How Wikipedia is warping the world’s view of Israel

That all changed a sometime later when a list of editors, whose usernames had repeatedly appeared in anti-Israeli editing for years, was revealed. Examining the list, I found that some of these editors were behind the decision that editing subjects related to the conflict would be restricted to users with at least 500 edits and 30 days of registered activity. Others were involved in the community decision to approve Al Jazeera as a reliable source and proclaim that Fox News and the Anti-Defamation League were not.

Most prominently, they were very involved in the framing of articles and their content. On the page for “Hamas”, for example, you’ll see a list of ideologies associated with the terror group, such as “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”. It also used to include “antisemitism,” — but that was deleted in January 2024. According to the editors, there weren’t enough scholarly sources to list antisemitism as a “central ideological tenet” of Hamas; they claimed the terror group revised its charter in 2017 to state that their problem was with Zionists rather than Jews. This, despite the fact that the charter implies the destruction of Israel through its use of phrases like "from the river to the sea," which suggests a vision of a Palestinian state encompassing all of Israel and the fact that there are plenty of reliable sources by known scholars, such as Bruce Hoffman, that assert that the charter highlights the organisation's longstanding commitment to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state governed by Sharia law.

Elsewhere, the name of the page “Israel Hamas War,” which covered the ongoing war, was changed to “Gaza War,” effectively downplaying Hamas's central role and obscuring its direct involvement in the violence. This politically motivated alteration shifts the focus away from the key actors, minimising the recognition of Hamas's actions and reframing the war in neutral geographical terms. This is not new. A similar reframing occurred before with the renaming of the “Israeli Independence War” to the “1948 Palestine War,” presenting a one-sided perspective that aligns with the Palestinian narrative while forsaking Wikipedia’s cornerstone of neutrality. To further entrench this framing, two additional pages titled “1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine” and “1948 Arab–Israeli War” contribute to fragmented and misleading historical representations.

Even more disturbingly, it gradually became clear that these edits weren’t being carried out by random actors. Following the patterns of this users' engagement on the platform, it is evident that many of them maintain work habits that mirrored standard office hours, from 9am to 5pm, or engaging in consistent eight-to nine-hour shifts, suggesting a level of organisation uncommon amongst typical volunteers. They are also in the habit of giving each other “Barnstars” — Wikipedia’s tokens of appreciation and a way to gain social capital on the platform.

But who were they? Given Wikipedia’s commitment to anonymity, it’s tricky to tell. Yet, it is possible to guess their ideological persuasions by looking at their user pages. For example, based on the flags on his user page, it might seem that user called “Nableezy”, who recently received an indefinite topic ban from editing the Israeli-Palestinian, is fond of Egypt and Chicago. Nableezy, who was also previously banned for a short time after making an antisemitic “joke”, states on his page that he supports “the right of all individuals and groups to violently resist military aggression and occupation by other parties”.

Elsewhere, the page of an activist user called “Selfstudier” also expresses support for Palestine, while at the same time taking pride in having edited the pages of every Israeli prime minister. The page of “Iskandar323”, meanwhile, reveals a user urging him to stop editing biblical pages, in response to this user’s habit to delete Jewish biblical history, in pages such as “Hezekiah”, “Ezra” and “Solomon’s Temple”, which he claims to be “predominantly the preserve of biblical myth, with little evidence lending itself to the study of the topic as anything more tangible or historical”.

It is impossible to know if these and similar editors are supported by Qatar, Iran or Hamas. But it is known that some of these bodies are openly involved in the Wikimedia Foundation. For example, in 2011, the Gulf Times reported that the Qatar Computing Research Institute, part of Qatar Foundation, had partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation to expand and improve Arabic content on Wikipedia. It is also known that the Qatar Foundation has donated more than $100,000 in support of Wikipedia — and that the page for the Qatar Foundation was edited by a PR associate of the Foundation.

None of this, of course, is a smoking gun — but it is a red flag and suggests that, when studying the campaign against Israel on Wikipedia, focusing on individual users can only get us so far. To better understand this coordinated effort, we could do worse than revisit the Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum. Written in 1991 and attributed to Mohammed Akram, a senior Hamas leader and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s executive committee in North America, the document lays out a clear strategy for infiltrating and subverting Western societies. Crucially, it calls for the “destruction and elimination of Western civilisation from within”, achieved through non-violent means, primarily by shaping public opinion and manipulating cultural narratives.

Through this lens, the calculated takeover of Wikipedia appears to be part of a long-term strategy. And it’s not confined to English Wikipedia. In January, French journalist Nora Bussigny revealed the existence of a pro-Palestinian group that trained editors to shape Wikipedia narratives by learning the “value” of strategic framing, selective sourcing, and coordinated editorial efforts. Yet while other Wikipedia editions face similar challenges — Arabic Wikipedia is particularly known for its bias — the issue is most severe on English Wikipedia. This is largely due to the site's immense reach, with approximately one billion visits per month.

Given it’s popularity and the importance of Wikipedia as a source, how will this online war end? Well, having spent years studying the mechanisms that power Wikipedia, I can say that the short answer is not by itself. As public sphere scholar Jürgen Habermas has noted, the freedom to participate in discussion demands some preliminary rules. To put it simply, this public sphere cannot be considered reliable without legislative action, enhanced transparency in Wikipedia’s editorial processes, and stronger oversight to ensure impartiality. Public attention is an essential component as well, as we already saw a brief and unsatisfactory glimpse of how awareness can contribute to moving the community to action in January, when eight editors — six of them “pro-Palestinian” — were warned and banned from the topic area by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee.

But they were only the tip of the iceberg. Just as with Hamas’s fighters, there are plenty more activist-editors waiting to replace them. If we want to keep Wikipedia reliable and neutral, the only way is to reverse their edits, enforce the mandatory disclosure of editor identities on sensitive topics, and implement AI and expert monitoring to uphold neutrality.

Without these measures, Wikipedia risks becoming a modern version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir is a fellow researcher at the University of Haifa. She specialises the politics of knowledge, gender, and technology.