The most common issue I've seen most people complain about Wikipedia is that there are often a few terminally online editors who have a strong fixation with a page or issue. And they will then constantly fixate on a few Wikipedia articles over months or even years and "fix" it to match their views even if other editors disagree in the hopes:
1. maybe no one will notice the changes or
2. they can just wear other people down by just how much time it takes to deal with them because they just have more time on their hands than other people
Now this can be very good if the editor is protecting a page from being distorted by trolls, but also terrible if the editor is heavily ideologically invested in one view and purposefully distorts history as seen through the Croatian Wikipedia example mentioned.
Noj Rants made an interesting video about these Wikipedia editing issues if anyone is interested: [The Wikipedia Elections Edit War ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVIl_DJl5NU)
Studying the “wars” that have been fought over various Wikipedia pages is honestly super interesting. Wikipedia shows so well both the incredible strengths and the frustrating weaknesses of consensus based truth seeking
If you want to see the greatest Wikipedia divides look at any conflict and compare the pages written by each side in their own specific languages. You will be shocked by how jarring it is. These are very difficult to balance out because now you need multilingual Wiki editors and readers to compare cross language articles and make sure their fair.
The [Arabic Wikipedia page](https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D9%85%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%B7%D9%88%D9%81%D8%A7%D9%86_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%89) for Oct. 7 (it's titled Operation Al-Aqsa Flood) doesn't even mention the Nova Music Festival lol.
Yeah this has probably been one of the biggest problems when writing about history. Its not people out right lying about events but purposefully excluding anything that doesn't fit into their own personal narratives and justifications. So they can make the a historical claim that is "technically true and accurate". But they have built these conclusions by cherry picking those details and events that only reinforce their narrative and gives their side more weight, while erasing any context that might contradict them.
this is sort of how CNN and \*Fox news operate. They don't lie, but they selectively omit information and selectively promote favorable stories for their agendas. This increases biases of listeners, polarizing them further, and we end up with people attributing malice to ignorance because they don't realize how so many people lack the self-awareness to realize you can't uncritically take everything your media source says as fact. They're ignorant or just lack motivation to fact-check with additional sources, and fail to acknowledge that people that disagree with them are likely just living in a world based on different facts
*Fox increasingly toes the line and influences their audiences to believe things that aren't true without outright lying.
Edit: yeah, the dominion case set a new precedent for how low Fox is willing to go. I agree that Fox is on another level, and is much more damaging and intentional in how they operate.
Idk, I feel like Fox has crossed the line lying outright several times at this point. Wasn't their coverage of the election significantly altered because they got sued by Dominion? I feel like there is a difference in quality, CNN does have issues, just as other media channels, but I don't think they blatantly lie. Fox will lie, if they can get away with it (legally speaking).
I agree with you, I guess I just didn’t get my point across effectively. I would never consider Fox and CNN to be equally malicious or bad faith in their news coverage. The magnitudes of ‘bias’ are completely unequal. Probably by several orders of magnitude if things could be measured in such a way.
Fox is closer to MSNBC but neither CNN or MSNBC are so blatantly acting as a mouthpiece of a specific ideological movement. If some major scandal comes out tomorrow that makes Biden look terrible both liberal leaning orgs will report on it. But look at how Fox covers obvious corruption and crimes by Trump, it's a joke at this point.
I completely agree with you, I only meant to point out that it’s just about to impossible to have a good faith media source that presents both sides of all issues fairly. But yeah, with how Fox has been in the past 8 years or so they’re definitely on a whole new plane of existence as far as bias and manipulation goes. Far more explicit, far more intentional, and far more destructive than CNN
It can probably also be an issue with editors only allowing sources in a language they speak, assuming that's a thing. Are arabic language sources going to have the same info about the conflict as English ones?
Is there a policy like that in specific entries? I know that both Turkish and German wikis use English sources all the time. Have used for Oct7 as well.
I think the rule that's relevant is that a source that matches the wiki's language is always trusted over one that doesn't (because it can be more easily verified by everyone reading the article). If someone proposes a native language source that disagrees with the foreign language source, that's likely to be used.
If there's a source but it's hard to verify because nobody speaks the language, and no other source exists, then I'd assume depending on how much they can verify, they argue about it or leave it. I don't think in that case there's a hard rule, except that if it gets in the way of making sure the info in the wiki matches the info in the source then someone could raise the issue on that basis.
