Wikipedia has an antisemitism problem - opinion

The latest scandal involving Wikipedia should, by any reasonable measure, hammer a final nail into the coffin of its credibility as a reliable source of information about Israel and Jews.

According to Ynet, after months of debate, Wikipedia editors recently voted to change the heading of its page entitled “Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza” to “Gaza genocide.”

In other words, Wikipedia decided that the “allegation” of genocide in Gaza is now a “settled fact.”

Ynet said, “Supporters of the new title argue that there is a broad consensus in academia on the matter, citing academic articles by Holocaust historians, genocide scholars, human rights professors, and legal and political experts.”

Among the so-called experts cited for this “consensus” is Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, whose hate-filled social media posts employed such openly antisemitic rhetoric that the US has called for her removal from the position.

The Wikipedia entry’s footnotes cite many veteran anti-Israel NGOs affiliated with the long-standing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel and relies heavily on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers that have been repeatedly challenged by experts as obviously distorted or manipulated.

The page accuses Israel of deliberately causing “starvation” in Gaza by preventing humanitarian supplies from entering and blocking or attacking humanitarian convoys, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that Israel facilitated the entry of enough aid to provide adequate calories for every man, woman and child in Gaza.

This latest scandal is not the first time Wikipedia has courted controversy with blatantly manipulated and politicized content targeting Jews or Israel.

Anti-Defamation League

In June, a group of Wikipedia administrators declared the Anti-Defamation League – the world’s oldest, largest, and best-known organization combating antisemitism – as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and only “roughly reliable” on antisemitism “when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.” They also falsely claimed that the consensus International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

Plus, in a recent and damning account of the bias built into the Wikipedia system published in Tablet magazine, Izabella Tabarovsky has documented Wikipedia’s numerous past scandals over the past two decades involving the publication of material amounting to Holocaust denial, including efforts to systematically whitewash Polish and Croatian complicity, and inventing a wholly fictitious extermination camp for killing Poles in Warsaw.

Meanwhile, a recent World Jewish Congress (WJC) report noted that Wikipedia biases are produced by a “lack of transparency and the concealment of decision-makers’ actions, alongside the significant authority wielded by anonymous administrators who can delete entries and block participants without accountability.”

THE GAZA genocide page appears to be an example. It is set so “editors with the extended confirmed user access level” can make page edits, which gives them the power to “display favoritism towards acquaintances and like-minded individuals while penalizing unfamiliar editors and ideological adversaries,” the report stated.

Despite Wikipedia’s ostensible commitment to upholding the principle of “neutrality,” the WJC report revealed how in many cases it is observed in the breach.

Arabic Wikipedia

A glaring example is Wikipedia Arabic’s decision last December to black out the Arabic language Wikipedia site as a sign of solidarity with the Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War.

Since then, Arabic Wikipedia’s logo has been wrapped in the Palestinian flag and its front page features a banner calling for “solidarity with the rights of the Palestinian people” and declaring “no to genocide in Gaza.” When complaints were made about this blatant violation of the neutrality policy, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, refused to intervene in the matter.

As the WJC report notes, the Wikimedia Foundation says it “is the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and its community of volunteers” but it does “not control editorial content.” In other words, if the editing process is skewed by activist editors and administrators, there seems to be no appeal to Wikipedia’s ostensible owners, and thus no one actually enforces compliance with Wikipedia’s supposed neutrality policy.

The magnitude of damage Wikipedia can do, and doubtless has already done by distorting the historical record and therefore people’s knowledge, is truly terrifying.

As a website, it is outranked only by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and attracted more than 92 billion visits in 2023 alone.

Worse still, reliance on Wikipedia is becoming further entrenched, with numerous artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT using the website as one of the main training sites and information sources for their bots. AI is thus becoming yet another means by which billions of people are being fed inaccurate research and dangerously skewed narratives about Jews, Jewish history, antisemitism, Israel, and Zionism.

Over the last 11 months, the Jewish people have witnessed university campuses, social media, trade unions, the UN and international NGOs weaponized to try to create a new global conventional wisdom – that Israel is a genocidal Nazi state which must be destroyed, while anyone who supports its right to exist, meaning almost all Jews, are criminals who should be punished.

The success of these lies is an existential danger to Jewish survival, both inside and outside Israel. That danger is being magnified greatly by the activist takeover of Wikipedia, and the apparent inability of anyone to stop it.

The writer is a policy analyst with the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and a PhD student in Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney.