Draft:Antisemitism on Wikipedia

In the early years of Wikipedia, there were isolated cases of antisemitic misconduct by Wikipedia contributors, as well as one larger-scale incident.^[6] In his book on Wikipedia culture, Joseph Reagle notes, for example, that a Wikipedian was blocked in 2005 for posting a list of purported Jewish editors.^[6]

In his "Nazis and Norms" chapter, Reagle highlights a broader 2005 episode when neo-Nazis apparently mobilized to preserve an article on "Jewish ethnocentrism," based on the writings of antisemitic professor Kevin MacDonald. According to Reagle, neo-Nazis and other Wikipedians were polite in their discussions, in keeping with Wikipedia etiquette and in keeping with the neo-Nazi guidance to avoid offending Wikipedians with anti-Jewish criticism.^[6] Nonetheless, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stated that he would set aside ordinary procedures, protect the encyclopedia, and ban users as needed "if 300 neo-Nazis show up and start doing serious damage."^[6]

Other misconduct has included antisemitic vandalism on Wikipedia pages^[7][8] and the creation of accounts with antisemitic names,^[5] the creative nature of which obscures their identification.^[9] Wikipedia has responded, for example, banning a user for their anti-Jewish campaign.^[5] Antisemitic vandalism on Wikipedia pages typically result in quick reversals by site editors.^[7]

Concerns have also been raised about "Jew tagging", a practice primarily driven by one active editor, who would tag biographies of Jewish individuals as such. One subject affected by the tagging suspected antisemitic motives, although the Wikimedia Foundation said that the editing had no malicious intent.^[10]

Some scholars have suggested that Wikipedia's collaborative editing policy makes the encyclopaedia vulnerable to antisemitic edits and vandalism.^[11] Once these edits have been made, editors resolve the issue by following the processes for article deletion and editing, which can lead to content disputes and edit warring.^{[12][13][better source needed]} For example, in 2005, a suspected sock puppet account from Stormfront edited the Eugenics article to remove a section on Nazi eugenics and add a "Jewish eugenics" section instead. Both edits were reverted after in-depth discussion on the article's talk page.^{[13][better source needed]} In other cases, references to the antisemitic views of notable individuals, such as Father Charles Coughlin, were deleted and then restored. Following such disruptions, Wikipedia may periodically restrict editing on its otherwise open platform.^[11]

According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, Wikipedia has repeatedly overcome efforts to insert the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews were responsible for the September 11 attacks into various pages. He says such edits are removed "promptly" but require "constant attention" from editors.^[14]

In a 2010 article, Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka and Mykola Makhortykh suggested anti-Jewish bias can take the form of "criticism elimination", such as the removal of an accusation that the NGO War on Want had employed "Holocaust and anti-Semitic themes".^[5] In 2018, journalist Yair Rosenberg said that "activist" editors were "quietly attempting to erase" mention of antisemitism within the Labour Party by either seeking to delete the Antisemitism in the British Labour Party article or by adding the word allegations to its title. Rosenberg also criticised Wikipedia because, at that time, the Jeremy Corbyn article did not include criticisms of antisemitism; three months later, these criticisms had been added as their own section at the Wikipedia article.^[15]

In a 2016 study of positive and negative noun use related to religious adjectives on Wikipedia, linguist Emad Mohamed concluded that "both Jewish and Christian are positive words while Islamic has more negative semantic prosody". The word Jewish was often accompanied by nouns like scholar, culture, and heritage, suggesting Jewishness was discussed in contexts of intellectual and cultural contributions. Mohamed said the "most salient negative colocation" (word pairing) was Jewish lobby, followed by Jewish conspiracy. He suggests these word pairings relate to negative stereotypes that frame Jews as political entities with potentially undue influence.^[16]

In writing about Arabic-language treatment of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 2013, Carmen Matussek said that Arabic Wikipedia suggested this was a legitimate historical viewpoint rather than antisemitic propaganda.^[17] Agnieszka Graff suggests that articles about popular individuals with antisemitic viewpoints will be edited with a respectful tone.^[18]