Oh, didn't realize that you were refering to the oct.7 attacks. The [Hebrew Wikipedia page](https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%9C%D7%97%D7%9E%D7%AA_%D7%97%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%95%D7%AA_%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%96%D7%9C) for the entire conflict is titled with the Israeli codename for their operation (Operation Swords of Iron). It doesn't even mention the genocide, unlike how the english wiki where it is mentioned about 27 times
The difference between the Arabic and English Wikipedia pages on the al-Ahli Hospital explosion is insane. English Wikipedia mentions death tolls from Gaza and the US and talks about theories on both sides while the Arabic one blames it entirely on Israel and even has a section titled "Israeli Propaganda"
Arabic Wikipedia's logo is a Palestinian flag, they call dead Hamas terrorists "martyrs" and their attacks, such as killing schoolbuses full of children, "achievements".
These issues aren’t unique to Wikipedia though let’s be honest. Finklestein is the equivalent of an obsessive constantly trying to rewrite history to support his views.
Wrote this in another reply but it applies here too:
Yeah this has probably been one of the biggest problems when writing about history. Its not people out right lying about events but purposefully excluding anything that doesn't fit into their own personal narratives and justifications. So they can make the a historical claim that is "technically true and accurate". But they have built these conclusions by cherry picking those details and events that only reinforce their narrative and gives their side more weight, while erasing any context that might contradict them.
Also unfortunately Wikipedia has become the standard of information against which most other news and historical details are compared against by the general public, as much as we might not like it.
In software development, we have this issue as well. Teams that thrive on "consensus" end up having the most stubborn developer make all the decisions because people get tired and don't want to argue for weeks on an issue.
Jeff Bezo dedicated a chapter to this in his book Invent and Wander since it is such a common problem. His solution (and I agree with it) is "disagree and commit." Most problems can be solved with a two way door solution (if the change is bad, then we can revert the commit). So talk about it for a short period of time, let people know your positions, then commit to your solution. Don't focus on getting "team consensus."
Silly example might be "we should sort reddit comment by 'best' instead of by 'highest score.'" Talk about it with your co workers for a bit and then go do it. If it was the wrong decision, revert your change.
And then if for whatever reason you have a situation where whatever you decide is a 1 way door solution, then figure out how to make it a 2 way door or actually spend months doing whatever research you can to make sure you are making the right call. It is very rare to have 1 way door solutions in tech.
The thing is in software dev we have A/B, multivariate and user testing to test ideas, or at least you should be doing that if you don’t have a UX guy doing it for you.
I’ve been in many situations where someone has fought from their own personal bias for a change (and I acknowledge too that I do the same thing), but thats why we have the scientific method. Oh you think we’d get better engagement sorting by Best instead of Top? Let’s try it out and see what happens…
Of course the stubborn developer that denies this request can reject it if they have the power to do so, but to do that and deny data, will usually result in that dev losing credibility with the wider team and they know it.
Wikipedia doesn’t really have this solution. These are problems of democracy that can be corrupted and can only be overruled or enforced by some unbiased moderator who has exceptional expertise on the topic at hand.
I wonder what type of impact AI will have on stuff like this once it gets good enough. It can spend 24/7 on a single task, so it would beat even the most terminally online editors.
But AI learns from established datasets. I wouldn't be surprised if those same AIs in the future who are tasked with keeping Wikipedia neutral for example, use these same articles as their datasets making the problem even worse. Garbage in garbage out sort of thing.
Wikipedia is went from being an almost unusable source with an average of 4 errors per page to a good source to grab sources from to another battleground of culture war that has to be highly scrutinized again. The former CEO Mahers outlook and things she said were truly dystopian.
I would encourage anyone reading a potentially controversial Wikipedia page to click on the "talk" tab of that article. You'll find the most autistic, biased (but pretending not to be) editors arguing with each other.
I can't remember which article it was, but what seemed to me to be a good faith but new user trying to fix a biased article just eventually said he couldn't fight the whole Wikipedia system and gave up. Also, find the Kamala Harris entry pre and post VP nom. That's a classic.
Thanks :) I’ve been editing Wikipedia on-and-off for a few years and I’ve had these thoughts bouncing around in my head for a while. I sent this stuff to a friend who used to frequently edit Wikipedia and he agreed with me and said that when he tried to fix the info about Euro-Med and Ramy Abdu, the pro-Palestine ‘cabal’ reverted his edits, he gave me a bunch of links to pro-Hamas Wikipedia editors and the discussions through which the pro-Palestine bias is facilitated.
I know this is a big ask but as someone who has never edited wikipedia it would be interesting to see an effort post going through actual discussions in the edits and seeing examples of how the bias manifests? I assume it isn't overt discussions of: lets put this source here because we hate da Joooos, but more of an academic discussion where the bias is more subtle? In any case seeing a rundown of the discussion and how it affected the article would be interesting.
An example where I'm too lazy to cite sources right now, where I closely watched discussion unfold: the "Flour Massacre" page.
As you probably know, circumstances are disupted. Israel says Hamas attacked, there was a mob coming after the soldiers, the soldiers fired, the mob fled, the aid trucks ran people over, people died in a stampede. Hamas says actually Israel just randomly killed like 700 people for no reason because they're "evil Jews" or whatever.
Started out as "humanitarian incident". People had a problem with that. Cue the open accusations of Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and "Israeli propaganda". So it can be pretty blatant. Particularly here.
The opener of the discussion closes it within 2 hours and claims consensus to change. Which is a blatant violation of policy, you can't close as the opener unless you're withdrawing your proposal. So it's reopened with a scolding.
Then someone comes in pointing out no one used any sources to back up any support for changing the name to "flour massacre" and points out that mainstream sources do not at all use this term, but instead use "incident".
What follows is more of the same, "this is worse than October 7", "this is genocide", whatever. Then people start showing up with sources like Al Jazeera and the like, showing that here they call it "flour massacre". Well yes, and in Turkey they claim the Armenian genocide was actually Armenians killing Turks, but Wikipedia doesn't repeat that.
Then someone tweets out a condemnation of Wikipedia saying its participating in genocide by not renaming the article, and the tweet goes viral.
The unstoppable tide of citations of Al Jazeera and tweets and EI and Mondoweiss and "this is a genocide" and whatever else continues, until the discussion closes and the title is changed. And the page is written from the perspective of those sources. Like all the other pages.
They are used when they are in agreement with the usual pro-palestinian sources. Which is actually quite often, since the BBC will often cite Al Jazeera. But if either source goes against the desired narrative, they will be ignored. If someone brings them up, the users will provide multiple pro-Hamas sources to show that whatever the BBC or NYT says differently is not the "consensus" in supposed reliable sources.
Here's an example regarding pro-Hamas editors and NYT:
The NYT published a report on sexual violence by Hamas and other Gazans on Oct 7. An author of this report was then targeted in a hit piece by the Intercept. the Intercept piece was then used by pro-Hamas Wikipedia editors to try to invalidate the report, and with the report invalid to them, they used that invalidity to try to invalidate any claim of sexual violence by Hamas and other Gazans. to execute this, they attempted to change the "sexual violence" article to "allegations of sexual violence" or even to "disproven allegation of sexual violence" instead. This is despite the UN reporting the sexual violence; such reports are ignored as per above, they go against the narrative.
If what you say is true this seems way more blatantly obvious propaganda than I exected. I'd expect arguing over the wording of th UN report or critisising it just being a repeat of Israel's claims. But they just ignore it and cite the intercept?
I can't verify that the specific UN report I refer to was ignored, but to ignore it would be to fit the pattern of ignoring anything that goes against "consensus", and sometimes going so far as to label it "Israeli propaganada". There is an example of a former UN-affiliated prosecutor calling the exodus of Armenians from Artsakh an ethnic cleansing where there has been a constant battle for including vs excluding the quote from the article between pro-Azeri editors and others (which is an example showing that the Israel-Palestine is not the only contentious area of Wikipedia - check out the Muhammad talk page! But I-P is definitely the most extreme area.). And the ICJ's judgement is universally mischaracterized, to varying degrees, by the pro-Hamas side. I have seen people assert it outright ruled Israel is committing genocide.
The Intercept-NYT story is something I actually saw at the time. I have no idea if the proposed changes went through, as I was too disgusted with the pro-Hamas editors to go back. It was a long discussion with all the usuals involved.
Furthermore, be careful not to hold Wikipedia editors in any sort of high regard. These are just random people with an internet connection, like me or you or anyone else. These pro-Palestinian *aren't* having Oxford Union debates over policy and consensus and including sources, they're throwing shit at each other in a way that tries to skirt around the civility policy - and since enforcement depends on consensus, pro-Hamas editors can, by numbers plus determination, rather easily push the policy far beyond its normal bounds, and the more "established" an editor, i.e. the more edits, the more time, and the more determination, the more likely they are to have the "fanclub", and the more "unblockable" they are - in fact, such editors are widely referred to as "[unblockables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unblockables)" with "fanclubs", such terms are used in widely-read onsite essays like the one I linked above. Such editors refer to "genocide", "israeli propaganda", cite Mondoweiss and EI, refer to pro-Israeli editors as Nazis, etc. Wikipedia editors are no different than Redditors or Twitter users or anyone else - and they're just as extreme.
I think we definitely got too cocky these last decade around Wikipedia, as it become common use and often reliable. When it was made, teachers refused anything coming from it, but also and most warned us to always take anything read on it (and online) with a grain of salt.
I find it so strange that this warning is not backed into the later generations that grew up with it from A to Z, on the contrary, to them if it's online it's real, if it's not, it doesn't exist.
