Anna Delvey’s crusade against Wikipedia, and what it means for the First Amendment

Anna Delvey knows she is being dramatic. 

Her recent four-part Substack series, outlining her desire to unmask the editors of her Wikipedia page, is meant to grab people’s attention. But she says the issues she raises should still be taken seriously. 

“I’m obviously exaggerating some things — I was just trying to make the piece entertaining,” Delvey told Straight Arrow. But “it’s not like a New York Times investigation piece. I think anyone can see that.”

Delvey is particularly irritated by the way Wikipedia works because she doesn’t want to be defined by her past experiences. The parts of her life that people deem newsworthy — her convictions for grand larceny and theft, her years in prison, the nine-episode miniseries inspired by her life, her deadpan responses on reality TV — are in the past, Delvey said. So, why can’t her page in the digital encyclopedia reflect that?

Her light-hearted posts have illuminated two very real questions. 

The first, already long-settled, is the question of freedom of speech in America; the answer predates even the Constitution. Benjamin Mako Hill, associate professor of communications at the University of Washington, told Straight Arrow that, actually, he’s “much more worried about a Wikipedia in which Anna Delvey gets to decide what is or isn’t in her article.”

The second question addresses a more recent development: the role Wikipedia now plays in the digital media ecosystem and infrastructure. 

Read more: Should Anna Delvey be allowed to edit her own Wikipedia page?

What are Delvey’s complaints?

Delvey feels that the content on her page does not reflect her life in 2026. She said it should be updated to reflect her work and creative exploits since the criminal convictions and splashy news articles that made her famous. 

The rules around sourcing facts on Wikipedia mean that every edit or change must cite an external source that provides evidence. But there are simply many more online sources that reference her criminal history than any of her subsequent work. 

“I was looking through the edit history of my page, and there are editors who obviously just, like, don’t have any grasp of how, like, criminal justice system works,” Delvey told Straight Arrow earlier this month, during a two-hour interview digging into her feelings on the topic. 

Some of the edits insert terms like “con artist” and “fraudster” on her page. But those aren’t accurate terms, she said, because they’re not technically legal categories: “I’ve never been convicted of con artistry, and I’ve never been convicted of fraud. My conviction is for grand larceny.” 

That, she said, is unnecessarily rude. 

The damage doesn’t stop there. A Google search for Delvey’s name always appears with a label attached: “con artist”. She believes part of the “knowledge panel” is drawn from Wikipedia. She’s probably correct; last week, Google’s search automatically described OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s “death date” after his Wikipedia page was vandalized to say he’d been assassinated. Google blamed “public information sources” for the error. 

Read more: How Wikipedia vandals convinced Google that Sam Altman was dead

What’s in a label? 

On July 26, the line on Delvey’s Wikipedia page changed from “con artist” to “fraudster.” On Aug. 1, it changed to “grifter.” This back-and-forth has happened several times in the last few years; past versions of her introduction have included both words, as well as the terms “painter,” “media personality and former socialite” and “artist and heiress.”

However, the “con artist” description still appears in Google’s search bar.

“I imagine that’s the first thing that a person who Googles me sees,” Delvey said. 

She pointed out that other newsworthy people, like Harvey Weinstein, Billy McFarland and Elizabeth Holmes, did not have subtitles attached to their names in the same way via search. (That’s true. Straight Arrow verified.)

She would prefer her subtitle to say something like “entrepreneur” or “internet personality,” but, she added, “God forbid you try to call yourself something that’s too flattering.” 

The Netflix page for the show inspired by Delvey’s life does use the term “con artist.” But that show is fictionalized, she said, and she feels differently about it. “It’s like an entertainment vehicle,” she said.

Delvey realizes that some readers might not be empathetic to her complaint. 

“Well, if she didn’t want to be called this, she should have thought twice before committing crimes,” she said, dryly preempting any potential critics. But she added, “I don’t think it’s reasonable feedback.” 

“It’s like I’m being blamed for (the) public’s unhealthy obsession with crime and scandal,” Delvey told Straight Arrow. “And that’s why I should be labeled this thing for the rest of my life. And that’s how they seem to think.”

Is she sure her problem is with Wikipedia specifically, and not just the media in general? Very.

Wikipedia is important to her, because “a person is more affected by something that’s on their Wikipedia page more than a news article in, I don’t know, CNN or New York Times.” 

“I can hardly go from one outlet to another one and, like, try to convince them to rename me,” she said.

Wikipedia is where central truth is stored these days. And Delvey sees Wikipedia as falling behind on updating events in her life; she added in an email, “allowing the loudest cluster of scandal-era reporting to define the person indefinitely.”

Then there’s the photo. 

Her page has also seen some debate over which picture to use. She has changed her picture in the past, and doesn’t like the current one, which was taken on a rainy day at a local art gallery. 

“My hair is frizzy, and, like, my nose is swollen, and I was so tired,” she said. “I just look unkempt.” 

When she tries to change it, editors revert her effort. 

“Why would a random person insist on having an uglier picture of me up? I just don’t understand it,” she said. 

She attributes her various difficulties to the editor’s anonymity. 

“Anonymity never brings out the best in a person,” she said. “I think if everyone knew that everything that they post online can be traced back to them, or, will be revealed under their real name, I think there won’t be a lot of stuff on the internet like the way you see it right now.” 

What does the First Amendment say about anonymity?

Anonymous speech is explicitly protected by the Constitution. 

Aaron Mackey, free speech and transparency litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Delvey’s complaints and her curiosity about who was editing her page “is not itself enough under the First Amendment.” 

In one of her posts, Delvey wrote she “genuinely struggle(s) to understand the insistence on absolute anonymity” in liberal democracies. 

But the desire for anonymity makes a lot of sense to Mackey. 

“Anonymity provides you the space to either publish unpopular speech, or speech that is critical of powerful individuals,” Mackey told Straight Arrow. And those powerful individuals could be “folks who are rich and famous, or government officials.” 

In that way, allowing anonymous free speech is a defining quality of a liberal democracy. 

The First Amendment allows people to publish their speech “in a way that both separates your identity from the content of the speech, but also allows you to speak without personally being subject to either retaliation, legal threats, physical threats of violence, intimidation — those sorts of things,” Mackey said.

And that protection has been in place, “actually since before the creation of our Constitution,” he added. 

Why do people volunteer to edit Wikipedia? 

Delvey told Straight Arrow that she does not understand why Wikipedia editors would want anonymity — or why they even volunteer to edit. 

“If you’re so scared and this is not a paid job, why do you insist on doing this?” she asked.

It would be better, she said, if the editors were named. And that’s just what she wants to happen. 

There’s no legal mechanism to deanonymize all of Wikipedia’s editors, Mackey said. And if Wikipedia did that, “they would be jeopardizing the health and safety of many, many, many editors from in the United States and around the world.” 

And there are a lot of people involved. 

“All of the information on Wikipedia is created and curated by a global community of nearly 250,000 volunteer contributors,” a Wikimedia spokesperson told Straight Arrow. “This volunteer-led process of content moderation is open and transparent, and anyone can see how a page has developed through public version histories.”

It is not illegal to be rude, incorrect or wrong online, said Mackey. If something illegal — like defamation or an invasion of privacy — was included in a Wikipedia article, the proper resolution would be to identify that individual writer, rather than every single person who edits the site, he said.

Delvey also acknowledges that she has benefited from the freedom of expression enshrined in the First Amendment. In 2024, she successfully argued in court that being barred from social media during her house arrest violated her First Amendment rights. 

“The Constitution applies to everyone, even though I’m not a citizen,” she said. “The First Amendment applies to me as well, and the judge took away my right to use social media when I was released from immigration detention back in 2022. And that was illegal.” 