In a 2011 study, Ewa S. Callahan and Susan C. Herring compare the Polish and English Wikipedias to assess their neutrality. They report that the Polish version tended to "downplay multiple ethnicities"—and especially Jewishness—when describing notable Polish individuals, such as Pola Negri, where only their Polish heritage was mentioned. The authors suggest this reflects Polish values and concerns, stating:^[19]

Poles have reason to be sensitive around the topic of Polish–Jewish relations, not just from the treatment of Jews in Poland during the Second World War, but from more recent history; this sensitivity may be expressed through omission or explicit rejection of that history.^[19]

In 2015, Eva Pfanzelter published qualitative data analysis that found "racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist or denialist remarks" in 9 of the top 60 threads about The Holocaust article. For example, some Wikipedians argued that Jews should not be allowed to edit the article and that research sources should be rejected if written by Jews. Another 7 threads alleged bias by other editors.^[3] Wikipedia responded by deleting various edits and blocking some editors. Pfanzelter stated that the discussions were "rarely neutral" and that "serious scholars would dismiss" its Good Article peer review, which had argued that the wording, such as murder and genocide, "betrays a bias towards the belief that the Holocaust was a bad thing".^[3]

Several studies have examined the concept of "memory wars"—a political dispute over the interpretation or memorialization of a historical event—in Wikipedia articles relating to the Holocaust.^[20] Mykola Makhortykh suggests that writing Wikipedia is a "discursive construction of the past", in which articles become a way to commemorate, memorialize or otherwise understand the past, and this may explain why editors are drawn to engage in such memory wars over important topics like the Holocaust.^[4]

In 2016, Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka analyzed the framing of 2014 articles about the Holocaust in the English, Hebrew, and Polish Wikipedias, hypothesizing that memory wars would result in different national narratives in each version. In his analysis, he said that the articles were "descriptive, and with very little evaluation or appeal to emotions". In the Auschwitz-Birkenau article, in particular, he identified some instances of bias that favoured the culture of the target audience, but this was true for both Polish and Hebrew versions of the article; the English version had a combination of these biases, suggesting Polish- and Hebrew-language editors had also been involved in writing the English version.^[a] By contrast, the articles on the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom uniformly identified Poles as the perpetrators, but the Polish version also said that the Poles had strong antisemitic feelings. He concluded that "the main characteristic of the articles" was "their attempt to remain academic and scientific", while "judgmental or evaluative language" was rarely used.^[21]

Relying partly on the Wolniewicz-Slomka methodology, Makhortykh compared editor interpretations of the Babi Yar article in the English, Russian, and Ukrainian Wikipedias. According to Makhortykh, the differences were evident in that "both the Russian and Ukrainian articles interpret it in a fundamentally different way from the English Wikipedia". The English-language article presents Babi Yar as "a Holocaust site and focuses on the history of the [Nazi] massacres", whereas the Russian and Ukrainian articles also focused on the 1961 Kurenivka mudslide and "present it as a generalised site of suffering, and place significant emphasis on its commemoration".^[4] Makhortykh says:

Digital media—such as Wikipedia—not only serve as spaces for cultural and political self-expression, but are also often used for the process of establishing collective identities through selective interpretations of the past and the present. Often, these interpretations are determined by existing cultural practices, which, as in the case of Babi Yar, leads to the instrumentalisation (e.g. by framing Ukrainians as Holocaust perpetrators in the Russian Wikipedia) or disparagement (e.g. by putting emphasis on non-Jewish victims in the Ukrain-ian Wikipedia) of Holocaust memory.^[4]

Like Wolniewicz-Slomka, Makhortykh also found a "large number of similarities in frame distributions across all three Wikipedia versions", which he suggests "points to the influence of platform-specific norms on the way issues are framed". He concluded that "the platform's encyclopaedic approach ... strives to avoid moral evaluations" and that the "existence of policies and norms supporting this approach" also "prevents the use of Wikipedia for the propagation of views of Holocaust deniers or highly subjective interpretations of the past in general".^[4]