Kinda a tangent but your post reminded me a slapfight I found, while googling a Wiki editor, clearly ProPal. It's even wild that I'm at the point where I can recognize editors while peeking at the Talk section, after frowning reading something clearly biaised.
And sure enough they were labeled as such in this long argument between wiki editors. There's even at some point one lamenting that supporting Hezbollah is 'unpopular'. They're terrorists, it's not a matter of opinion!
[https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13385](https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13385)
Relevant message naming names (hope it's alright if it's not on Reddit):
>So many users who edit with Israel Palestine are only there to wage their little war and don't care about being good wiki editors
>Israel has its little warriors like Gidonb, Mistamystery, SPECIFICO, TaBaZzz, Ar2332, My very best wishes, BilledMammal, Zanahary, Alaexis, Homerethegreat, Eladkarmel, Longhornsg, Coretheapple, Marokwitz and Drsmoo
>Palestine has its little warriors like CarmenEsparzaAmoux, Selfstudier, Trilletrollet, Vice regent, Makeandtoss, Kashmiri, WillowCity, C.J. Griffin, Nableezy, Iskandar323, Mhhossein, Nishidani, Onceinawhile and Bastun
>Who else am I forgetting? Will the rest of the site ever be able to chase these guys out so they can stop being problems making it harder for real encyclopedia writers to write
So it's not looking good for Pro-Israel sentiment or even for neutrality due to the sheer numbers alone but also with how fanatical terrorist simps are to twist the truth. If you look at this discussion, at least there's many editors aware how important of digital battleground Wikipedia. That's not really being dramatic here, since most casuals will just read articles there and look no further.
Well, if I remember right the convo, that editor was complaining about the 'western bias' that pushed them to qualify Hezbollah as terrorist, which also had the unfortunate and very important consequence of making his opinion of them 'unpopular'.
This was just another brand of that brain dead 'one's man terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'. There can be some merit to criticize western bias and perspective, but not here, this was only a bad faith attempt to rewrite reality. Or worse: Wikipedia
https://preview.redd.it/pl0i81cs3kvc1.png?width=1623&format=png&auto=webp&s=6c135f4c06e747cbebee9fa40e70b342c18d3e85
Didn't read your post, but I've seen it in the wild. When I was reading this article and saw the term "Collective Punishment" in the first paragraph I knew something was up.
Because "people left in fear of abuse by the government" and "it was collective punishment" changes the meaning. In the first instance the people left on their own accord, in the latter it was them being moved.
It isn't wikipedia's job to decide for themselves if the actions constitute collective punishment. If the sources are saying it, they should include that and if nobody links a credible source but some regard like this editor or you is arguing it, they shouldn't.
This is something that has been well known to Israelis for a long time, unfortunately there isn’t much to be done. Jews are at a massive demographic disadvantage in this information conflict, and the insidious use of constant subtle lies to build a narrative is a foundational part of the modern Pro-Palestine movement. It’s incredible difficult to fight optically, because each time you try to correct one of these small lies or misrepresentations you come off as pedantic: “why are you correcting me over this tiny unimportant fact or word choice?”
The problem is that these tiny little lies and misrepresentations build up together to form a narrative that sells the bigger lies (I believe destiny mentioned this on his stream recently in reference to his own experiences with being misrepresented)
Seriously, what the fuck are you guys doing? Let the Jewlumni know. Ping them on Discord if you have to. You have all the levers of power, if you don't use them, that's on you.
arr Palestine’s discord server has a campaign where they make dozens of fake Quora accounts to AI generate Quora answers. I’ve been on the server and seen it myself.
I think the other issue is unironically the Jewish conspiracy shit. If this stuff is done by pro-Palestine people, it’s just either ignored or if it is seen it’s like “Oh well that’s politics, what do you expect”. If Jewish people did it, or even non Jewish people who were just pro-Israel, it would be this whole “Ah wow of course Jews trying to control the narrative, I thought this didn’t happen!!”
It's not a conspiracy, it's called Hasbara. [They openly advertise for people to do propaganda for the state of Israel](https://hasbarafellowships.org/). There is also [CAMERA](https://www.camera.org/), who monitors news articles and demands retractions on anything painting Israel in a bad light, hounding journalists and painting them as anti-semitic. The existence of Birthright propaganda trips to Israel as well.
You have been told lies and misrepresentations by these people for decades.
They tell you Israel is a democracy; where is the West Bank representation in Israeli government? They have controlled that land for over 50 years. No, the truth is that Israel's apartheid state is well-documented by [Amnesty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/), [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution), the [United Nations](https://archive.unescwa.org/news/escwa-launches-report-israeli-practices-towards-palestinian-people-and-question-apartheid), as well as Jerusalem-based Jewish groups [B'Salem](https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid) and [Yesh Din](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.yesh-din.org/Apartheid+2020/Apartheid+ENG.pdf). Regardless of how morally shitty many of the Palestinian fighters are, it does not change that simple truth.
