I find Wikipedia useful to jog my memory about basic history, especially dates and names. As an online “encyclopedia,” however, it leaves much to be desired.
That’s why it’s not surprising to me that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has finished an exhaustive study of Wikipedia’s entries on Israel and the Palestinians and found that 30 editors “colluded” in spiking entries with pro-Palestinian propaganda and anti-Israel smears.
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The new ADL report, titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality,” was a collaborative effort between researchers for the ADL and the Center for Technology and Society (CTS).
They analyzed edits and chats between editors going back to 2002 from what the ADL termed “suspicious” editors.
“Most readers assume Wikipedia is a reliable online encyclopedia, but in reality, it has become a biased platform manipulated by agenda-driven editors on many topics,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO, said in a statement.
Wikipedia is open source, meaning that anyone can make an edit on an entry, and as long as it passes muster with the “community” of editors and volunteer fact-checkers, it remains.
But they can’t check everything in a resource with millions of entries. And they certainly can’t detect subtle changes that would tilt an entry in one specific direction.
“The values of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation reflect our commitment to integrity and accuracy, and we categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate,” a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, told The New York Post in a statement.
The Foundation doesn’t deny the allegations but claims the ADL relied on “flawed conclusions.”
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“Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis,” the spokesperson said, adding that it’s “unfortunate” the ADL did not contact Wikimedia before the report’s release.”
Wikipedia and the ADL have been at odds ever since last year when Wikipedia declared the ADL an “unreliable source of information.”
The nonprofit’s latest report claims alleged anti-Israel editors deleted references to antisemitism and cleaned up pages on Hamas in a years-long campaign, ramping up the rogue edits since the terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel.
In one instance, an NPR report about a young Palestinian flying a kite with a swastika on it was deleted from a Wikipedia page about Gaza protests, according to the report.
Conspiring editors deleted reports of sexual violence by Hamas from Wikipedia content, while others systematically removed references to terrorist violence from pages on Hamas, the report said.
In another example, edits to the Wikipedia page for Samir Kuntar – a Lebanese-Palestinian Liberation Front member who participated in the deadly in Nahariy, Israel in 1979 – removed his murder conviction on terrorism charges.
Media coverage of terrorists calling for the destruction of Israel was deleted from a Wiki page on Palestinian political violence, the ADL added.
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Information going back to 2002, when the first of the suspicious editors joined the Wikipedia editing corps, shows that there have been more than 1 million edits on about 10,000 articles. Most of the edits were related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Bloomberg reports that an internal conflict has roiled Wikipedia with at least “14 editors barred from working on pages related to the” Israel-Palestinian conflict. The outlet says that the argument “has reached the top levels of Wikipedia as the site’s two founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, are at odds over whether to unmask the anonymous editors involved in the turmoil.”
In January, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee found that fake online accounts used for deception, known as sock puppets, among the pages relating to Palestine and Israel are “an ongoing issue” which was “causing significant disruption.” The committee is a group of editor-elected volunteers tasked with policing misconduct.
The tensions have resulted in subtle edits of photos and text that allegedly reflect bias. Others are more obvious. For about six months last year, Wikipedia published two, radically different accounts of a deadly battle at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, though only one of them appeared in a Google search for the camp’s name.
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Wikipedia is not an “authoritative source” on most things, given the ease with which overt bias can be inserted into entries. Nevertheless, it’s always one of the top ten entries on Google search and most other search engines.
It’s time to reexamine that placement unless Wikipedia can repair the trust it’s lost as a result of incidents like this.
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