Wikipedia started out with great intentions. A crowd-sourced, collaboratively-edited online encyclopedia held the promise of a trusted source of information in which anyone, in theory, could participate.
Unfortunately, that promise has been denied by a small group of anonymous editors with a strong antizionist bias.
As historian and journalist Haviv Rettig Gur writes in the notes to his podcast episode 65: The unseen editors rigging the information war, with Ashley Rindsberg:
The internet has democratized information. Or so we are told. The world’s knowledge is now at everyone’s fingertips. No government and no power structure can gatekeep what everyone sees and hears. But as our lives increasingly move online, we are all discovering just how many forces are at work trying to control and manipulate the flow of information online. The information that comes our way is driven by algorithms shaped by corporations or foreign governments. And those who know how to game those algorithms now possess unprecedented control over what everyone sees on their phones and computers. Governments, political campaigns, advocacy movements all invest vast resources in shaping these environments to ensure their message dominates and opposing messages are suppressed. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the surprisingly small number of editors who have managed to take control of Wikipedia’s articles related to Israel, Israeli history and Zionism, and to skew them into narrow ideological screeds that no Israelis or Jews would recognize as representing them or their story. It’s a microcosm of a much larger story about the vulnerability of this new information environment in which we all swim to such manipulation. Wikipedia is a critical reference for hundreds of millions of people. It is often counted among the five most visited websites in the world. But its real influence is far larger: it’s a favored result in any Google search and a favorite source for AIs when they answer our questions. So it matters that a tiny group of no more than 40 editors, through careful coordination, can completely dominate all editing and content in a major arena of contested knowledge.
The Wikipedia entry on Zionism states in its very first sentence that Zionism “primarily seeks to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonization of Palestine”, perpetuating the false narrative that Israel is a colonialist project, when in fact it is just the opposite – a reclaiming of Israel as the Jewish homeland. Furthermore, the Wikipedia editors decided to place a one-year moratorium barring anyone from editing or discussing the second, controversial sentence: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” Terms like “settler-colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “apartheid” are ideological interpretations, not neutral descriptors, yet are presented as Wikipedia’s default framing. This violates Wikipedia’s own Neutral Point of View policy by embedding advocacy language into definitions. NGOs and advocacy organizations highly critical of Israel are cited as authoritative, while Jewish, Israeli, or Zionist organizations are described as “partisan” and discounted accordingly. This results in systematic skew toward antizionism.
For these reasons, we have chosen to avoid linking to Wikipedia on this site.