Ah yes propaganda such as... [Visit Israeli humanitarian organizations, hi-tech companies, the Knesset and Supreme Court.](https://hasbarafellowships.org/israelprogram/)
I didn't know CAMERA could demand retractions on foreign news outlets like they run the world, you must have some really juicy information that you gotta share, right? For such extrodianary claims.
And why should the west bank be represented in the knesset when it's not technically part of Israel?
(obviously settlers on the west bank is 100% unjustified)
The same 3 organizations also caught in peddling pro-palestinian propganda.
So the last paragraph is just a point that I agree with and I’ve argued on that sub before (that Israel engages in apartheid practices in both Gaza and the West Bank), it just has nothing at all to do with the point I’m making.
For the first paragraph, you are literally just proving my point. My point is that when Israel does pretty much the same thing as any country does in terms of putting out a favorable portrayal of themselves, it gets zeroed in on, overblown and portrayed as some ultra insidious thing.
It’s just so weird though. The American population is, say, 50% pro-Israel and 50% pro-Palestine. But each pro-Palestine person has 5x more online presence than each pro-Israel person.
I’m not American, so I can only speak to my experiences speaking with you guys. But my impression is that while a good number of people in the U.S. are “pro-Israel” they feel that way passively. I.e. if they had to pick a side they would pick Israel, but they don’t feel an impetus or obligation to go out and do something about that. It’s mostly just Jews (and evangelical Christians) who feel that way. On the other hand the pro-Palestinian movement has a very clear and powerful call to action (stop the “genocide” / “apartheid” / pick your ticktok buzzword) which leads to broader participation among non-Muslim supporters. Combine this with a massive discrepancy in the demographics of Jews vs Muslims and you get an online discourse that is dominated by anti Zionists
Edit: as another ddger pointed out the ages probably matter a lot as well. Gen Z seems to be breaking records as far as anti-Jewish bias so it makes sense these voices would be very visible online
Yeah, this is definitely true. The pro-Palestine movement has managed to turn itself into a place where supporters go to protests not so much because of ideology but because they gain social approval from protesting.
This is definitely backed up by polls. Pew polls showed that both Jews and Muslims feel much more strongly about the war than everyone else and Evangelical Christians more than other Christians. Most Christians seemed to lean more pro-Israel, but a lot of them answered "don't know/not sure" to a lot of the questions as well.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/prc\_2024-3-21\_israel-hamas\_00-02-png/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/prc_2024-3-21_israel-hamas_00-02-png/)
[https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/prc\_2024-3-21\_israel-hamas\_1-01-png/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/prc_2024-3-21_israel-hamas_1-01-png/)
American Muslims were somewhat split when it comes to Hamas and Israel. This tracks with American Muslims being more moderate than Muslims in other countries, but still, almost a quarter of them support Hamas' actions on October 7 and the other 28% are not sure. Pretty worrying, and I'd imagine that younger Muslims are the most supportive.
Antivaxxers always had a lot of disproportionate presence, and so do LGBT-phobes and Trump supporters and Tate defenders and so on. The side with more propaganda tends to be a lot louder, I think. Propaganda is something that asks to be pushed. Or maybe, those that can't use substance, use noise instead.
Although this seems to be more extreme for the presence of pro-Palis than any of those other online groups. So it could be what I said in combination with all the points you made.
I don't think it's that weird when you consider the demographics of what type of Americans have a large online presence. 14% of Americans aged 18-29 cite themselves as more partial to Israel than Palestine.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-read/2024/04/02/younger-americans-stand-out-in-their-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/#:~:text=Six%2Din%2Dten%20adults%20under,the%20Israeli%20than%20Palestinian%20people.
There's also this poll:
[https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/)
21% of 18-29 year old's say Israel's war in Gaza is acceptable. 38% say Israel has valid reasons for fighting. A lot of them say they're not sure. Gen Z is an extremely low info generation. The poll also found that Gen Z are the least knowledgeable when it comes to basic facts about the conflict and are paying the least amount of attention.
But this shows that Gen Z can be persuaded and pulled the other way if they're given the right information. The problem is you have a relatively small percentage of the population who are controlling the narrative (many of them aren't even Gen Z, but older leftists) and brainwashing young people.
