‘Edit Wars’ on Middle East page raise tensions on Wikipedia
Ongoing war and other conflicts in the Middle East have spilled onto the pages of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where volunteer editors who maintain the website are sparring over how to frame recent events.
At least 14 editors have been barred from working on pages related to the topic, Jewish organizations are claiming bias, and the conflict has reached the top levels of Wikipedia as the site’s two founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, are at odds over whether to unmask the anonymous editors involved in the turmoil.
In January, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee found that fake online accounts used for deception, known as sock puppets, among the pages relating to Palestine and Israel are “an ongoing issue” which was “causing significant disruption.” The committee is a group of editor-elected volunteers tasked with policing misconduct.
The tensions have resulted in subtle edits of photos and text that allegedly reflect bias. Others are more obvious. For about six months last year, Wikipedia published two, radically different accounts of a deadly battle at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, though only one of them appeared in a Google search for the camp’s name.
Conflicts among Wikipedia’s 265,000 volunteer editors are inevitable — “edit wars” have emerged over everything from the spelling of yogurt to the definition of an economic recession. So is criticism of the website, which has long been accused of being unreliable or politically biased. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a close confidante to President Donald Trump, in December labeled the site “Wokepedia” in response to a report that alleged 40 “Pro-Hamas” Wikipedia editors were working together to “delegitimize Israel” and urged his followers to stop donating.
Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Still, the disputes over Israel, Gaza and Iran have created an unprecedented amount of internal turmoil, according to 11 editors and administrators who focus on Middle Eastern issues, who provided previously unreported details about the ongoing tensions. They asked not to be named out of fear of harassment.
The feuds at Wikipedia, which is operated by a nonprofit, mirror roiling discord in society today, where vigorous debate and compromise have given way to incendiary rhetoric and self-righteousness. That has made the site’s stated goal of providing neutral summaries in a fair and accurate manner particularly challenging, one shared by many news organizations. Disagreements at Wikipedia are especially noteworthy because the site is one of the most visited sources of information. English-language Wikipedia counted roughly 12 billion page views in January, and roughly 130 billion in 2024.
Wikipedia’s page on the Israel-Hamas war, for instance, has garnered more than 9.8 million views, and it continues to attract more than 21,000 on average per day.
In an email to Bloomberg News, Wales, the Wikipedia co-founder, described the conflicts over the Middle East as routine, and he said he was proud of Wikipedia and the arbitration committee, or ArbCom. “The outside world is always very noisy, but the Wikipedia community is thorough and methodical.”
A Wikipedia spokesperson, meanwhile, denied that any coordinated activity was taking place, and said that the site’s “long-standing editorial processes and content moderation systems are functioning normally with regards to sharing and protecting information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
In addition, the spokesperson noted that ArbCom in recent years had sanctioned several users who engaged in “disinformation or sock puppet use to push a pro-Iranian point of view.”
“This is again a demonstration that existing editorial and content moderation processes are working to address problematic behavior on Wikipedia,” the spokesperson said.
As for Musk’s remarks, Wales noted that Musk’s own artificial intelligence model was trained extensively on Wikipedia.
“Every time Elon tweets his nonsense, we get a surge in donations, and no wonder,” Wales told Bloomberg News in an email. “Wikipedia is the antidote to his brand of sloppy misinformation, and the public knows it.”
Wikipedia is among the top 10 most visited websites in the world, according to several measures, an easy and free reference tool with the ability to shape or distort public opinion. It is often the first item to appear in a Google search, and it is used by ChatGPT to answer questions on various topics as well as training its underlying technology and other large language models.
Amy Bruckman, the author of Should You Believe Wikipedia?, told Bloomberg News that the online encyclopedia “has always been fragile.”
“There are a minority of editors who are willing to put in a tremendous amount of energy to push a point of view,” said Bruckman, who is also regents’ professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “And there aren’t enough people who are willing to put in the time on the other side.”
“I am concerned we have become so politically divided, it’s getting hard for the dedicated Wikipedians to fight every one of these battles,” she added.
But recent events in the region are challenging Wikipedia’s claims of independence. The blowback has been particularly acute among Jewish groups and media, where Wikipedia has come under increasing fire for alleged bias. One recent headline declared, “Wikipedia’s anti-Israel propaganda mocks objectivity and destroys its credibility,” and the World Jewish Congress last March published a report saying the English language version of Wikipedia contains “anti-Israel bias that perpetuates disinformation and promotes negative stereotypes.”
On Jan. 7, the Forward, an American-Jewish news organization, reported on an alleged Heritage Foundation plot to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors working on pages about the Middle East that were labeled anti-Semitic. The Heritage Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg News.
The suggestion sparked outrage, in part because Wikipedia editors are supposed to remain anonymous. You don’t need to provide an email address to edit Wikipedia, nor your real identity.
In a January 10 discussion on Wikipedia about the Heritage Foundation allegedly targeting users, Wales, the co-founder, expressed concern, describing the allegations as “extremely worrisome.” The Heritage Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment on the matter.
“I agree that for many who are doing it, the motive does appear to be the undermining of civic norms and democracy,” he said.
However, Sanger, the other Wikipedia co-founder, who has frequently criticized the website for being too left-wing, backed the Heritage Foundation’s alleged targeting of editors on the social media platform X. “Admins and those with significant authority in the system should be as easily named and shamed as any ordinary journalist,” he wrote.
