Wikipedia

Wikipedia and antisemitism

Antisemitic bias on Wikipedia has been raised as a concern over the conduct of some editors, systemic anti-Jewish bias, coverage of the Holocaust, source selection, and aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on English and other language Wikipedias. Starting in the early years of Wikipedia, antisemitic misconduct was observed and penalized. Antisemitism-related research has examined Wikipedia's treatment of the Holocaust[1] and its policy of neutrality.[2]

Scholars have also used Wikipedia data in sundry ways to research online antisemitism.[3][4] The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure used Wikidata to improve its coverage on Nazi-era ghettos and camps.[5] Richard Utz, a scholar of anti-Jewish medieval narratives, has called for Wikipedia editing to combat residual antisemitic sentiment and contemporary anti-Jewish propaganda.[6]

Antisemitic misconduct

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In the early years of Wikipedia, there were isolated cases of antisemitic misconduct by Wikipedia contributors, as well as a more large scale incident.[7] 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.[7]

 
Neo-Nazis discussed their plan to intervene in Jewish topics on Wikipedia, quoted in a Wikipedia-EN list, February 7 2005

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.[7] 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."[7]

Other misconduct has included antisemitic vandalism on Wikipedia pages[8][9] and the creation of accounts with antisemitic names,[2] the creative nature of which obscures their identification.[10] Wikipedia has responded, for example, banning a user for their anti-Jewish campaign.[2] Antisemitic vandalism on Wikipedia pages typically result in quick reversals by site editors.[8]

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.[11]

Other anti-Jewish bias

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Aside from explicit anti-Jewish misconduct on Wikipedia, concerns have been raised about other forms of anti-Jewish bias. In one study, the use of nouns in relation to Jews and Judaism on Wikipedia was found to exhibit a mix of positive and negative associations, though overall they lean slightly positive. Words like "scholar," "culture," and "heritage" often accompany "Jewish," presenting Judaism in contexts of intellectual and cultural contributions. However, certain terms, such as "lobby" and "conspiracy," reveal recurring biases and negative stereotypes that frame Jews as political entities with potentially undue influence. Nevertheless, the study concludes that the word "Islamic" is far more likely to be associated with a negative connotations than the word "Jewish" or "Christian".[12]

The framing of Wikipedia articles can be biased against Jews, at times, as Wolniewicz-Slomka and Makhortykh found, for instance, when Jewish heroics was omitted or Jewish suffering marginalized.[13][14] In a 2010 article on framing, the authors identified cases of "criticism elimination," such as the revision of accusation that the NGO War on Want employed "Holocaust and anti-Semitic themes."[2] In 2018, journalist Yair Rosenberg argued that "activist" editors were "quietly attempting to erase traces of the [Labour] party's Jewish problem from Wikipedia" by seeking to delete the Antisemitism in the British Labour Party article or add 'allegations' to the title. Rosenberg also objected that, at that time, the Jeremy Corbyn article did not include criticisms of antisemitism.[15]

Wikipedia's editing policy offers the opportunity for the creation of articles with antisemitic bias, an issue that editors resolve through processes of article deletion.[16][17]

 
The antisemitic views of Father Coughlin, shown on this 1934 magazine cover, were deleted and then restored on Wikipedia.

In other cases, references to the antisemitic views of notable individuals were deleted, such as Father Charles Coughlin and then restored.[18] Due to such disruptions, Wikipedia periodically restricts editing on its otherwise open platform.[18]

Antisemitic viewpoints have been observed on Wikipedia's non-English sites. For instance, viewpoints expressed in antisemitic literature will be expressed as a legitimate historical viewpoint.[19] In some instances, pages concerning popular individuals who maintain antisemitic viewpoints will be edited with a respectful tone.[20] Compared to English Wikipedia, the Polish version was found to downplay the real or possible Jewish ethnicity of favored persons of note, such as Pola Negri, arguably reflecting Polish values and concerns.[21] Conversely, the Polish version included the Jewish ancestry of Irena Szewińska, a victim of Communist antisemitism, which the English version did not acknowledge (at the time of the analysis).[21]

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While Wikipedia is a significant site for Holocaust information, scholars and Jewish community groups have paid close attention to signs of anti-Jewish and other bias in articles about the Holocaust.[1][5][14][13]

