Following the Money: Who Is Shaping Hindu Narratives on Wikipedia?
- authored by CoHNA Staff
From the time CoHNA was founded, our community noticed a glaring issue: a significant bias prevalent in Wikipedia articles on Hinduism. For most, Wikipedia is the first and final authority on any novel topic, which is why the increasingly narrow, ideological framing of elements of Hindu faith became a crucial problem. Given our organizational focus on accurate and fair representation of Hinduism, wiki pages became a natural place to focus on.
For many months, dedicated community members spent countless hours attempting to fix articles on Hinduism, relying on strict standards, along with verifiable, academic citations. Yet, time and again, good-faith edits were swiftly reverted, caught in what seemed like an endless loop of editorial bureaucracy. Meanwhile, narratives we viewed as fringe or having thin sourcing were inserted and allowed to stand. Over time, it became clear this wasn’t just open-source editing at play but a strategic, coordinated pattern. We share just a couple instances as part of a larger pattern.
Ideology Over Accuracy: The Case Studies
For example, the below two article edits show a pattern of ideologically driven editing that retells Hindu history through a specific lens:
Ekalavya: Edits appeared that sought to categorize a key Mahabharata character as belonging to a “Dalit Family,” overriding traditional descriptions of him being a descendant of warrior nobles.
Basava: The Hindu Bhakti saint saw edits to “de-Hinduize” him, effectively transforming him solely into a figure for modern caste-division narratives and historical revisionism.
In 2017, a noticeable increase in ideologically motivated page edits began appearing. Although seemingly unrelated at surface, these edits coincide with coordinated efforts by non-profit organizations to introduce a specific anti-Hindu slant into Wikipedia.
The Network of NPOs and the Financial Trail
Our investigation into these systematic edits led us to a highly successful Edit-a-Thon for the Dalit community in 2017 run by a non-profit called Whose Knowledge? This campaign ran several workshops where edits were made to 300+ pages which have since garnered over 132 million views by their own reporting.
On looking deeper, Whose Knowledge? had partnered extensively with the activist organization Equality Labs, known for its strongly anti-Hindu stances and radical views of wanting Hinduism demolished. While Whose Knowledge? has a goal of diversifying online content, this partnership raises serious concerns about the intent behind the edits that followed-since the edits did a hit job of demonizing Hinduism. This provided a massive platform for propagating biased Hinduphobic content and misinformed millions.
The true significance emerged when we followed the money:
- Wikimedia Grant: The Wikimedia Foundation, parent org of Wikipedia, awarded Whose Knowledge? a grant of approximately $45,000 for a pilot project focused on introducing Wikipedia articles from marginalized communities including Dalits and Lesbians.
• Connecting the Dots: The link between the funder and the recipient became clear with the role of Anasuya Sengupta. Until 2015, she was a chief grantmaker for the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2016, she joined Whose Knowledge? as a founder and director. In her new position, she successfully secured grant funding from her former employer, the Wikimedia Foundation, shortly after joining her new organization for the pilot project.
Anasuya Sengupta has shared prominent platforms with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality Labs, normalizing their radical anti-Hindu discourse as simply an alternate viewpoint dismissing concerns of Hinduphobia.
The use of Wikimedia funding by her new non-profit to run edit-a-thons in partnership with a group like Equality Labs, suggests that Wikimedia donation funds have been used to further a specific activist agenda on the world’s largest online encyclopedia.
Why is this a problem?
Wikipedia has public rules about neutrality and required transparency around direct or indirect paid edits and conflicts of interest. This chain of events exposes how the lack of grant funding oversight and editorial accountability by Wikimedia was exploited by ex-employees in partnership with radical orgs to blur the line between open source knowledge creation and agenda driven story telling. When grant backed activists networks shape narratives unchecked, Wikipedia’s promise of neutrality got subverted for propagating curated ideological fictions.
Wikimedia continues to fund an annual grant 250K+ to Whose Knowledge? until 2026. The total annual donations by Wikimedia exceeds 10s of millions of dollars.
Conclusion
Across many topics, Hindus have spent countless hours struggling to simply correct basic factual errors on articles related to Hinduism with citations.
The super access granted to bureaucratically buried ideological networks made it impossible to challenge the persistence of biased content. When contrasted with these organized, funded campaigns, a troubling double standard emerges that allows a powerful, ideologically-driven narrative to be cemented as global truth. This is especially problematic as AI companies increasingly list Wikipedia (along with an even more easily manipulated website Reddit) as their top source of OSINT data for training AI models.
At CoHNA, we understand deeply the impact these misrepresentations can have on Hindu kids in schools across the continent. With AI rapidly becoming a popular place to get quick access to data about all things, it is even more important that sources which seek to inform or record history take initiatives to prevent gatekeeping and abuse, and encourage the process of knowledge through engagement.