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A report from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, accuses Wikipedia of anti-Isreal and anti-Jewish bias. It is titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality” You can read it here.
The image the ADL used for their report’s illustration, above, is an AI created version of the Wikipedia logo blowing apart. I added Wiki’s real logo on the lower left.
This was discussed on ‘Morning Joe’ today. They interviewed the president of the ADL, Joseph Greenblatt. This was the first I’d heard about it.
This was covered in the media (see Google News search here) but as you can see it wasn’t getting major attention from very many American publications. I am pleased that “Morning Joe” covered it.
This is the Executive Sumarry from the report:
ADL has identified extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages. These issues include 1) a coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia content related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and similar issues, in which a group of editors systematically evade Wikipedia’s rules to shift balanced narratives toward skewed ones, spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism; and 2) pro-Hamas perspectives informing Arabic-language Wikipedia content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
ADL has found clear evidence that a group of at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in concert to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.
These 30 editors were much more active than other comparable groups of editors, on average, by a factor of at least two, based on total edits made over the past 10 years.
The 30 editors were much more likely than other editors to communicate with each other on Wikipedia: they were as much as 18x more active in group communications than comparable groups of editors.
The editors appeared to coordinate to change pages related to Israel, Palestine1, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.
These edits have ramped up since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and include the systematic removal of citations to reputable sources and tandem voting to keep content critical of Israel but remove coverage of Palestinian violence and terrorism.
In addition to this multiyear campaign by bad-faith editors to revise Wikipedia’s content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ADL found evidence of biased and extremist content in Arabic-language Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s rules are not applied consistently outside of some English-language pages, allowing biased pro-Hamas content in the Arabic-language edition.
Pages related to Hamas in Arabic glorify the Palestinian terrorist organization and perpetuate pro-Hamas propaganda, while failing to follow Wikipedia’s rules for neutrality.
This report makes clear that Wikipedia needs to do far more to address anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias and coordination. Until it has done that, those who rely on Wikipedia – from Google Search to large language models like ChatGPT – must deprioritize Wikipedia’s content on issues related to Jews, Israel and the Middle East conflict so that they do not perpetuate this bias.
It should be a no-brainer to say that some subjects require considerable diligence to write a totally obective article about in Wikipedia or any other publication trying to be an encyclopedia, especially one that reports on current events, often within a few hours after they occur the way Wikipedia does.
When it comes to the Middle East conflict I agree with the ADL that Wikipedia must get its act together before anyone can use it as an unbiased source.
Consider what would happen if Wiki’s exhaustive entry of the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave credence to Putin’s claim that that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis committing genocide against the Russian minority in the Donbas, and said that Russia's goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine. What if they went further and said, like Trump has, that Ukraine started the war?
The matter of Wikipedia in this instance has nothing to do with Trump and his manic effort to control the press. I haven’t seen any reports of him jumping on it to discredit Wikipedia because it accurately describes what he does. I doubt he knows how many members of both the media and the public count on it for factual information. This may change. Consider that in doing reseacrh for my Substack today I found this from a Fox News article published on March 7th:
Excerpt:
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is calling on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to look into whether government actors have infiltrated the online encyclopedia that he helped start over two decades ago.
"Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia? Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we’d like to know. Agree?" Sanger recently wrote on X.
Sanger, who left the organization in 2002, has been a heavy critic of Wikipedia since about 2005, when he says the website began to drift into left-wing bias.
If what Larry Sanger is true this tarnishes the reputation of all of Wikipedia. It is not up to the government to investigate it. Musk and DOGE should keep their dirty hands off it. However, Wikipedia has to clean house themselves.
I often either provide a simple link to Wikipedia so people can learn more about a person or a subject. For example, above with ADL president Joseph Greenblatt, for readers who want to learn more about him I provided a link. In yesterday’s Substack I used quotes from Wikipedia from their entries on police state and martial law.
I have found entries related to Donald Trump to be unbiased. This is the main entry in a series of articles about him.
Trump would no doubt want the following from that entry scrubbed along with it’s internal links to other Wiki articles:
Trump is the central figure of Trumpism. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged, racist, or misogynistic. He has made false and misleading statements and promoted conspiracy theories to a degree unprecedented in American politics. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump attempted to overturn the outcome, culminating in the January 6 Capitol attackin 2021. In 2023, Trump was found liable in civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and for business fraud, and in 2024, he was found guilty of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Kamala Harris, Trump was sentenced to a penalty-free discharge, and two other felony indictments against him were dismissed.
Trump began his second term by pardoning around 1,500 January 6 rioters, initiating mass layoffs of the federal workforce, and starting a trade war with Mexico and Canada. Trump's broad and extensive use of executive orders has drawn numerous lawsuits challenging their legality.
Trump has already been on a crusade to control the media. He has banned the Associated Press from press conferences using the excuse of their refusing to accept that the Gulf of Mexico has to be called the Gulf of America. Of course this is bullshit. The AP reporters are known for asking tough questions. (The AP style book which is used by many journalists has addressed the Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America matter here.)
Wait for it, folks. How long before Musk sends his DOGE minions along with armed officers like he did at The United States Institute of Peace (read article) to break into Wiki’s San Francisco headquarters and kick out their staff and take over their computer servers? Of course, this could be problematic given this is San Francisco which is a sanctuary city, and Mayor Daniel Lurie might decide to order the SFPD to stop this.
For my recent Substacks about American politics click here.
For my readers as if we don’t have enough to worry about:
Trump and MAGA don’t want anyone to realize these are human beings: