I first wrote about the problems with my Wikipedia page in 2015. Over a decade later, the problems are worse, not better. We've tried to correct the issues, but Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone directly connected to the subject of the page to make changes, claiming "Conflict of Interest." This allows editors with a decided political slant to control the substance and direction of the information.
Wikipedia's BLP policy is supposed to give extra protection to living persons against unsourced or poorly sourced claims. In practice, the Peter Schiff article demonstrates the opposite.
The policy is used to prevent the subject from correcting the record—any edit from Schiff or his representatives is reverted as "COI"—while the article itself carries forward accusations that an Australian court has specifically found to be defamatory. The policy protects the article from its subject, not the subject from the article.
Schiff has been publicly asking for corrections since 2015. His website has a dedicated page. He's posted about it on X multiple times. Wikipedia's response has been procedural: you can't edit your own article. But when other editors try to make the same corrections, those are reverted too—on different grounds ("undue weight," "primary source," etc.). The COI policy is the shield; the substantive policies are the sword. The subject loses either way.
I'm not a Peter Schiff partisan. I think his inflation predictions have been wrong more often than right since 2010, and I've said so in print. But fairness is fairness, and the Wikipedia article has real problems.
The bank section is the worst. The article spends three paragraphs on the OCIF suspension and the money-laundering allegations. The defamation verdict—an Australian court finding that the primary media source for those allegations was defamatory—gets one clause in the last paragraph of that section. A reader scanning the article would come away thinking Schiff ran a dirty bank. The public record says otherwise: no charges, no indictments, and a court ruling that the accusations were defamatory.
The gold section is a subtler problem. Starting the timeline at 2012 is editorial malpractice. If you're evaluating a forecaster, you start the clock when they first made the call. Schiff's gold call started in 1999. That's publicly documented.
The rest of the article is decent. The lede is straightforward. The economic views section is reasonable. But the two problems above are serious enough to undermine the whole thing.
The article's treatment of the Euro Pacific Bank affair has a structural problem common to Wikipedia BLPs involving legal disputes. The allegations are reported in detail—OCIF suspension, money laundering suspicions, regulatory fines—while the legal outcomes receive far less space and emphasis.
Specifically: an Australian Federal Court found that 60 Minutes conveyed seven defamatory imputations about Schiff and his bank. The respondent settled for AUD $360,000 and withdrew the broadcast. A multi-year grand jury investigation resulted in no charges. These are not minor facts. In defamation law, a court finding of defamatory imputation is a formal legal determination that specific statements were false or misleading. The article's treatment of this finding—one clause, buried after three paragraphs of allegations—fails the proportionality standard that Wikipedia's own BLP policy is designed to ensure.
This is not a balance-of-opinion issue. It is a balance-of-fact issue. The facts exculpate more than the article lets on.