In a similar analysis of the 1941 Lviv pogroms, Makhortykh reported that the Russian Wikipedia, unlike articles in seven other languages, focused on "framing the event as a single episode of the Holocaust" and stressing "the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the pogrom". Makhortykh suggests these differences could serve to both "emphasize the connection between anti-Soviet nationalistic movements and crimes against humanity" and to "appropriate and marginalize memory of the Holocaust in Russia".^[22]

In an internal investigation looking at Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia articles from 2013 to 2021, the Wikipedia Foundation found disinformation had been spread by far-right activists on the website, including Holocaust revisionism and downplaying the atrocities of the Ustaše regime, such as the killings of Serbs, Roma, anti-fascists, and Jews at the Jasenovac concentration camp.^[1] Wikipedia published its "Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment", which described the case and the banning of the editors involved.^[23]

In 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein said that Wikipedia editors had intentionally introduced skewed views and distortions in the encyclopedia's history of the Holocaust.^[24] In response, the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee opened a case to investigate and evaluate the actions of editors in the affected articles.^[25] Ultimately, the Committee banned two editors from the topic areas, although Klein criticized the proposed remedies as "[lacking] depth and consequence".^{[26][better source needed]}

In 2021, right-wing British pro-Israel blogger David Collier criticised Wikipedia, calling it "a central conduit in the spread of antisemitism" and accusing it of "lies, propaganda and distortion". He said the Campaign Against Antisemitism article should not include criticisms levelled against the organization by anti-Zionist Jews, and contrasted it with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign article, which he said lacked such criticisms.^[27]

In the wake of the 2023 October 7 attack in Israel, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) published a report alleging that Wikipedia entries in English demonstrated a pattern of anti-Israel bias.^[2][28] This claim was reiterated by former French prime minister Manuel Valls, who was keynote speaker at a WJC event in Geneva.^[2]

In 2024, the Jerusalem Post said that an individual who edited the Zionism article and was banned for violating Wikipedia's one revert rule was anti-Zionist. Israeli actor and activist Roi Dolev criticized the editor's contributions for framing Zionism as colonialist, as well as for the article's statement that Zionists wanted "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinians as possible".^[29] Israeli writer Hen Mazzig called the entry "downright antisemitic", saying that it promoted the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry.^[30]

In December 2024, Wikipedia's arbitration committee took action against editors who participated in canvassing operations in the Israel-Palestine topic area. These operations included the use of social media platforms such as Discord, and some participants described their group as an “instrument of the Gaza war for the elimination of Israel.”^[31] Ashley Rindsberg argued that pro-Hamas editors were "hijacking Wikipedia" in a piece for Pirate Wires.^[31]

Wikipedia maintains a list of "perennial sources" whose reliability has been evaluated by a community of editors. Possible statuses include "generally reliable", "marginally reliable... depending on context", "generally unreliable", and "deprecated".^[32]

In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was downgraded to "generally unreliable" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, leading to criticism of the decision. Editors supporting the decision said that the ADL's credibility was undermined by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, by using an overly-broad classification of antisemitic incidents (based on the working definition of antisemitism), and because of statements by its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.^[33] This decision "extend[ed] to 'the intersection of the topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict'".^[34] On antisemitism in general, Wikipedia stated that the ADL "can roughly be taken as reliable on the topic of antisemitism when Israel and Zionism are not concerned."^[35]

A number of Jewish groups wrote a joint letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking them to reverse the ADL decision because it "could provide cover for antisemitism"^[36] and was "stripping the Jewish community of the right to defend itself from the hatred that targets our community".^[35] The Foundation replied that it does not involve itself in such decisions, which are made by a community of volunteer editors.^[35] Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. envoy on antisemitism, also raised concerns about Wikipedia's action on the ADL.^[37]

• Criticism of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
• Ideological bias on Wikipedia

• Antisemitism on Wikipedia: Distorting the History of the Holocaust (USC Shoah Foundation)