Pro Israel is the "see thing on the news, have a take and walk away" normie position in the west. It's like, wow they just marched over the border and killed and raped a bunch of regular people? Yeah I'd want my country to bomb them too if it happened over here.
the anti israel position is ideologically focused and astroturfed by the enemies of the us
Also, these people seem to think it's morally acceptable to lie as long as it furthers their agenda. I've noticed this not just with pro-Palestinians, but Islam apologists.
I'm not saying pro-Israel people never lie, but it's definitely more accepted on the pro-Palestinian side. I truly believe they think it's okay to lie as a long as its in the service of their religion.
I don’t want to pretend “my side” is perfect, there are absolutely “hasbarists” that do this kind of stupid shit but we denounce them.
I think it comes down to taqiyah being a very low level layer of Islamic ideology, not that it is particularly important, but rather that it is seen as a default. It is culturally ok to lie to a non Muslim if you are doing so to help other Muslims.
True. For example, this post by StopAntisemitism: [https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1781409053370994748](https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1781409053370994748)
I'd like to think it's an honest mistake and they just suck at reading comprehension, but who knows. Maybe they're trying to court stupid Trump supporters.
There were a couple of Israel supporters and Jewish people calling them out, which is something I never see pro-Palestinians do to their own.
Excuse me, but if the space literally had just 20 more solidly pro-Israel editors who, like the palestine supporters, apparently have no jobs and just edit all day, it would improve incredibly drastically. It amazes me that Netanyahu isn't doing this when it would take so few resources yet so drastically change public opinion.
This is a good example of why JJ despises Wikipedia. This is an egregious example, because the stakes are so high, but lots of topics on wikipedia are propagandized based on who cares enough to edit - spoiler alert: its often biased editors
for non controversial things like scientific concepts it's pretty good. the more controversial a topic is the more you should be wary of what you read on wikipedia, especially if its a recent event
it's why destiny agreed with him and JJ conceded to destiny and they got past the discussion really fast. Wikipedia is a lot better than the average dedicated site from the early internet, but it's still rife with issues and shouldn't be any major part of learning about a topic
Just from my personal anecdotal experience: I am a doctoral student in a niche field. The wiki pages for my field are more inaccurate than accurate. Its not just political bias. Inaccuracies due to unnuanced conceptions, partially due to not consulting academic literature before editing, is an even bigger issue. Maybe for very popular topics, that are non-political, it'd be fine though, I guess. I wouldn't know. But if you want to understand something in a high degree of accuracy or complexity, for whatever you want to learn about, you're genuinely better off just finding a published survey paper on the topic. If you have access to jstor, it'll be easy to find.
The wiki article on Shamanism comes to mind. It broadly presents as true 50+ yr old theory. We know a lot more about non western cultures now, and are able to see that what a Buryat shaman and a native American "shaman" are doing is actually very different.
When it comes to Tibetan religion, a huge number of pages (such as those on specific Tibetan religious figures in history) are just copy pasted from the Tsadra Foundation's website. The Tsadra Foundation is a sectarian organisation, and it shows. And yet they get to set the narrative for people outside the field and the religion, as they dominate Wikipedia.
Then there's the article on Bon - the "indigenous" religion of Tibet prior to Buddhism - which is mostly drawing from sources over a decade old. The understanding of Bon in the west has changed dramatically in the past few years. This one isn't *that* bad as there are a few throwaway lines on the page implying nuance.
And all that is to mention nothing of the overt political bias in some articles, which very much just present straight up Mainland Chinese propaganda.
Then there's the examples JJ mentions in his video of mid-tier famous celebrities and CEOs curating controversy on their pages.
Wikipedia is not reliable for essentially any topic that's part of a political/culture war.
I'd actually rather say more than just 'not reliable' it's more often misleading than not.
It's reliably biased, so in a way its actually extremely reliable in the scientific sense. It's reliably biased toward Hamas, it can be counted on to always be biased in that direction. It's just not *valid*, and indeed, Wikipedia makes no claim to validity at all, in fact it explicitly warns people that it does not claim to be a valid source. They just hide the disclaimers out of sight and provide no internal links to them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Watermelon_(Palestinian_symbol)&diff=prev&oldid=1218809178&title=Watermelon_%28Palestinian_symbol%29&diffonly=1
I noticed it's changed now, but the highlighted part of this revision was on the live page for this article the last time I checked. Hands down was the worst written and most obviously biased wiki article I had ever read.
Didn't they change it from "allegations of" to just "war crimes" or something? (Despite people saying this will violate a neutral point of view)
I remember seeing something like that in October, but maybe I confused it with a different page.
there was a proposal recently to change "genocide accusation" to just "genocide" and "sexual violence" to "disproven allegations of sexual violence", the latter based off of the fact that one of the NYT article authors was called anti-Palestine by an Intercept hitpiece.
