Why does Wikipedia think I’m Evan Spiegel?

For fifty-one weeks Over the course of the year, I’m not 100% the CEO of Snap, the company behind it Snapchat. this Evan Spiegelthe billionaire founder of the company. No one in their right mind would question that. But for one week out of the year, specifically last week, some people probably thought I was the CEO of a social media company. If you look WikipediaIt certainly seemed like you were.

Starting Sunday, when you click on Spiegel Wikipedia pageThere was a picture of me. The same thing happened if you did a Google search for Evan Spiegel or asked a Google Gemini about him. At the time of publication, this remains the case.

How did this happen? Despite what you may think online, I’m Maxwell Zev (friends call me Max). The photo on Spiegel’s Wikipedia page was taken at the clock TechCrunch Last year’s conference. I’m a reporter in my twenties, and while I write about tech companies for a living, I’ve never met Spiegel, and I’ve barely written about Snapchat.

But I’m now CEO, according to Wikipedia. This first came to my attention on Monday, when I was scrolling through social media and saw a random post from the account “He Doesn’t Look Like Evan Spiegel” with a screenshot of my photo on his Wikipedia page. I paused for a moment, wondering if I was seeing things. I Republished Image on Twitter and he said: “It’s very interesting but that’s actually me, not the CEO of Snap.” My followers were amused, responding with comments like “Congratulations on the upgrade” and “At the limit of the yacht invite.”

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, “Max is not the second photo that comes up on Google right now…” A day later, more colleagues, friends, and family members began to notice. Someone texted me, “Why are you Evan Spiegel?” I didn’t have a good answer. Before I knew it, I spent an entire week on Evan Spiegel’s Wikipedia. I decided to do some sleuthing

On April 26, someone with the username “Artem G” changed a photo of Evan Spiegel to a photo of me with the caption “newer photo,” according to the page. Review date. Then, a few days later, someone changed it again, correctly saying: “That’s Maxwell Ziff, not Evan Spiegel.” Within hours, Artem G jumped back in and reverted the change, directing my face back to the Wikipedia page and saying: “No, the new photo is better, take it to the talk page if you have to.”

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

I scrolled down a bit and found that Artem G actually tried to make me Wikipedia Evan Spiegel back in February, but the image was only up for a few hours. I clicked on Artem G’s contributions page to see what other Wikipedia pages he made changes to. There was a lot. He’s made hundreds of contributions to various pages — from Swiss scientists to space artifacts to Claude — in just the past month.