In 2015, Eva Pfanzelter published a qualitative 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.[1] 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."[1] Since the article's readership was declining, the author speculated that Neo-Nazi and other extremist activists may have shifted attention from Wikipedia to other social networks, such as Facebook.[1]

In a detailed case study, Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka analyzed the framing of three Holocaust 2014 articles in the English, Hebrew, and Polish Wikipedias, without explicitly labeling any differences as biased against Jews or Poles. For the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp article, it was found that the Polish version emphasized responsibility of German Nazis, not Poles, and it omits the category of collaborators, e.g., the Kapo. The Hebrew article mentions Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Polish heroics, while the Polish article omits the former. Only the Polish article brings up the problem of Holocaust denial. For the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, the language versions diverge more. While all three identify Poles as the perpetrators, the Polish article further notes that Poles had strong antisemitic feelings. German incitement is covered more in English Wikipedia. (Third were the Righteous Among the Nations articles.) Overall, the author found that the framing was less tied, than anticipated, to the concurrent dispute between Poles and Israeli Jews over of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Polish Wikipedia was more critical of Poles than the nationalistic sense of Poles as "noble victims."[13]

Relying partly on the Wolniewicz-Slomka methodology, Mykola Makhortykh compared editor interpretations of the Babi Yar massacres in the English, Russian, and Ukrainian Wikipedias. The Russian and Ukrainian articles paid roughly half (48, 41, 82%) as much attention as the English Wikipedia to the atrocities committed. The Russian and Ukrainian versions also emphasized the trauma on (surviving) non-Jews and as an attack on the Ukrainian people overall. The Ukrainian Wikipedia here places less emphasis on Jewish suffering, which Makhortykh says is marginalized in favor of Ukrainian national victimhood.[14] This version also saw, in the Talk pages, effort to deny Ukrainian responsibility. All three Wikipedias has contributors who sought to deny the Holocaust.[14] Overall, the research found that these massacres were presented in Wikipedia to favor a national viewpoint (e.g., blaming Ukrainians in the Russian text) and to disparage the memory of the Holocaust (e.g., by stressing Ukrainian suffering in their language Wikipedia).[14] In a similar analysis of the 1941 Lviv pogroms, Makhortykh found that the Russian Wikipedia, unlike articles in 7 other languages, avoided discussion of anti-Jewish violence partly to marginalize the Holocaust in Russia.[22]

In an explicitly critical vein, in 2023 Grabowski and Klein have described Wikipedia editors as intentionally introducing skewed views and distortions in the encyclopedia's history of the Holocaust.[23] In response, the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee opened a case to investigate and evaluate the actions of editors in the affected articles.[24] Ultimately, the Committee banned two editors from the topic areas, although Klein criticized the proposed remedies as "[lacking] depth and consequence".[25]

Bias in Israel-related content

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See also: Wikipedia and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

In editing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to Oboler, editors have "campaigned" for an Arab or Palestinian viewpoint without being antisemitic.[2]

Conversely, various established Jewish community organizations have alleged a potential pattern of anti-Jewish bias on the part of Wikipedia editors that effectively silences what they argue are Jewish communal perspectives on matters relating to the State of Israel. In the wake of the October 7, 2024 terror attack in Israel, the World Jewish Congress alleged that Wikipedia entries in English demonstrate a pattern of antisemitic and anti-Israel bias.[26]

In 2024, Wikipedia faced accusations of bias based on changes to its article about Zionism. Some of the controversial language related to the framing of Zionism as colonization, as well as the statement that Zionists wanted "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinians as possible". The Anti-Defamation League called the revised language "historically inaccurate" and "derogatory".[27] Israeli writer Hen Mazzig called the entry "downright antisemitic", saying that it promoted the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry. US congressman Ritchie Torres called it a "warped telling of history," counting "Israeli Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as from Ethiopia" among the "European colonizers."[28]

Concerns were raised regarding editors removing antisemitism as one of the ideologies of Hamas.[29] Other concerns raised related to the perception of editor behaviour on pages relating to Jewish community groups combating antisemitism.[30]

Source selection

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Wikipedia maintains a list of "perennial sources" whose reliability has been evaluated by a community of editors. Possible statuses include "generally reliable", "generally unreliable", and "deprecated".[31]

 
Wikipedia policy on the ADL as a reliable source, June 21, 2024

In 2024, there was a controversial Wikipedia decision to deem the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as "generally unreliable" on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Editors supporting the decision argued that the ADL's credibility was undermined by an overly-broad classification of antisemitic incidents, as well as controversial statements by ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.[32] The further decision that this unreliability "extend[ed] to 'the intersection of the topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict'"[33] led some Jewish community members to fear this would provide cover for antisemitic editing and delegitimize what they viewed to be Jewish communal perspectives.[34] Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. envoy on antisemitism, also raised concerns about Wikipedia's action on the ADL.[35]

A number of Jewish groups jointly wrote a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking them to reverse the ADL decision which they said stripped "the Jewish community of the right to defend itself from the hatred that targets our community". The Foundation replied that it does not involve itself in such decisions, which are made by a community of volunteer editors.[36]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e Pfanzelter, Eva (2015). "At the crossroads with public history: Mediating the Holocaust on the Internet". Holocaust Studies. 21 (4): 250–271. doi:10.1080/17504902.2015.1066066. ...other discussions (9 threads out of 60) are more easily identifiable as racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist or denialist remarks: Editors openly try to change the text of the lemma [article title], for example, by including a "Holocaust controversy" section or paragraphs about an alleged "Jewish striving to establish world dominion" prior to Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and by questioning the accuracy of the number of Jewish victims. Others try to argue that Jews should not be allowed to contribute to the writing of the lemma, they delete references to scholars because they seemingly have identified them as being biased due to their Jewish background, and some openly deny the Holocaust.
  2. ^ a b c d e Oboler, Andre; Steinberg, Gerald; Stern, Rephael (11 October 2010). "The Framing of Political NGOs in Wikipedia through Criticism Elimination". Journal of Information Technology & Politics. 7 (4): 284–299. doi:10.1080/19331680903577822. 
  3. ^ Mustafa, Raza Ul; Japkowicz, Nathalie (2024). "Monitoring the evolution of antisemitic discourse on extremist social media using BERT". Arxiv. arXiv:2403.05548.
  4. ^ Zannettou, Savvas; Finkelstein, Joel; Bradlyn, Barry; Blackburn, Jeremy (26 May 2020). "A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 14: 786–797. doi:10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7343. ISSN 2334-0770.
  5. ^ a b Cooey, N. (2019). "Leveraging Wikidata to Enhance Authority Records in the EHRI Portal". Journal of Library Metadata. 19 (1–2): 83–98. doi:10.1080/19386389.2019.1589700.
  6. ^ Utz, R. (2019). Medievalism, Antisemitism, and Twenty-First-Century Media: An Update. Studies in Medievalism XXVIII: Medievalism and Discrimination, 41-50.
  7. ^ a b c d Reagle, Joseph M. (2012). Good faith collaboration: the culture of Wikipedia. History and Foundations of Information Science. Cambridge, Mass. London: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01447-2.
  8. ^ a b Fox, Mira (16 August 2021). "Wikipedia fixed its swastika problem fast. Why can't anyone else?". The Forward.
  9. ^ Dean, Grace; Akhtar, Allana. "Pictures of Swastikas temporarily replaced Wikipedia pages for Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck". Business Insider.
  10. ^ Aksit, F. G. An Empirical Research:“Wikipedia Vandalism Detection using VandalSense 2.0”.
  11. ^ Kosner, Edward (17 April 2020). "Jew-Tagging @Wikipedia". Commentary.
  12. ^ Mohamed, E. (2016). Jewish, christian and islamic in the english wikipedia. Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, 11. "These two issues aside, I have found that in Wikipedia Islamic is probably more negative than either Christian or Jewish..."
  13. ^ a b c Wolniewicz-Slomka, Daniel (22 December 2016). "Framing the Holocaust in popular knowledge: 3 articles about the Holocaust in English, Hebrew and Polish Wikipedia". Adeptus (8): 29–49. doi:10.11649/a.2016.012.
  14. ^ a b c d e Makhortykh, Mykola (2017). "Framing the Holocaust Online: Memory of the Babi Yar Massacres on Wikipedia". Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. 18: 67–94. ISSN 2043-7633. The subject of Holocaust denial was a prominent part of the discussions in all three versions, where calls often appeared to remove 'Bolshevik lies' ('Obsuzhdenie: Babii Iar' 2017) or to add arguments effectively denying the Holocaust to the article.
  15. ^ Rosenberg, Yair. "How Some Wikipedia Editors Tried—and Failed—To Erase The UK Labour Party's Anti-Semitism Problem". Tablet.
  16. ^ Tripodi, Francesca (27 June 2021). "Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia". New Media & Society. 25 (7): 1687–1707. doi:10.1177/14614448211023772. 
  17. ^ De Vera, E. (2020). Classifying Eugenics: A “Wandering Subject” moves to Wikipedia (Doctoral dissertation).
  18. ^ a b Rosenzweig, Roy (2006). "Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past". The Journal of American History. 93 (1): 117–146. doi:10.2307/4486062. JSTOR 4486062. The Wikipedian collectivity must temporarily "lock" controversial entries because of vandalism and "edit wars" in which articles are changed and immediately changed back, such as an effort by NYCExpat to remove any references to Father Charles Coughlin's anti-Semitism. But other entries—even ones in which dedicated partisans such as the followers of Lyndon LaRouche battle for their point of view—remain open for anyone to edit and still present a reasonably accurate account.
  19. ^ Matussek, C. (2013). Fertile Ground for a Poisonous Weed: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab World. Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 7(3), 71-78.
  20. ^ Graff, A. (2022). Jewish perversion as strategy of domination: the anti-semitic subtext of anti-gender discourse. Journal of Modern European History, 20(3), 423-439.
  21. ^ a b Callahan, E. S., & Herring, S. C. (2011). Cultural bias in Wikipedia content on famous persons. Journal of the American society for information science and technology, 62(10), 1899-1915.
  22. ^ Makhortykh, Mykola (1 September 2017). "War Memories and Online Encyclopedias". Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society. 9 (2): 40–68. doi:10.3167/jemms.2017.090203. ISSN 2041-6938.
  23. ^ Jan, Grabowski; Shira, Klein (2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939.
  24. ^ ELIA-SHALEV, ASAF (1 March 2023). "Wikipedia's 'Supreme Court' tackles alleged conspiracy to distort articles on Holocaust". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 11 March 2023.
  25. ^ Metzger, Cerise Valenzuela (16 May 2023). "Ruling on Wikipedia's Distortion of Holocaust History Lacks Depth". Chapman University. Archived from the original on 27 May 2023. Retrieved 25 September 2023.
  26. ^ "Wikipedia entries show anti-Israel bias says WJC". World Jewish Congress. 19 March 2024. Retrieved 1 October 2024.
  27. ^ Heller, Mathilda. "Wikipedia's page on Zionism is partly edited by an anti-Zionist - investigation". The Jerusalem Post.
  28. ^ Cordi, Peter. "Wikipedia blasted for 'wildly inaccurate' change to entry on Zionism: 'Downright antisemitic'". Washington Examiner.
  29. ^ Bandler, Aaron (23 May 2024). "Seven Tactics Wikipedia Editors Used to Spread Anti-Israel Bias Since Oct. 7". Jewish Journal.
  30. ^ Gal, Hannah (10 June 2021). "A spike in antisemitism has British Jewry worrying for the future". The Jerusalem Post.
  31. ^ Bandler, Aaron (11 September 2024). "Wikipedia's Fundamental Sourcing Problem". Jewish Journal.
  32. ^ Elia-Shalev, Asaf. "Wikipedia moves to bar ADL, claiming reliability concerns on Israel and antisemitim". Times of Israel.
  33. ^ Collins, Michael (21 June 2024). "Wikipedia ADL Israel Palestinian conflict and antisemitism". USA Today. Retrieved 6 October 2024.
  34. ^ Bandler, Aaron (25 June 2024). "Forty-three Jewish Orgs Call on Wikimedia to Reconsider Editors' Decision on ADL". Jewish Journal.
  35. ^ Rod, Marc (8 August 2024). "Lipstadt 'deeply disturbed' by Wikipedia's ban on the ADL". Jewish Insider. Regarding the ADL and Wikipedia, she said she was reluctant to comment on any individual organization but she was "deeply disturbed that Wikipedia should decide that one of the main organizations that tracks and evaluates antisemitism should be totally disbarred from commenting on certain things." "It struck me as very strange and it struck me as not as thoughtful, as judicious as it should be."
  36. ^ "Wikipedia rebuffs Jewish groups' call to override editors' move against ADL". Times of Israel. JTA. 26 June 2024.
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