Sanger did not respond to requests for comment.
In the same month, 11 editors were banned from editing Palestine and Israel-related pages by ArbCom for reasons including “non- neutral editing,” “incivility” and coordination off Wikipedia to create teams who would approve edits. One was accused of sock-puppetry and banned indefinitely from Wikipedia. Of the editors, three were accused of taking a pro-Israel stance and seven, pro-Palestine positions.
In response, the Anti-Defamation League in a statement praised the removal of “some editors who, in our view, have spread malicious, false and biased information about Zionism and Israel across the platform.” Wikipedia had deemed the ADL an unreliable source for Palestine and Israel topic pages in June 2024, following an editors’ vote.
The free encyclopedia’s approach to moderation is guided by the idea that letting volunteer editors and administrators handle the process is the best way to keep bias in check without boxing new editors out. In this view, the more editors there are on a given page, the more accurate that page should be, as everybody has to work together to reach a consensus.
Yet the editors who spoke to Bloomberg - and who self-identified as holding beliefs that ranged across the political spectrum - said that while the website has seen an increase in new editors on Palestine-Israel articles, known for short as PIA, many aren’t interested in working across ideological divides to uphold the site’s core principles of accuracy and neutrality.
Instead, they are coordinating edits with like-minded members, the editors said.
Allegations of coordinated editing have been lodged against all sides in the Middle East disputes. In early 2024, three different editors involved in a previously unreported pro-Israel campaign were banned from Wikipedia following an investigation by ArbCom. Their coordination began shortly after Oct. 7, the investigation found, when an editor who had been kicked off the website began emailing others and directing them to amend pages related to war in Gaza, including articles pertaining crimes against Israel, the use of human shields and the 2001 Beit Rima raid in the West Bank.
On Oct. 16, one of the three editors sent an email - reviewed by Bloomberg News - urging colleagues who work on PIA pages to vote against an article that referred to the war in the Gaza Strip as a “genocide” started by Israel.
“Please vote for the article to be deleted or merged,” the author wrote, calling the page’s editors “propagandists” and referring to the article as “ridiculous.”
Conversely, an initiative named Tech for Palestine allegedly began in the spring of 2024 coordinating editing of Wikipedia pages on its Discord server. The allegations were first reported by the Jewish Insider.
A Twitter account, “Zei Squirrel,” announced in April a plan to “coordinate action on countering Zionest propaganda lies with facts on Wikipedia.” A person claiming to be behind the account discussed the effort on Discord in May, saying they had established a mailing list to send updates about editing articles about Israel and Palestine. Participation in mailing lists like this is described as “covert canvassing” on Wikipedia and is forbidden.
Asked for comment in October, a person who responded to the Zei Squirrel account, which has 272,000 followers, said those efforts had “zero effect.”
The tensions between Wikipedia between editors were evident for months in entries on a June 8 event in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza strip. Until early this year, two different pages were posted.
The first accorded with the official Israeli military narrative, describing a “rescue” operation to save the hostages gave way to a firefight between Hamas militants and Israeli troops, resulting in around 100 civilian casualties. The second detailed a “massacre” that resulted in the deaths of at least 274 people, with nearly 700 more injured. This article was based on figures released by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is overseen by Hamas.
The accusations of bias and coordination have seeped into Wikipedia’s pages about Iran too. In January 2024, for instance, a complaint was filed against five editors for allegedly whitewashing pages that reflected negatively on Iran, and defending each other against charges of bias, according to seven of the editors.
All Wikipedia’s edit histories are publicly viewable, and histories show that between them, the five editors removed photos and reporting from anti-government protests, or backed each other up when they came under scrutiny. In one instance, an editor – who had been previously blocked on Persian-language Wikipedia – used his or her administrative privileges to delete photos of 2019 anti-government protests in Iran and replace them with images of an injured police officer from a state-run news agency.
The editor also removed pictures of international protests following the death of a 22-year-old woman who had been taken into custody by Iran’s morality police for allegedly not wearing a hijab. Another editor was accused of making edits mirroring those of a former colleague who had previously been banned from the site for being part of a covert propaganda campaign run by the Iranian government.
The complaint was dismissed on technical grounds, though the complainant was told by Wikipedia’s trust and safety team “that some of the concerns were valid,” according to an email seen by Bloomberg News.
Since reporting began, one of the editors in the complaint has been blocked. Two editors, including the one who is blocked on Persian Wikipedia, did not respond to requests for comment. Two other editors denied the allegations, with two suggesting they originated with outside activists. “All of these edits were pro-reliable sources, pro-guidelines and pro-manual of style,” one said.
These editors, including those who were blocked, also edited in the PIA topic space and were accused of providing biased content. For instance, one of the editors created an entry on a Houthi drone attack which was “hailed as a victory for the oppressed Palestinian people and their fighters.” The current entry has been amended by other editors to add quotation marks around those claims, clarifying that it was Hezbollah making them.
A former employee at Wikipedia, who had knowledge of previous politically inflammatory debates, said it was unlikely anyone at the Wikimedia Trust would try to intervene to quell the tensions, owing to the organization’s long-held hands-off policies.
But the editors that spoke to Bloomberg suggested that the voluntary system is creaking at the seams. An ArbCom member complained in a post on the website in August that the group has “run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues” related to Palestine-Israel articles.
“PIA is a Gordian knot,” the arbitrator wrote, adding that their team “has run short of knot detanglers.”