Why Does Wikipedia Think I’m Evan Spiegel?

For fifty-one weeks of the year, I’m 100% not the CEO of Snap, the company behind Snapchat. This is Evan Spiegel, the billionaire co-founder of the company. No one in their right mind would question that. But for one week a year, especially last week, some people may have thought I was the top executive at the social media company. If you looked on Wikipedia it seemed like that was the case.

As early as Sunday, when you clicked on the Spiegel Wikipedia page, there was a photo of me. The same thing happens if you Google Evan Spiegel or Google Gemini about him. At the time of publication, this is still the case.

How did this happen? Despite what the internet might have you believe, I am Maxwell Zeff (my friends call me Max). The photo on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page was taken at a TechCrunch conference last year. I’m a journalist in my 20s, and although I write about tech companies for a living, I’ve never met Spiegel and almost never written about Snapchat.

But now I’m the CEO, according to Wikipedia. This first caught my attention on Monday, when I was scrolling through social media and saw a random post on an account “that doesn’t look like Evan Spiegel” with a screenshot of my photo on its Wikipedia page. I stopped for a second, wondering if I was seeing things. I reposted the photo on Twitter and said, “Very flattering but that’s me, not the CEO of Snap.” My followers were amused, responding with comments like “Congratulations on the promotion” and “when the yacht invite is maxed out.”

The next day, I was still Wikipedia Evan Spiegel. A Snap employee texted a mutual friend a screenshot of a Google search for Spiegel, saying, “It’s not Max who’s the second photo that shows up on Google now…” A day later, more co-workers, friends, and family began to notice. One of them texted me, “Why are you Evan Spiegel?” I didn’t have a good answer. Before I knew it, I had spent an entire week as Wikipedia’s Evan Spiegel. I decided to do some research.

On April 26, someone with the username “Artem G” replaced Evan Spiegel’s photo with one of me with the comment “Newer photo,” according to the page’s revision history. Then, a few days later, someone edited it, correctly stating, “That’s Maxwell Zeff, not Evan Spiegel.” » Within a few hours, Artem G came back and reverted the change, bringing my face back to the Wikipedia page saying, “No, a new photo is better, take it to the talk page if you must.” »

Artem G’s attitude and dedication piqued my interest. For the uninitiated, the talk page is where Wikipedia editors go to resolve disputes. Who was this person who adamantly thought I should be Wikipedia Evan Spiegel and was willing to dump me on the talk page to keep me there?

I scrolled down a little further and found that Artem G had actually tried to Wikipedia Evan Spiegel on me another time, back in February, but the photo was only visible for a few hours. I clicked on Artem G’s contributions page to see what other Wikipedia pages he had made changes to. There were a lot of them. He had made hundreds of contributions to various pages – ranging from Swiss scientists to space artifacts to Claude – over the past month.