Wikipedia banned eight volunteer editors from making changes to articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, following a ruling on Thursday by the online encyclopedia’s Arbitration Committee.
Six of the banned editors are from the pro-Palestinian camp.
Their online editing names are: “Selfstudier,” “Nableezy,” “Nishidani,” “Levivich,” “Iskandar323” and “Makeandtoss.”
Two other banned editors are from the pro-Israel side. Their online names are: “BilledMammal” and “AndreJustAndre.”
The Arbitration Committee is a panel of Wikipedia editors whose decisions are binding. The committtee has been described in the media as “quasi-judicial” and the “Wikipedian High Court.”
Its rulings against the eight dealt with their misconduct, and not content issues. Poor behavior included personal insults and misrepresenting sources.
According to Wikipedia’s page about the Arbitration Committee, this is in line with other rulings, which generally focus on user conduct and not the content of user disputes.
The behavior of anti-Israel Wikipedia editors has been in the news lately. The Jewish Journal published an in-depth article in May titled “Seven Tactics Wikipedia Editors Used to Spread Anti-Israel Bias Since Oct. 7.”
An Oct. 24 report released by the American media company Pirate Wires found that scores of Wikipedia editors led a coordinated campaign to delegitimize Israel and present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light over recent years.
“A powerful group of about 40 editors is hijacking Wikipedia, pushing pro-Palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about Hamas, and reshaping the narrative around Israel with alarming influence,” according to the report.
The report, titled “How Wikipedia’s pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative,” said that this effort on the popular online encyclopedia only intensified after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
One of the banned editors removed mention of Hamas’s 1988 charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, from an article on the Islamic terrorist group, six weeks after the massacre.
The editors also attempted to promote the interests of the Iranian government by editing articles that documented the human rights violations of officials in the Islamic Republic, the report found.
A separate effort carried out by a group called Tech for Palestine to alter more than a hundred articles in the same vein earlier this year was halted after it was uncovered, the Pirate Wires report noted.
‘Unreliable source’
In June, Wikipedia editors targeted the Anti-Defamation League, declaring it an “unreliable source” whose data could not be relied upon when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When Wikipedia first announced disciplinary action against the Wikipedia editors, the ADL issued a press release praising the decision “in the wake of a massive effort by anti-Israel editors to spread misinformation and hate across the platform.”
ADL listed all but one of the banned anti-Israel editors. It named “Iskandar323,” “Selfstudier,” “Nableezy,” “Levivich” and “Nishidani” as “being part of a bad-faith campaign in an attempt to undermine the credibility of ADL.”
It also named another editor, Ivana, for participating in the campaign against ADL.
“In light of this, it is now imperative for Wikipedia to begin work immediately to undo the harm caused by these rogue but prolific editors who literally have wreaked havoc across the platform, causing untold harm to potentially hundreds of entries about Israel, the Oct. 7 massacre, Zionism and topics relating to antisemitism,” said ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt in the Jan. 17 statement issued after the disciplinary action but before the outright bans.
“As we have said before, Wikipedia needs to wake up to the reality that this is a systemic problem across the platform that needs immediate action. There is still a lot more that must be done to ensure that Wikipedia can live up to its policy around the encyclopedia holding a neutral point of view,” he added.
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