minassian Media wasn't like any other PR agency. At the time, its founder and CEO, Craig Minassian, a longtime Clinton staffer, held another role: chief communications and marketing officer of the Clinton Foundation. A direct line to Hillary Clinton — then, the most powerful figure in Democratic politics — would have lent considerable heft to Minassian’s recommendations. But, just as importantly, it would have given Clinton a direct line into WMF.

Through remarkably canny branding as America’s mom (then grandma), Hillary Clinton has positioned herself as a centrist. In reality, she has pushed a platform of radical political change closely intertwined with Soros’ vision. Soros — Clinton’s biggest donor for her presidential bid, giving nearly $10 million — has played a leading role in her ability to pursue this ideological platform.

In 2004, Soros, introduced by Clinton at a Democratic conference, told the audience, “I have great admiration for [Hillary Clinton]. I’ve seen her deliver a speech in Davos about open society that explained the idea better than anybody else I’ve heard.” That speech was Clinton’s 1998 Davos keynote, where she made a robust argument for globalism rooted in “civic society.”

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Minassian Media’s recommendations amounted to a full-throated endorsement of Clinton and Soros’ shared ideology. “We have an opportunity to double-down on several elements of the ‘open’ narrative,” Minassian wrote. They also pushed WMF to adopt a globalist approach, writing, “As a global organization, it’s important to be embedded in the global community.”

After the audit, WMF began searching for a strategic consultancy that could give shape to its recommendations. They found it not in a transnational firm like McKinsey or Deloitte, but in a mostly unknown agency based out of Montana called Williamsworks. Here, too, Soros and Clinton’s political influence was at work.

Williamsworks was founded in 2003 by Whitney Williams, the scion of a powerful Montana political family. The inflection point in her career was serving as an aide to Hillary Clinton during Clinton’s time as First Lady. (Her father, former Montana congressman Pat Williams, had worked with the Clintons to develop legislation tied to the Clintons’ signature healthcare proposal, Hillaryhealth.) As Clinton’s trip director, she coordinated all of Clinton’s travel, including her 43-country tour for her 1996 book, It Takes A Village. Williams — whose agency’s website features a photo of a beaming Hillary Clinton on a private jet next to a birthday cake decorated with “Happy Birthday Whitney,” a smiling Williams standing in the foreground and two senior generals looking on — once said of Clinton’s on-the-go public life, “I run the road show.”

Powerful as the Clinton connection was, it was another influential WMF figure who proposed the Williamsworks consultancy: Lisa Seitz-Gruwell. Today, Seitz-Gruwell is president of Wikimedia’s $140 million Endowment and serves as the organization’s chief advancement officer. Before joining WMF, she was a fast-rising Democratic Party operative and a consultant at Gruwell and Associates (named after her husband, California lobbyist Chris Gruwell), where one of the biggest clients was the Democracy Alliance, a mega-donor fund co-founded — and primarily funded — by George Soros that has funneled over $1 billion to Democratic Party candidates, including millions to Hillary Clinton.

Seitz-Gruwell herself was recruited to Wikimedia Foundation by then-chief community officer Zack Exley, who would rise to become chief revenue officer at WMF. Immediately before joining Wikimedia in 2010, he served as a fellow at Open Society Foundations, where he worked on leaderless activism models (the kind that would rock America first with Occupy Wall Street and later with Antifa). In the early 2000s, Exley was made organizing director at MoveOn.org, an organization Soros supported from its inception.

Amid this swirl of influence and positioning, the Movement Strategy induced another major change to the WMF in 2016: the launch of a $100 million Endowment, which, as I’ve previously reported, was initially nested inside of Tides Foundation, one of America’s biggest funders of far-left causes. The year the Endowment was launched, Soros’ Open Society Foundation made the first in a series of donations to Tides that would amount to a staggering $61 million over six years. Since Tides is a donor-advised fund, Soros could have used it to funnel money to the Wikimedia Endowment without any trace.

In 2018, the year of his Davos speech, Soros doubled down on his commitment to the Wikimedia Endowment with a direct $2 million donation. In its announcement of the donation, WMF emphasized Soros’ political philosophy, noting “his extensive philanthropy to support ideals underpinning a free and open society, including access to knowledge.”

Referring to Soros by his first name, Maher echoed this emphasis on openness in her quote: “George’s generous gift to the future of free knowledge is reflective of his deep commitment to supporting openness in all its forms.” But Soros’ statement spoke loudest. “My gift represents a commitment to the ideals of open knowledge — and to the long-term importance of free knowledge sources that benefit people around the world,” he said.