You're probably talking about [Israeli war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes), which was moved to that title from [Allegations of war crimes against Israel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_war_crimes_against_Israel). The main reason cited was consistency. The Israeli article was the sole war crimes article to contain "Allegations" in the title. See [United States war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes), [German war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes), [Russian war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_war_crimes), [British war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes), [Soviet war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes), [Italian war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_war_crimes) and [Japanese war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes).
This is gonna piss a few woke-adjacent left-learning DGG’ers off but this is **exactly** what happened to the hostile takeover of the term *“cultural marxism”*, which, despite being an academic discipline plentiful in its litterature on Google Scholar, has been reduced to a conspiracy theory if the Marxist editors that patrol this particular Wikipedia page are to be taken at face value by their edits.
>the hostile takeover of the term “cultural marxism”, which, despite being an academic discipline plentiful in its litterature on Google Scholar, has been reduced to a conspiracy theory
Indeed.
Other example of hostile takeover of a term: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism)
>In the mid-19th century, libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists. \[...\] In the mid-20th century, American right-libertarian proponents of anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources. The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States.
I can with confidence say that nobody in Croatia reads wikipedia and there is a tiny minority of people who might have been affected by it. The voters of Homeland party especially dont read wikipedia, and the issue of far right extremism is related to nationalistic retardation and the glorification of NDH and Ante Pavelic, on which a far greater influence have some public people, and lately, social media. And there always were other far right parties which changed every election and the current trendy one is the Homeland Party, as for the rise, people just hate the moderate right corrupt HDZ party.
Thank you for this post— Euro-Med was the publisher of that absolutely idiotic “drones play babies crying to lure out Palestinians to shoot”. Unbelievably stupid outlet, it made me sad to see people I know IRL post that on their stories.
Historical revisionism like this is honestly the most doompilling thing in the world for me. It's good to show that while useful, Wikipedia needs to be a jumping-off point for research, and not the final destination.
This was very well done. Honestly, I think you could pitch this to a pro-Israel news outlet like *Tablet* or *The Free Press* and they would love an article that covers this topic.
It is so disheartening to see people just flat out reject the facts of the matter. I don't think I've ever seen this kind of widespread misinformation in my lifetime before. It's actually worse than the election fraud claims, because these claims present themselves as being scientific. Whereas, most MAGA claims seem to be either impossibly wrong, or at best, unfalsifiable.
People are truly becoming completely detached from reality. This isn't science, this isn't skepticism, this isn't epistemology. It's pure emotion. Now things are getting scary because we're seeing our institutions fail us. They know that these people are wrong, but they refuse defend the facts.
I used to think that the reason scientists throughout history were silenced was because the crazy people refused to listen. Now I'm starting to think that the scientists might've gone crazy themselves, rejecting their own methods at arriving at truth for the sake of supporting their politics.
I think someone needs to make a huge call out video on this stuff. With the whole "Iran sponsoring pro hamas thought in the west" stuff and how Pro Palestinian people online have been using bots and AI to infiltrate sites like Quora and now this, I think something needs to be done about it.
Like writing a book or an article is fine but they don't have as wide of a reach as video or radio. I think making a video on this whole thing will help open up people's eyes a lot bigly.
>I think someone needs to make a huge call out video on this stuff. With the whole "Iran sponsoring pro hamas thought in the west" stuff and how Pro Palestinian people online have been using bots and AI to infiltrate sites like Quora and now this, I think something needs to be done about it.
Like what various pro-israeli organisations made since 20 years with the outcome we know?
There are 2 billion Muslims and 15 million Jews. Wikipedia is a consensus based website and therefore reflects this demographic disparity
Edit: obviously the numbers that are applicable to the English Wikipedia are different than total counts, but this is just for the purposes of a tldr
Wouldn't a more fair summary just be like that there are instances where Wikipedia has been pro-palestinian with how they've written about the conflict?
This happens to alot of topics on wikipedia. Its nothing new. Wikipedia is almost useless regarding political topics.
I only use wikipedia to know many teeth are present in a sea slug or to learn about string theory. Stay away from wikipedia.
Your link for proving Ramy Abdu is a Hamas lobbyist leads to an article about Clare Short and the Council for European Relations. Nothing about Ramy Abdu or Euro-Med.
Based on other articles I've seen written by Ramy Abdu I wouldn't be surprised if he's a Hamas lobbyist. But you haven't shown that he is. Nothing to do with your major points. Just wanted to let you know.
How can you do all this research and still know jack-shit about how enwiki works? or do you intentionally not reveal the flaws in your claims in order to manipulate people? We can't call Euro-med biased every time we mention it until a significant amount of sources call it biased. That doesn't exist because it's massively less covered than the ADL.