She thinks that Wikipedia is different from social media, however, “because it has consequences and it, like, travels.”

Delvey believes that the way the modern internet now draws from Wikipedia — including the widespread use of Wikipedia in AI training and chatbots — should prompt the organization to rethink its policies. 

Anonymous editors are better at hashing out truth

Wikipedia directly relies on anonymity to work as well as it does, according to Hill.

People have to hash it out to get to the truth, he told Straight Arrow. On Wikipedia, anyone can jump in on any topic, on any page, with any amount of expertise. Good debates need people on both sides, including those willing to be wrong in public. And people tend to be much less willing to be wrong if they are named. 

Hill’s research found anonymity gives people space to be wrong while editing and contributing to online information sources. Even requiring account registration “reduces both high- and low-quality contributions” to collaborative efforts like Wikipedia. 

Requiring an account “was very effective at blocking vandalism, but it also resulted in a quite substantial decrease in the amount of good contributions,” said Hill. He said anonymous users have a lot of value: they “maybe know a little thing or see a typo, but can’t be bothered to create an account.” 

And he said that when people make low-quality edits, it “can elicit contributions from other established users” (evoking the classic meme “someone is WRONG on the internet”). 

Hill said his own Wikipedia page is out of date, but he doesn’t mind because he can edit his personal website to his preferences. He also said he thinks Delvey’s entry is pretty good by Wikipedia’s standards, meaning it is well referenced and strongly cited. 

“There are definitely ways in which it can be improved,” he said, “But I don’t look at Anna Delvey’s article and say, ‘ Wow… this is a problem.” 

The idea of public interest includes controversies and criticism, he added. 

“If everybody’s Wikipedia biography just represented them the way that they wanted to be represented, there would be no reference of anybody having any associations with Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. 

Aaron Shaw, associate professor of Communication and Sociology at Northwestern University, worked with Hill on the anonymity paper and also works with a collaborative open knowledge group called the Community Data Science Collective.

“Wikipedia is about producing an information archive that has that trustworthy accounting of reality,” he told Straight Arrow.

Wikipedia’s anonymity policies support a system that deprioritizes academic or social awards, Shaw said. Editors can’t claim to be experts just because they have a degree or diploma. 

“It’s at least democratic in the sense that your knowledge isn’t ‘high-quality’ because you have a fancy degree,” he said. “It’s high-quality because we’re able to inspect it. ​​We’re able to check your sources, and we’re able to verify that the information you’ve put on here is accurate.”

Shaw sees Wikipedia as collectively owned, but he also believes everyone has the right to shape their personal internet presence on social media platforms like Instagram or on their own website. 

“I think that kind of, like, self-invention is fantastic,” he said, but Instagram, for example, “shouldn’t be held up to the same standard” as Wikipedia. 

“The real interest that I’m concerned about is whether people can find trustworthy information about the things they care about,” Shaw told Straight Arrow. “Wikipedia right now is arguably one of the best systems we’ve got for doing that.”

That won’t please everyone, he said. But the truth doesn’t have to.

“Whether or not Anna Delvey is mad at” her page’s editors, Shaw said, “is secondary to whether or not every person alive should have access to the most thrashed-out, detailed knowledge on much bigger topics.” 

The system is old-fashioned, he said, and reflects the democratic ideals of the earlier internet in the ‘90s.

“Supporting that system are these kinds of arcane rules and really nerdy people who are really committed to those arcane rules.” And this, he said, is an “area where I think Delvey gets it spot on” in her critique. 

The rules can discourage nonexpert editors from engaging with improving the project, Shaw said, as they are “unbelievably profuse and hard to read, especially if you’re an outsider and really challenging to navigate effectively, even for people who have spent a lot of time trying to figure them out.”

Do Machine Learning and AI change the game?

