Wikipedia editors have also kept information about the human smuggling charges Jia Tolentino’s parents faced from her page on the website
Wikipedia editors have spent years removing negative information from New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino’s page, including her recent admission to stealing from Whole Foods and the federal prosecution of her parents for the attempted smuggling of hundreds of Filipino aliens, the “Talk” page on her Wikipedia article shows.
Tolentino’s frank acknowledgment last week on a New York Times podcast that she has stolen from Whole Foods because it’s a “big box store” and that she doesn’t “feel bad … at all” stealing from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the owner of Whole Foods, spurred a discussion among Wikipedia editors about whether to include that information on her page. “While the podcast did likely have her on and she said these things (I haven’t listened to it),” one editor wrote, “it’s not a self-published source and may struggle to be considered a reliable source.”
The same editor asked, “So what if she admits to shoplifting? She also admitted to sharing her Netflix password and using limewire to pirate music.” A different editor, apparently shocked by the decision to exclude Tolentino’s remarks from her Wikipedia page, wrote, “Undoubtably professional Wikipedia cleaners.”
Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors to manage its website, and most Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone. Every article on the website has its own “Talk” page where editors can discuss or debate changes and explain why information may or may not appear in a given article.
The embarrassing Times podcast appearance is not the only topic that has been scrubbed from Tolentino’s Wikipedia page.
In 2004, the U.S. government accused Tolentino’s parents and grandmother of persuading Filipino nationals to pay them $10,000 apiece in exchange for teaching jobs in the United States through a family business. That company, Omni Consortium, took money from 273 Filipino teachers, but fewer than 100 of the Filipinos ever received teaching positions, federal prosecutors said. The Tolentinos were charged with conspiracy to commit alien smuggling and visa fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering.
The judge in the case declared a mistrial, and in that trial, Tolentino’s father pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to defraud” the U.S. government.
Many Wikipedia editors have argued that the prosecution of her parents should not appear on her page. One editor, for instance, said he or she was “not clear how you know the people mentioned in these links are her parents.”
Tolentino wrote a since-deleted May 2020 blog post in which she addressed the charges, stating that “a school district in Texas declined to hire a batch of teachers to whom they had previously extended job offers,” but “the company was not informed of the change of plans until after the teachers had already traveled to the States.” Her father’s guilty plea, Tolentino said, came because the migrants’ “visa petitions bore the name of the school district that had extended the job offers before declining, rather than the school districts where they eventually worked.”
The criminal proceedings against Tolentino’s parents first emerged on her Wikipedia page that May, and as Tolentino wrote in the blog post, a friend helped her remove references to the charges from Wikipedia.
“When a kind friend deleted the line from my Wikipedia page, out of concern for my family, it was added again nearly immediately,” she wrote.
Even though Tolentino confirmed that her parents had faced criminal charges, other editors continued to argue that the information should not be included on her page.
The issue resurfaced in 2021, and the same Wikipedia editor argued against including the information about Tolentino’s parents because doing so would give undue “weight to social media and blog blatherings.”
Another editor argued, “Create a page about her parents if you think this deserves coverage.”
Neither Tolentino nor the New Yorker responded to requests for comment.
Wikipedia itself has been the subject of controversy over the past few years. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel, a group of around 40 Wikipedia editors “has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years,” Pirate Wires reported in October 2024. Those editors were able to remove Hamas’s 1988 charter—which repeatedly calls for the killing of Jews—from the Wikipedia article on the terror group, as well as delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.”
Wikipedia eventually banned the leader of that group, but the “tens of thousands of edits made by him and others operating alongside him” still exist on the website.
The Washington Free Beacon reported in April 2025 that other left-wing Wikipedia users have been able to manipulate the website. Harvard’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a far-left legal advocacy group, hosted a “Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon” at which students watered down language about antisemitic incidents on college campuses. One student changed the term “antisemitic incidents” to “pro-Palestine protests” and “incidents targeting Jewish students” to those “described … as antisemitic.”
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