HOW WIKIPEDIA WORKS
Though anyone can edit Wikipedia articles -- you don’t even have to register! -- internet users consistently report high levels of trust regarding the information available on the website. In fact, a 2019 YouGov survey found that 78-98% of respondents across five different countries trusted Wikipedia either “a great deal” or “somewhat.” Shockingly, as many as 50% of American physicians have reported using Wikipedia as a source regarding health conditions.
But because any user can edit Wikipedia articles, then, it’s no surprise that articles on particularly contentious or controversial topics can be riddled with inaccuracies or back-and-forth edit “wars.” Though Wikipedia claims to adhere to a neutral point of view, the website, which is visited by up to 4 billion times a month, has long been criticized of ideological bias. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for example, published a report arguing that “Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts.”
Wikipedia edits are accepted through a consensus; in other words, majority rule, rather than independent verification by qualified arbitrators in any given topic.
SINCE OCTOBER 7
Wikipedia has long been accused of anti-Israel bias, but in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, Israel-Palestine related Wikipedia articles, as well as a number of other Wikipedia articles regarding Jewish history topics, were subjected to two major targeted anti-Israel editing campaigns, according to a Pirate Wires investigation.
In one of these campaigns, a group of around 40 veteran Wikipedia editors worked in coordination “to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.” The other campaign was carried out by a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), which, in violation of Wikipedia rules, coordinated anti-Israel edits in an 8000-member Discord group.
As of October 24, 2024, these two groups had edited over 10,000 Israel-related articles, with their edits consisting of more than 90% of the articles’ entire content, thus controlling the narrative.
Examples of these edits include removing the 1988 Hamas Charter, which calls for the genocide of Jews, removing “Land of Israel” from the page describing the origins of the Jewish people, and deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials.”
While the editors have long used strategies to avoid detection, Wikipedia has now also locked a number of Israel-Palestine articles to avoid “editing wars.” Unfortunately, this means that much of the misinformation on the website cannot be corrected.
DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR
It’s not just pro-Israel journalists, watchdogs, and commentators that have noticed the targeted campaigns to disrupt any and all articles related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish history. In fact, earlier this year, in a highly unusual move, Wikipedia itself banned eight editors for disruptive behavior that violated the website’s rules, though they said that such a ban was not reflective of Wikipedia’s stance on the content of the edits. Six of the banned editors were pro-Palestine; two were pro-Israel.
WHICH SOURCES DOES WIKIPEDIA CONSIDER RELIABLE?
Another problem? Wikipedia also decides the “reliability” of sources upon majority “consensus.” For this reason, many Jewish sources, most notably, the Anti-Defamation League, have been deemed “questionable,” whereas sources like Al Jazeera, whose content is controlled by the Qatari royal family, long known for financing Islamist terrorist groups, including Hamas, are deemed “generally reliable.”
Obviously, information on the conflict shouldn’t come only from Jewish or Israeli sources. But shouldn’t information on Jewish topics come from...Jewish sources, rather than outsiders with an anti-Jewish agenda?
THE GOOGLE PROBLEM
For years, social justice activists on social media responded to questions from their followers by stating “Google is free.” I’ve always found this position worrisome. After all, several years ago, when I searched “Holocaust denial,” one of the first hits was the Institute for Historical Review, which sounds legitimate, but is actually a Holocaust denial organization run by neo-Nazis.
Google is not infallible, and like all other sources of information, Google not only has bias, but it pulls from sources across the web with bias.
When you a search any given topic on Google, Wikipedia is given precedence. For example, if you search “Zionism,” its Wikipedia entry will show up first. That means that the problem of post-October 7 edits on Wikipedia goes far, far beyond Wikipedia itself. These editors have essentially monopolized the access to information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli and Jewish history, and more. Well-meaning individuals curious to learn more likely don’t know about any of this.
WIKIPEDIA ARABIC IS EVEN WORSE
One of the major problems with Wikipedia’s reliability is the significant discrepancy between its English content and its content in other languages. According to a recent John Hopkins University study, “Cultural and social biases significantly influence Wikipedia's multilingual content.” For example, Russian language articles related to LGBTQ+ issues are significantly more negative than those in English.
For this reason, it’s unfortunately not surprising that antisemitism runs rampant on Wikipedia’s Arabic page. For instance, Wikipedia Arabic claims that the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a virulently antisemitic text that inspired Hitler, is “disputed.” In reality, every legitimate historian knows that the text was a hoax.
Wikipedia Arabic’s account of the October 7 massacre presents a narrative in which Hamas primarily attacked Israeli army bases -- in reality, around 70% of the murdered targets were civilians, and the overwhelming majority of massacres took place in civilian communities -- and falsely claims that the majority of Israeli “captives” were soldiers.
EXAMPLE
DISTORTION BY OMISSION
Since October 7, Wikipedia editors have tried to distort the history of the Jewish people and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by deleting numerous articles which paint Palestinians or the Palestinian movement in a less favorable light or which contradict the mainstream pro-Palestine narrative.
WHY IS JEWISH HISTORY UNDER ATTACK?
As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur argues, “Good history inoculates us, immunizes us, to shallow ideology.”
The anti-Israel editors at Wikipedia seem to very well understand this. As I’ve long noted, many -- though of course, not all -- of the criticisms lobbed at Israel are not rooted in established facts but in poorly defined terms and buzzwords. If, for example, to charge Zionists with “settler-colonialism,” you must expand the definition of settler-colonialism -- as Fayez Sayegh, the originator of the “Israel as a settler-colonial state” libel, admitted to in his own 1965 paper, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” -- then maybe Zionism is not actually settler-colonialism at all, but something different.
Irrespective of politics or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even a basic (but accurate) understanding of Jewish history easily and quickly debunks many of the talking points and accusatory buzzwords that we hear from the pro-Palestine side. For this reason, then, these editors have taken it upon themselves to misrepresent, distort, revise, or outright erase important aspects of Jewish history by rewriting it themselves.
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