Delvey’s concerns about Wikipedia are amplified by AI; she thinks the site’s content is being “laundered” through chatbots. Wikipedia is “the perfect target for AIs,” Delvey told Straight Arrow. And she’s correct. 

“Wikipedia is incredibly important for feeding LLMs,” said Hill. 

But the data from Wikipedia is also some of the most accurate on the internet, he added. 

“Increasingly, we know — for example, in Meta’s model — that Wikipedia is so important that they actually exclude it from the training data, so you can use it in the post-training,” he said. This is the stage in which an AI model is producing answers, and engineers need accurate “real” answers to compare them against. 

In that way, it’s seen as a source of ground truth. And, Hill added, the idea that search results come from Wikipedia is “not exactly new.” 

“As Google has gotten better at attributing the source of information, you can see that the links are going back to Wikipedia,” Hill said. Research from Northwestern University has found that search engine results pages are “highly reliant on free content created by volunteers.” 

But “the reason Wikipedia is seen as reliable and treated as very important by the kinds of people who train large language models” is because they strive to ensure web pages about people or organizations “are not just another homepage for the person that describes the person in the way in which they want to be described,” said Hill. 

Mackey, from the EFF, doesn’t believe Delvey’s perspective has legal validity: that LLMs that use Wikipedia’s output to train AI should change their anonymity policy.

The volunteers on Wikipedia choose what information is presented and how it is presented, which is their right, Mackey told Straight Arrow. “All of that is expressive. Now, the fact that subsequent to that work, an automated tool comes in and scrapes that information and then uses it,” wouldn’t change that, he said. 

Delvey disagrees. She said she thinks they should adapt to the changing technological environment. 

And Wikipedia has adapted, in some ways. In response to unprecedented levels of AI scraping, the organization has struck deals with several AI companies to access structured versions of its data. Founder Jimmy Wales told the Associated Press that AI companies “should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.”

“Citogenesis” — where can fake “facts” come from? 

Delvey is particularly irritated by an instance of what she refers to as “citogenesis.” This term, coined by the internet comic XKCD, refers to the process in which a piece of information in a Wikipedia article is referenced by a reporter in an article, which is then used as a citation in Wikipedia to support the “fact.” 

“The freaky thing about cytogenesis is no one really knows how big of a problem it is,” said D.F. Lovett, whose blog Edit History focuses on Wikipedia. Lovett said that the concept isn’t unique to Wikipedia — it can happen with any source that references another. But if journalists use the crowdsourced site as a source themselves, it can exacerbate the problem. 

In Delvey’s case, she said, an error in an early piece in The Cut has proliferated after being used as a citation on her page. The article said she moved to Germany at age 16; she was actually 14, she told Straight Arrow. 

The statement has persisted, however: Time, BuzzFeed, Yahoo and The New York Post have replicated it, and they can now be used as sources for Wikipedia. Delvey was in jail when the statement first appeared and therefore could not correct the record. 

Surely her lived experience can be used as evidence? Well, no. Citations are always needed. Personal claims, which are open to bias and manipulation, can’t be used — even to correct something that may be mistaken. And Delvey is not the first person to disclaim this code. In 2012, the novelist Philip Roth tried to edit the entry for his award-winning novel The Human Stain. 

The Wikipedia entry claimed the book was based on one person, and Roth said it was another. He wasn’t allowed to edit the page without evidence and was told by a Wikipedia editor that, while “an author is the greatest authority on their own work … we require secondary sources.”

Roth wrote an impassioned open letter in The New Yorker to try to correct the record. 

What’s next?

As for Delvey, some of the Wikipedia editors she had interacted with had invited her to an Aug. 9 picnic in New York; she was considering attending the Roosevelt Island party, which she said was within the range allowed by her immigration ankle monitor. She couldn’t make it, but she’s keeping an eye out for the next one. 

She said that she did like some of the editors she’d interacted with on her page. After all, she said, Wikipedia is an important project. 

“I mean, I don’t remember the internet without it.” 

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