Truth separately, values ​​separately: the distortions in Wikipedia remain – in front of millions

The report, published by the Center for Technology and Society (CTS) of the Anti-Defamation League under the title “Damage Done: Wikipedia Leaves Biased Edits Unchecked Despite Editor Bans” (“The damage is done: Wikipedia leaves biased edits unchecked despite editor bans”), shows that although six key editors were removed from the field of dealing with the issue and three others were completely blocked from the site, their work was never systematically examined, And as a result, it continues to be the official version to which millions of readers are exposed every day.

The methods have changed, the bias remains

​The study reveals that following public criticism and pressure from federal lawmakers in the United States, overt coordination activity has indeed decreased by about 95%, but a new group of 11 active accounts (along with eight veteran editors who have not been convicted or sanctioned) continues to hold the reins. These editors have adapted to more subtle and quiet working methods – from canceling changes made by other editors in order to preserve a specific framing, through softening factual claims, to rebuilding values ​​at a slow pace that does not attract direct attention from the community.

​According to the data, among 229 entries that were checked and edited by at least two of these accounts, about 60% of the latest edits (determining the currently active wording) belong to those new editors. This means that the texts read by users – and fed into large language models (LLMs) and search engines used by the general public – continue to bear the stamp of a systematic disinformation campaign.

This is how the values ​​were written

​The report presents a series of individual cases that indicate a deep distortion of the encyclopedia’s flagship values: The “Hamas” entry: Three days after the October 10th attacks, on October 10, 2023, a significant portion of the material that dealt with the terrorist organization’s anti-Semitism, the use of human shields, and human rights violations was moved to a secondary and less viewed entry (“Criticism of Hamas”). Today, in the opening of the main entry – which won at that time For a million views a day – Hamas’s status as a declared terrorist organization is not indicated except at the end of the break.

The entry “Zionism”: In the opening of the entry, the Zionist movement is defined as having achieved its goals “through colonization”, while claiming that the Zionists sought to establish a state with “as few Palestinian Arabs as possible”. One of the newly investigated accounts made 543 edits to this page, replacing most of the content of the entry.

​Sexual violence on October 7: In four pages dealing with the issue, editors mentioned in the report made hundreds of corrections in order to maintain a framing according to which Israeli women and girls were victims of sexual violence only “according to reports”, a framing that remains in place three years after the events despite a series of official and verified reports.

After the exposure: the four requirements for change

​The Anti-Defamation League is back and calls on the Wikimedia Foundation to adopt four structural recommendations: a requirement for private identity verification for editors in controversial areas, an end to anonymous edits using IP addresses on sensitive pages, deciding content disputes based on expertise and not on the basis of majority votes, and establishing a dedicated team to deal with anti-Semitic bias. Alongside this, the report calls on search engines and artificial intelligence development companies to reflect to the public when Wikipedia is used as a central source of information for their answers.