“Wikipedia is a major battleground. There are too many entries related to Israel and the war on terror that are biased, one-sided or omit critical information.” This is how the country’s president Yitzhak (Boji) Herzog recently expressed himself regarding the many claims of anti-Israel bias in the world’s largest collaborative online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of information in the world, on the face of it, thanks to its stated position to write information from a neutral point of view. However, it seems that since the October 7 massacre and the war that broke out in its wake, this status has been undermined, at least against Israel – and Wikipedia has become another arena in the battle for the never-ending propaganda.
“Colonialism”, “territorial expansion” and “desire to expel Palestinians” are just some of the terms that appear in the free encyclopedia as the official ideology of the State of Israel. Although these claims are backed by alleged academic sources, but among other things they are based on academics who are considered very hostile towards Israel.
“A national home through the colonization of Palestine”
There are no shortage of examples of the change that has taken place in Wikipedia. If you look for the entry “Zionism”, you will find accusations of colonialism: “Zionism is a national ethno-cultural movement that emerged in Europe at the end of the 19th century, and aims to establish a national home for the Jewish people through the colonization of Palestine, an area that roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel In Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history, Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land as possible, and with a quantity As many Jews as possible, and as few Arabs as possible. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism has become the national ideology of Israel.”
In contrast, on the eve of the war, the wording was much less biased: “Zionism is a national movement that emerged in the 19th century to mobilize support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, an area that roughly corresponds to the Land of Israel of Jewish tradition. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism has become an ideology which supports the ‘development and defense of the State of Israel'”.
These are not the only changes that have happened to the English Wikipedia in the last year. In the “Hamas” entry, for example, the fact that Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by most Western countries, was pushed to the bottom of the opening, compared to the entry before the October 7 massacre – in which a significant part of the opening dealt with this. In addition, under the entry “List of Genocides” the example “Genocide in Gaza” appears, and accusations of starvation to death appear in the entry “Closing the Gaza Strip”.
Over 7 million views per year
Wikipedia entries have a tremendous impact on influencing public opinion. According to Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir, a research fellow from the University of Haifa who recently published a study on the anti-Israeli biases in the English Wikipedia and presented it at the United Nations, Wikipedia is one of the leading sites in search engines. “Wikipedia is ranked as the seventh most viewed website in the world according to various ratings, with millions of daily users from all over the world. For comparison, the entry Israel receives an average of 416 thousand views per month.” The ‘Zionism’ entry, which is considered more niche, has also received over 7 million views since the beginning of the war, and no fewer than 1,254 edits by 212 editors.
“Although it is not a research source approved by academic institutions, Wikipedia is still the main place for many people in the world to search for information and it also appears in many cases in the first place on Google,” says Dr. Aharoni Leer. “This is the place where many form their first impression of Current issues, and in case you don’t delve further – this is probably the only information they will be exposed to.”
According to her, there is a bias “in the values that mark Israel in a way that is incomparable to other countries. For example, the value ‘Comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany’, normalizes a comparison between Israel and Nazism in Germany, and frames the comparison as a common and accepted matter, while omitting the context and complexity that Israel faces.” .
“No effort to try to produce a neutral image”
“In every project of Wikipedia, one can find biases and approaches that are probably not in line with the principle of the ‘neutral point of view,'” says Sh., an editor at Wikipedia for 16 years. This principle is one of the basic values that Wikipedia has set for itself, but many times it seems that it does not manages to withstand it. According to S., the situation is even more serious: “This is not a phenomenon that results from one editor putting his opinion into the From a large, and perhaps even organized, group of editors who act solely according to their own opinion and ideology, without any effort to try to produce a neutral image.”
According to Dr. Aharoni Lear, this is not an accidental tendency. “When you follow the editing histories on Wikipedia, you can learn that in the various edits there is a list of about 40 editors who seem to be coordinated. This list was published in part on social networks, along with the exposure of a group called Tech For Palestine that includes 8,000 participants who also act in a way that reinforces the bias. These groups are responsible not only for trending edits but also for attempts to delete values related to the massacres, changing terminology in the values describing the disaster from ‘massacre’ to ‘attack’, referring to Hamas and Hezbollah as militant groups and not terrorist organizations, and working to rewrite values.”
Anti-Israel bias did exist even before the war, but according to S. and Aharoni Lir – it was on the margins. “There was a varying degree of anti-Israelism in Wikipedia projects before the war. The Israeli community made great efforts to prevent this, and in 2011 we even hosted the world conference of Wikimedia at the University of Haifa. Before the war, the English community was considered relatively neutral, even if not always. During the war there were moves in the English community that simply erased any sign of this neutrality,” says Sh.
With the outbreak of the war, says Dr. Lear, it was possible to see how the bias against Israel intensified. As a result, the false narrative has become established for many and it is now very difficult to change it, because the pages are blocked and also any change leads to discussion and immediate deletion when trying to balance the value.”
The power is actually in the hands of the little citizen
Those who are entitled to edit entries related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are only editors with a seniority of 30 days and at least 500 edits, which prevents others, “occasionals”, from accessing them. “Thus, a situation has arisen in which a phenomenon in which the editors are a closed and relatively homogeneous group can only edit, and the basic motto of Wikipedia – ‘Anyone can edit’ – does not materialize in the case of values related to Israel,” says Dr. Aharoni Leer. This group, is Narrator, produces “fear, over-marking and a feeling that everything that editors write in connection with the conflict will be deleted immediately and they will face the danger of being blocked or removed”.
Is it still possible to do something to deal with the phenomenon? One option is to contact Wikimedia, a foundation responsible for operating the Wikipedia platform and related activities, in order to correct the entry. Sometimes, that happens. For example, a complaint against Croatian nationalists who distorted and edited a variety of entries dealing with the history of the former Yugoslavia, led to Wikimedia intervention.
However, there have been quite a few attempts to contact the Foundation, asking it to act on the problems that have arisen in the English Wikipedia, which have failed. “At this point, it seems that the International Fund is not taking significant steps on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and is choosing to ignore it,” notes Dr. Aharoni Lear.
“The small citizen’s ability to influence is to join the community,” concludes S. “Of course, in the English version it is more complex, because it is not the language of the people living in Zion and because it is a large community, with bureaucratic challenges.” Aharoni Lir adds: “The way to influence is to edit. One of the tasks we should take on is to integrate editing into our studies.”
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