The War on Wikipedia

There is a war happening in Gaza.?

There is another one happening in cyberspace waged on Wikipedia conducted by keyboard warriors.

This may sound trivial but it’s anything but.?

The pages that are written today about today’s happenings and their tone will influence the minds of tomorrow.?

Not only that, the history books that will be written by AI or plagiarized by lazy writers will use Wikipedia as their source material.?

In times such as these - Wikipedia’s influence gets heightened. No only can anyone* edit any page, but everyone is turning to Wikipedia for information.?

(*Given how contentious editing on this topic is, Wikipedia implemented a rule that an editor must have done 500 edits and be at least 30 days old in order to touch the subject.)

Anything that gets added to Wikipedia has to comply with the guidelines but the grey area is enough to drive a tank through. Here are the areas of contention

Not a newspaper

When something of note happens, the desire is to add it, but Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a newspaper . So if something happened but you don’t like what it’s say, you could try to get it removed on these grounds.?

Neutral Point of View

Everything needs to be neutral . Good luck with that! This is going to be in the eye of the beholder, but if one side has more beholders than the other, they are going to see it differently.?

It’s Just Semantics

Here it really matters! If you use the words terrorists or militants it makes a big difference.

Sources

This is where it gets really muddled. The sources are the basis for adding content to the page but if the source is questionable or dubious, so too is what you’re adding to the page.?

How Does It Play Out In Reality

So how does it look in real life? Let's take a look at the al-Ahli Hospital explosion page - the hospital at the centre of a lot of discussion

Visitors to the page are greeted with a tag

You can see by the contents that it drills down into every aspect of it

In the section about where the rocket came from, there's a tag saying the neutrality is disputed.

Disputed or not, people don't care. They will believe what they read.

This is being played out across the more than 50 pages that have already been created as a result of this war.?

On each of them, Pro Israel and Anti Israel editors try to restore neutrality to the page or push their agenda.?

Pages about Hamas Terrorism

On October 7, Hamas committed some of the worst atrocities known to man. How does Wikipedia account for it? Let's take a look at the What does the page about Despite the issues about language, sources, and neutrality, the pages are created. What do that look they look like?

Take the massacre at the Re'im music festival massacre page.

Despite it being the biggest terror attack in the history of the State of Israel. Who did it - Hamas militants. Because they can't be called terrorists.

So who were behind September 11 ? Terrorists

And the July 7 attack on London ?? Terrorists

What about what happened on October 7 ? Militants

Everywhere you look for this conflict on Wikipedia you will see a horrendous skew against Israel

On the War Crimes page there are so many more charges against Israel.

Of course Hamas can't be referred to as terrorists, but only as militant groups.

When you thought things couldn’t get any worse, there is a page called Genocide against Palestinians .

This page was only created two weeks ago on October 12 with a description of:

characterization of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that argues that Israel has carried out or is carrying out some kind of genocide against the Palestinian population, sometimes related to the view that Israel is a settler colonial state

The basis of this is a paper which has this abstract:

It reemphasises the importance of the settler-colonial dimension to Zionist settlement in Palestine, which, it argues, has so far not been explored sufficiently. The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of Palestine without its people, comprising massacres, physical destruction of villages, appropriation of land, property and culture, can be seen as an ongoing process and not merely a historical event.

There was a discussion to delete the page, but nothing happened due to no consensus and so it stays online doing untold damage?

Conflict of Interest

If Wikipedia truly wants to be encyclopedia of worth and value, only editors without an agenda or a bias would edit these pages.

But this is living in a fairytale.?

If the United Nations is biased against Israel, if the New York Times is biased against Israel, it would stand to reason that Wikipedia is as well. When it comes to antisemitism and ganging up on the Jews, unfortunately this isn’t our first rodeo.

The real tragedy is that someone who doesn’t know better, someone who’s genuinely looking for information wll be exposed to anti semitic trope after anti semitic trope and will most likely, join the least exclusive club in the world.?

Given its power,?Wikipedia has a responsibility to do better. To be better. Otherwise it's just the sequel to the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion .?

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