A network of progressive groups that’s seeded some of the most influential Democratic activist groups in the country is turning its attention and considerable resources to another task: sanitizing its Wikipedia page.
Arabella Advisors, a philanthropic consulting firm, has enlisted a digital consultant to push for the deletion of portions of its Wikipedia page that the group deems biased or unreliable. It’s targeted excerpts on the page sourced to conservative news organizations and a leading good-government watchdog group, according to Wikipedia edit logs.
Arabella and a pair of affiliated nonprofits—the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund—have grown in prominence of late as they’ve worked to incubate scores of organizations, most of them left-of-center, including Demand Justice, the leading Democrat-aligned advocacy group working to shift partisan control of the U.S. courts.
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With that work has come scrutiny, both from journalists and watchdogs concerned about the Arabella network’s ability to shield critical information about the finances of the organizations with which it’s affiliated. It’s precisely that sort of information that Arabella’s digital consultant has attempted to soften or purge entirely from the group’s Wikipedia page.
The efforts began this month, when a longtime editor on the site, Mary Gaulke, suggested four changes to Arabella’s Wikipedia page. Gaulke is a senior content strategist at the public relations firm Porter Novelli, according to her LinkedIn page; there, she specializes in managing clients’ reputations on Wikipedia, the world’s largest reference database and the second-most-visited website in the U.S. She told The Daily Beast that her work for Arabella was undertaken in a freelance capacity.
Arabella, for its part, said in a statement that it provides “advice and implementation support to clients with very different ideological and political viewpoints. It has recently been the target of significant mischaracterization, including by an anonymous Wikipedia editor. Arabella is proud of the services we provide, so we engaged an experienced, independent Wikipedia editor on a freelance basis to challenge this misinformation through an open and transparent process.”
For Arabella’s page, Gaulke’s proposed changes included the deletion of information about how the organization and its affiliated 501(c)(4) “dark money” group, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, effectively hid financial information about groups they support.
Sixteen Thirty acts as a “fiscal sponsor” for those groups, meaning, in effect, that they are not independent entities, but are, for legal and tax purposes, part of the Sixteen Thirty Fund itself. That means that they don’t have to independently disclose financial information to the Internal Revenue Service. Instead, Sixteen Thirty discloses its overall finances, lumping together all the income and expenditures for its scores of fiscal sponsorees into a single financial filing. That makes it all but impossible to divine the sums that those sponsorees themselves are bringing in or spending.
It also makes other public records associated with Arabella-backed organizations more difficult to parse. Last month, for instance, Sixteen Thirty reported hiring a lobbyist to work on “judicial nominations.” That’s precisely what Demand Justice works on, but due to the fiscal sponsorship arrangement, Demand Justice’s name wouldn’t need to show up in lobbying disclosure forms even if it were the actual entity behind that advocacy effort.
That sort of ambiguity has led to criticism that the organization is exacerbating an already troubling level of financial opacity among politically active nonprofits.
It’s just that sort of criticism that Gaulke has attempted to expunge from Arabella’s Wikipedia page. She proposed deleting, or at a minimum qualifying, a quote on the page from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit political money watchdog, that said Sixteen Thirty and New Venture “have fiscally sponsored at least 80 of their own groups, bankrolling those entities in a way that leaves almost no paper trail.”
Gaulke also pushed to delete a section of the Arabella Wikipedia page that noted Sixteen Thirty’s fiscal sponsorship of groups pushing for President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Other suggested edits called into question the reliability of reporting on Arabella by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet. Gaulke cited Wikipedia’s policy on “reliable sources,” and suggested that, according to precedents on the site, the Free Beacon (where, in full disclosure, I formerly worked) should only be cited in the context of opinion, rather than reporting.
Gaulke did not make these edits herself, but rather suggested them, consistent with her stated determination to abide by Wikipedia policies governing conflicts of interest. But her suggestions nonetheless drew pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, who questioned the attempts to modify Arabella’s Wikipedia page at the behest of the group’s paid consultant.
“I don’t feel comfortable acting on these requests,” one editor wrote. “The fact that this page was created less than a month ago and Arabella has already retained a paid editor is not, to me, a good sign. As we can see from the article, Arabella has a massive amount of money and exerts tremendous influence across a wide range of channels. Its Wikipedia page should not be one of those channels.”
“What chance does the layman have at crafting a truly impartial encyclopedic article if volunteer editors here are asked to do the bidding of a paid editor on behalf of a gigantic and powerful company?” another editor wrote of Gaulke’s efforts to sanitize her client’s page. “It is truly David vs. Goliath.”
Gaulke did not respond to questions about her work. But she told Wikipedia editors who objected to her proposed changes that in her “discussions with Arabella, they have expressed a firm commitment to being transparent on Wikipedia and abiding by its rules.”
Editors did accede to some of Gaulke’s suggested changes. While they declined to remove portions of the page sourced to the Free Beacon, one editor added additional sourcing and “softened the language a little bit.” The same editor also added an in-text citation to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But the Wikipedia community’s unease has persisted.
“Arabella spends hundreds of millions of dollars on various public-relations efforts. They are real professionals,” one editor wrote of Gaulke’s efforts. “I would want to know how much they are paying you and what you have promised them.”
Updated 6:22pm to add comment.
