More than two dozen Wikipedia editors allegedly colluded in a years-long scheme to inject anti-Israel language on topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Anti-Defamation League claimed in a bombshell report released Tuesday.
The rogue editors, at least 30 of them, flooded one of the world’s most popular sites with “antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information,” according to the report by the ADL’s Center for Tech and Society.
The alleged bias also extended to pervasive “pro-Hamas perspectives” across Arabic-language Wikipedia content, the report claimed.
Wikipedia did not immediately respond to noti.group’s request for comment.
The battle between the leading human rights group in the US and the non-profit group heated up last year when Wiki editors declared the ADL an “unreliable source of information” about the Israel-Gaza war, according to the Washington Post.
In January, Wikipedia’s arbitration board took disciplinary action against six “suspicious editors,” banning them from editing certain topics for trying to bully or intimidate other volunteer editors into making certain page changes, the ADL said at the time.
The nonprofit’s latest report claims alleged anti-Israel editors deleted references to antisemitism and cleaned up pages on Hamas in a years-long campaign, ramping up the rogue edits since the terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel.
In one instance, an NPR report about a young Palestinian flying a kite with a swastika on it was deleted from a Wikipedia page about Gaza protests, according to the report.
Conspiring editors deleted reports of sexual violence by Hamas from Wikipedia content, while others systematically removed references to terrorist violence from pages on Hamas, the report said.
In another example, edits to the Wikipedia page for Samir Kuntar – a Lebanese-Palestinian Liberation Front member who participated in the deadly in Nahariy, Israel in 1979 – removed his murder conviction on terrorism charges.
Media coverage of terrorists calling for the destruction of Israel was deleted from a Wiki page on Palestinian political violence, the ADL added.
In the main Wikipedia entry on Hamas, a sentence indicating that many governments, including the US, designate it as a terrorist group was demoted from the top of the story, according to the report.
Instead, the lead section of the page focuses on Hamas’ role as a political, social and military organization that promotes “Palestinian nationalism in an Islamic context.”
Meanwhile, edits to the main Zionism page since 2022 have negatively reframed Israel’s founding, the ADL argued.
“Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,” the Wikipedia page said.
Data going back to 2002, when the first of the “bad-faith editors” joined the site, recorded more than 1 million edits on about 10,000 articles linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ADL said.
The ADL is calling on search engines like Google and Bing to deprioritize Wikipedia pages in results.
The report also demands Wikipedia create a program with experts on Israel and revisit its policies on harassment, bias and sourcing standards.
Bloomberg previously reported that tensions are brewing at Wikipedia over the war in Gaza as volunteer editors have launched “edit wars” to manipulate the slant of pages.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