While her repeated echoing of Soros’ language of openness may seem coincidental, in truth Maher has nurtured deep ties to Soros’ views. Her first real professional experience in NGOs began around 2008, when she co-founded a non-profit called Sharek961 to do election monitoring in Lebanon. Her bio on the organization’s website stated: “Katherine Maher works on making information and communication technology work for development purposes and is interested in the principles of open society and communities of practice and participation.”

Maher’s organization was indirectly supported by a Soros-funded NGO called Global Voices, which was founded by Ethan Zuckerman, a pioneer of digital activism, proponent of Soros-style globalism, and one of the most important figures in the Soros universe.

Amid the Movement Strategy launch in 2017, WMF recruited Zuckerman, who had served on the inaugural WMF advisory board, to return as a board member. By then, Zuckerman’s involvement with OSF had stretched over decades. In 2004, he began serving as a board member and later chair of Open Society Foundations’ advisory board, a role he maintained for 10 years. In 2008, he became director of the US board of the foundation. He also served as the chair of Open Society Foundation’s sub-board for its Information Program, an initiative that created ways for activist organizations to leverage media for social change.

In 2012 Zuckerman was elevated to the global board of the Open Society Foundations. It’s hard to overstate just how significant this is. In this role, Zuckerman would have had top-level insight and decision-making abilities in one of the world’s most powerful social change philanthropies.

In 2017, when Zuckerman returned to WMF, he also became special advisor to OSF’s president, Christopher Stone, a criminal justice reform advocate. In an interview that August, he spoke to many of the ideas that would become central to the Movement Strategy, including the idea of civic media, or “media that people make and disseminate as a way of trying to make social or political change.”

This, Zuckerman argued, was not about making change at the ballot box, but, rather, shifting “norms.” For Zuckerman, there was no more striking example than BLM, whose effectiveness, he argued, sprang from its ability to superimpose a “greater narrative” — that police officers, driven by racism, murder black men — on top of straight news reporting. This, he said, is what shifting norms is all about.

WMF followed Zuckerman’s lead. With the resurgence of BLM in 2020, it launched the Wikimedia Race and Knowledge Equity fellowship, with $4.5 million in grants. It published a BLM policy: “We stand for racial justice,” which affirmed Wikipedia’s role as a “social movement” dedicated to “supporting knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.” It also created an Inclusive Product Development initiative, which sought to design and implement “a DEI-centered software development process.”

But, as every successful activist movement knows, this was about people. Alongside Zuckerman, WMF appointed to its inaugural advisory board Melissa Hagemann, a self-described “open knowledge advocate” who spent nearly 25 years at Open Society Foundations spanning 1994 to 2022. Hagemann would spend 11 years on the WMF board.

During the same period, WMF named a new head of legal — Eileen Hershenov — to lead it through the thicket of policy issues generated by the Movement Strategy. Hershenov had previously served as associate general counsel at Open Society Foundations from 1994, before being elevated to full general counsel in 1996, a position she held until 2006. During the same period, she became general counsel at Central European University, the university Soros founded in 2001 and endowed with $250 million.

WMF would continue to advance this ideological agenda through numerous Soros-tied hires. In 2021, Zuckerman’s Global Voices co-founder, Rebecca MacKinnon, was named VP for global advocacy to “continue Wikimedia’s efforts to establish and defend a legal and regulatory landscape essential to the future of free knowledge globally.” Before joining WMF, MacKinnon founded and ran an NGO called Ranking Digital Rights, also funded by Open Society Foundations.

That year, WMF named its first Head of Human Rights, Cameran Ashraf, a professor at Central European University who previously served as deputy director at Open Society Foundation’s Internship for Rights and Governance.

WMF is not slowing down in its effort to fulfill the mandate of the Movement Strategy. And Wikipedia itself is only growing in significance. WMF recently noted that Wikipedia is among the most important content sources being ingested by LLMs, with one analysis showing that the site is one of the three most important sources for training data and among the highest for reliability. With the concept of Knowledge Equity shaping not just Wikipedia but the LLMs that shape our future, there’s little doubt that the Movement Strategy has been a success.

While Soros has handed the reins to his son Alex, OSF has similarly pledged to pursue its core mission of pushing our societies towards Soros’ vision of openness. As information eats our world, it’s all but certain that the massive investment Soros has made in Wikipedia will continue to pay off.

—Ashley Rindsberg