Scandal as Wikipedia’s founder edits Israel’s genocide out of online entry

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been accused of ‘caving’ to the Israel lobby after he intervened on the online encyclopedia’s entry on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Wales jumped in on the edit discussion page to describe the article as “particularly egregious” for concluding that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and stating “in Wikipedia’s voice” that:

The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war.

How could anyone with a smartphone or computer sensibly argue against that conclusion? Well, Wales did, saying on the discussion page that he had been:

asked point-blank in a high profile media interview about this article, and I answered with transparency and honesty: this article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention.

Wikipedia founder

Wales went on:

As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV [Wikipedia Neutral Point of View] working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do.

He maintained that:

I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Gaza “genocide” article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested. This is a violation of WP:NPOV [Wikipedia Neutral Point of View] and WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV [Wikipedia Attribute Point of View] that requires immediate correction.

And, he insisted that:

This policy is non-negotiable, and the principles upon which it is based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus.

Instead, he demanded that the following approach be taken:

A neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

Of course, as Al Jazeera explained:

Several major international bodies, including the United Nations, have asserted that Israel’s assault on Gaza is a genocide. This view has been backed by human rights organisations and scholars.

Turmoil within Wikipedia

The intervention has caused what US journalist Ryan Grim called “a huge scandal… inside Wikipedia”, with other platform editors condemning the interference and insisting that Wales’s opinion should have no more weight than anyone else’s and needs to be proposed, argued and either accepted or rejected by the editing community like any other:

Grim assessed that:

top dog Jim Wales swoop[ed] in to edit the Gaza genocide article and some others, buckling to pressure from the ADL and Israel.

The main article page has now been locked to prevent editing until at least tonight.

Online backlash

On social media, others considered that Wales had humiliated himself by wanting to give the opinions  of the Israel lobby equal weight to those of United Nations experts, human rights groups and genocide scholars, and by ‘caving’ to the Israel lobby:

The insistence that everyone editing the article has to be treated as a good-faith actor is also humiliating, given that the Israeli regime has long admitted deploying armies of supporters to edit Wikipedia articles (and flood social media) to make them positive about Israel. Several posted this clip of former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett saying the same:

History of Zionism

Even more embarrassing is the fact that Wikipedia has a page listing “political editing incidents” that includes a examples of editing wars funded by Israel or its proxies including, alongside Bennett’s admission, those of:

• Israeli firm Percepto (formerly Veribo), which was exposed by Wikipedia’s own internal newspaper for using sockpuppets (fake online identities) to edit articles for paying clients, a breach of Wikipedia rules

• right-wing Israeli think tank Kohelet Policy Forum allegedly using sockpuppet accounts – after openly using paid editors in the past

• Wikipedia administrators being forced to ban pro-Israel activists pushing a 2008 campaign organised by the ironically-named Israel propaganda group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)

Wales’s own personal history of Zionism is no less troubling. He has said of himself that:

I’m a strong supporter of Israel, so I don’t listen to those critics [of Israeli apartheid].

Wales also joined in the UK antisemitism scam, accusing then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of being antisemitic and ‘supporting Hamas’ – a position that saw him accused of being a supporter of apartheid by an Israeli citizen:

Last month, Wales was accused by X owner Elon Musk for not being right-wing enough. Musk then set up Grokipedia, an alternative pushing “far-right talking points”. Musk’s own Grok AI has repeatedly admitted its programmed pro-Israel biases and Islamophobia.

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Channel 4 News