A coordinated campaign by at least thirty editors is altering Wikipedia articles to introduce antisemitic and anti-Israel bias, according to a Tuesday investigative report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology and Society (CTS) and research group Builders for Tomorrow.
A group of about thirty editors changing pages related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict edited twice as much over the last ten years than their colleagues and were 18 times more active in communications than other editors, when contrasted by researchers to Wikipedia comparable groups of editors.
The ADL claimed that editors appeared to coordinate changing relevant pages, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, calls to destroy Israel, and adding more criticism of Israel. The edits allegedly increased following the October 7 Massacre, with the reported "systematic" removal of reputable source citations and tandem voting to keep content critical of Israel and remove information about Palestinian terrorism.
“It’s clear that Wikipedia needs to do far more to address the very active antisemitic and anti-Israel bias and coordination,” ADL CTS interim head Daniel Kelley said in a statement. “And until then, other platforms that rely on Wikipedia as a source – from Google Search to large language models like ChatGPT – must deprioritize unvetted Wikipedia content on issues related to Jews, Israel and the Middle East conflict so that they do not perpetuate this bias.”
The report also found that Arabic-language Wikipedia articles glorified and perpetuated Hamas propaganda, which the ADL asserted contradicted Wikipedia's rules that content must be "written from a neutral point of view."
The ADL recommended that Wikipedia develop a program for experts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to review contentious pages for accuracy and bias. For volunteer editors, the organization suggested the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia establish an administrator committee to vet editors for the ability to close discussions on article content disputes. Decisions on controversial content that become topics of talk page discussion should be decided by these designated editors, said the ADL, rather than by majority vote.
Wikipedia was urged to evaluate its existing tools for detecting and acting against state actors.
The ADL also called on policymakers to convene academics, computer scientists, Wikipedia officials, and civil society leaders on how to limit bias and antisemitism on the platform while increasing greater transparency in the editing process.
Task force on antisemitism
Policymakers should create a task force and hold hearings on combating antisemitism on Wikipedia, according to the ADL.
“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,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Recent Wikipedia efforts toward neutrality are nothing but a Band-Aid on a problem that’s getting worse, with persistent antisemitic and anti-Israel bias still far too present. We urge Wikipedia and policymakers to act quickly before rampant disinformation on one of the most visited sources of information leads to tragic consequences."
The issue of inauthentic editing of Wikipedia articles related to Arab-Israeli conflicts was confirmed by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee on January 23 with the banning of eight editors from the topic. Most of the editors held anti-Israel positions, while two of the editors were pro-Israel. One anti-Israel editor was banned from editing the English-language Wikipedia, and a pro-Israel user saw a suspended site ban. The eight editors were accused of engaging in "edit warring," disruptive behavior, incivility, non-neutral editing, and the use of sock-puppet accounts. The committee also acknowledged that "outside actors are heavily invested in influencing Wikipedia's coverage of the topic area."
In a January 24 post, the Wikipedia Flood blog, which documents anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on the platform, accused the Arbitration Committee of lying and engaging in double standards about the actions of pro-Israel editors, one of which was accused of acting as a proxy for the blog. The actions against the pro-Israel editors were made in an attempt to mantain balance and "split the baby," the blog editor told Jewish Journal's Aaron Bandler, who had extensively covered the Wikipedia editing war scandal. The blog writer was critical of the disciplinary process in a January 19 post, assessing that the bans only touched on a small part of the cabal of anti-Israel editors, allegedly ignoring some of the worst offenders.
According to Wikipedia Flood,the anti-Israel editor banned from the English site had allegedly coordinated editing the website on a Discord group operated by Tech for Palestine. In August the blog warned that this was likely just one of the mediums used for off-Wiki editing coordination.
The six anti-Israel editors had also engaged in a campaign to degrade the ADL's status as a reliable source on the Israel-Hamas War, according to the antisemitism watchdog, with Greenblatt welcoming the interim disciplinary action against them in a January 17 statement.
Last March a World Jewish Congress report on anti-Israel bias in Wikipedia detailed a series of tactics used by editors such as "deletion attacks" with attempts to remove or merge pages related to the October 7 Massacre. Surviving pages had their terms changed, such as "massacre" to "attack."
Pro-Palestinian bias was introduced to Wikipedia, according to the WJC report, by linking entries to the genocide category to present Israeli actions as being related to a proven rather than alleged genocide. An article on Palestinian controlled territories used loaded terms such as "Bantustans" and "open-air prisons," and drew comparisons between Israeli policies and South African apartheid.
The WJC report warned that the Wikipedia's popularity made the issue pressing, noting a 2021 North Western study that found search engines suggested Wikipedia articles on the first page results of 67-84% of common and trending results. WJC also pointed to the “Israel–Hamas War” Wikipedia entry accumulating 25,401 visits last January 20 alone.
The ADL also noted on Tuesday that Wikipedia has also seen issues of antisemitic bias regarding Holocaust revisionism.
In a February 2023 Journal of Holocaust Research article, historians Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein detailed "systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history" by far-right Polish nationalists allegedly seeking to whitewash the role of Polish involvement in the genocide. Site discussions allegedly revealed the attempt to discredit historians.
Grabowski and Klein accused the editors of creating a "false equivalence narrative" about Polish suffering with that of the Jews, promoting the Polish role in saving Jews while inflating and exaggerating Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. In one example, the historians said that false figures about three million Poles being murdered in World War Two and thousands being executed for saving Jews was added to a Wikipedia article on the rescue of Jews by Poles. The article asserted that the real figure of Polish WWII casualties was closer to two million, and the number of those slain for aiding Jews was under 800.
Grabowski and Klein had also claimed that the editors had promoted antisemitic tropes about how most Jewish were communist and conspired with communists to betray Poland. Other tropes allegedly promoted included that "that money-hungry Jews controlled or still control Poland, and that Jews bear responsibility for their own persecution."
