Wikipedia is Pushing Disinformation About Israel and Jews
“All of these critiques are assertions not of fact but of leftist dogma, designed to create the impression that left-wing antisemitism does not—indeed, could not—exist.”
Wikipedia’s bias is well known but this is just disgusting.
From Tablet Mag:
Wikipedia’s Jewish Problem
In June, a group of Wikipedia editors and administrators rated the Anti-Defamation League as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “roughly reliable” on antisemitism “when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.” They also evaluated the ADL’s database of hate symbols, deeming it as “reliable for the existence of a symbol and for straightforward facts about it, but not reliable for more complex details, such as symbols’ history.”
The anonymous editors, with unknown backgrounds or academic credentials, accused the ADL of “conflating” anti-Zionism with antisemitism and relying on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which, they claimed, brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic and stifles pro-Palestinian speech. They also accused the ADL of “smearing” Students for Justice in Palestine by calling on universities to investigate whether the group provided material support to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
All of these critiques are assertions not of fact but of leftist dogma, designed to create the impression that left-wing antisemitism does not—indeed, could not—exist.
“Wikipedia’s leadership are clowns,” tweeted Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, in response. Sanger had earlier declared Wikipedia’s neutrality—on all issues—effectively dead. But the general public has yet to catch up. With 6.6 billion visits in June, Wikipedia ranked the fifth-most-visited site worldwide, outranked only by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. For many students and scholars, it serves as a starting point for research—a source of sources to be investigated further.
Closer to home, what’s clear is that Wikipedia’s articles are now badly distorted, feeding billions of people—and large-language models that regularly train on the site, such as ChatGPT—with inaccurate research and dangerously skewed narratives about Jews, Jewish history, Israel, Zionism, and contemporary threats to Jewish lives.
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Comments
Anything that can possibly be politicized will be at Wikipedia.
Wiki has never been reliable as a sole source of anything
Wikipedia has never claimed to be reliable as a sole source, and has always said that it’s only as good as the sources it quotes. At least on non-political topics it’s generally more reliable than any other encyclopaedia, but no encyclopaedia is reliable as a sole source. That’s not what they’re for. They’re tertiary sources, and their function is to point you to secondary sources that you can look up yourself.
If you see something wrong there, you can fix it yourself. And if you see something weird, check the edit history — some clown may just have put it there five minutes ago, or a few months ago on a little-trafficked page, and nobody noticed to fix it.
That’s the theory. The reality is that anyone who tries to correct even the most blatant lies about Israel or Jews will find themselves blocked and banned.
I had a medical student vociferously defend Wikipedia as a “juried” (I don’t think he really knew what the term meant!) and peer-reviewed site that I shouldn’t reject as “not being authoritative enough” to support the answer he provided me when I questioned him during rotations on drug question. I told him it would have been easier to just consult the pharmacist—they are the drug information experts. But Wikipedia? The “peers” are just other people who probably don’t have any qualifications and are reading crap from bad sources. SMH….
Wikipedia is heavily skewed to the left, just like CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, The Wa Post, and the NY Times. It can be useful as long as you remember the bias. But many people think that it’s unbiased, and that is where a lot of misinformation begins.
I used to do editing for Wikipedia, because I think it’s a good idea. But when it was taken over by woke administrators, it was time for me to stop wasting my time.
Wikipedia claims to be neutral, but assert that the only reliable sources are things like WaPo, NYT etc whilst rejecting any non-Left news source as biased and unreliable. Thus their standard of neutral reliable material is in fact a facade for Leftist approved material.
On subjects where the Left doesn’t hold a view, or the Left’s view isn’t so problematic as to fully taint what’s presented, the pages can be reliable.
The problem isn’t that the admins reject so many right-wing sources as unreliable — they’re usually correct to do so. The problem is that they give too much credence to the sources that they like, and imagine that those sources are any more reliable than the ones they reject. It would be nice to think so, but experience shows that it isn’t so.
I had one fight with WP admins many years ago, over a “fact” cited in a published book, that I knew to be false because I asked the person cited in the book, who told me that he never said it. On that basis I deleted the quote, and was reverted because a book from a proper publishing house is automatically regarded as a reliable source, since publishing houses “of course” have editors and fact-checkers, whereas going to the horse’s mouth himself is original research, and thus not valid for WP. I even had the source sign up for a WP account and delete the quote himself, saying “I never said that”, and they reverted him too, because the book said he said it.
Poor Doc Daneeka!
I’m sure Sanger understands now that he should never found another organization whose skinsuit is not made of Kevlar from day one. But if people are going to learn this lesson only after the fact, one may as well not even point out the lesson.