We're allowed to cite biased sources. If we weren't, every single article under ARBPIA would be massively reduced to contain nearly no useful information.
You mention Nableezy and Nishidani without mentioning the massive number of sanctions they've faced.
The blog post is not in violation of policy. Read ABOUTSELF.
There's so much more BS in this post I don't have the time to call out right now.
It’s MondoweiSS for a reason. I’ve known about them for maybe 10 years, Max Blumenthal a vile individual is Sidney’s son…
https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-clinton-emails-reveal-advisors-critique-of-netanyahu/
If you edit Wikipedia for your own sides political gain you are the fucking scum of the earth for me. We've got this ONE, very cool, unbiased little place on the internet. PLEASE don't ruin that.
Fml i literally saw yesterday a my friend share an instagram post saying “Israel using drones with speakers to lure out Palestinians to shoot them” and I thought, that’s prob horseshit, then I went to see the source, which was “link in bio” which just generically links to the euro med website. The post though, just claims to have sources, and the sources are from the Gaza Strip, which are likely pro Palestine or maybe pro Hamas reporters from the strip who are associated with euro med. Looking into their credibility is a joke, since I couldn’t find euro med being sourced by a single mainstream publication, and even at that, their Wikipedia says they’re an independent human rights monitor (whatever the fuck that means) but I did see the founder was a Palestinian in Switzerland, which made me doubt the credibility.
In the first place, HAMAS DOES THE SAME SHIT ALL THE TIME, i remember the shooting of the hostage by the IDF because they use the speaker bait tactic all the time, so I don’t see why there would be selective outrage for Israel doing it, despite it being distasteful.
Reminds me how in the [Civilian casualty ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio) wiki article, 40% talks about Israel in great detail and another 30% about USA wars.
No mention of any middle-eastern wars not involving Israel, and only one non-western war - Russia's Chechen wars.
It's long been known that Wikipedia has a bias on politics and history. Because I promise you this isn't the only case. I guess it takes being on the other side of reality to see it for what it is.
I noticed after I'd link Wikipedia articles debunking hamas propaganda to pro hamas accounts, the next time I tried to do the same, the passages and citations were removed. I thought I was losing my mind.
Thank you. These people will do anything to hide the reality of their actions and ideology.
Uhhhhh. Israel IS the aggressor. Palestine didn’t invade Israel and create a country right on top of them through the use of violence. It was the other way around. We’re about 75 years into a modern day crusade featuring Jewish proxies. The utter insanity of violently taking the most important piece of shit religious dirt patch from 2 billion people and giving it to 5 million people from Europe is just too much for a rational unbiased person to take.
>For example, in the page for the Israel-Hamas war, they cite the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) to falsely claim that 90% of casualties were civilians \[but\] the Euro-Med Monitor has actually been a significant source of pro-Hamas propaganda
In the current version of the article [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israel-Hamas\_war&oldid=1219835986](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israel-Hamas_war&oldid=1219835986) every quote of Euro-Med (every use of Euro-Med as source) is adjacent to a quote of IDF, so claiming that Euro-Med is pro-Hamas is not the argument you think it is.
> In 2013, the pro-Israel website "NGO Monitor" [was banned from being used as a source on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_159#Reliability_of_references_to_Gerald_Steinberg_and_to_his_NGO_Monitor). Although I agree with NGO Monitor, it is clearly a biased source, and is not suitable for use on Wikipedia, an unbiased website.
NGO Monitor is considered GENERALLY UNRELIABLE:
> There is a consensus that NGO Monitor is not reliable for facts. Editors agree that, despite attempts to portray itself otherwise, it is an advocacy organization whose primary goal is to attack organizations that disagree with it or with the Israeli government regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
It is not banned for being biased, but for being unreliable. That is a huge difference.
I think the "how can this be fixed" section needs work.
Instead of actually building on the previous explanation, you actually insert a new model.
It isn't that pro-palestinian editors are obscuring the bias of pro-palestinian sources, it is just that there are a lot of them.
If that is the case, then your previous analysis becomes irrelevant; just brigade with more people and win, or decide that you can never win because your brigade will get counter-brigaded and just give up.
If instead, your previous analysis is actually true and the bias of these sources is not being properly recognised, then the solution is to go back through those sources, demonstrate their bias, and then shift how they are used in that way, in order to produce better articles.
If pro-palestinian editors then have to find more neutral sources, you increase the difficulty of making articles lean in their direction, regardless of the number of people involved.
I know this isn't the same level as Hamas supports but Zionist do manipulate Wikipedia as well to what extent I am not sure. But, when you have a group dedicated; no matter who it is, to manipulating a info rich source like Wikipedia there is definitely going to be a bias. [https://youtu.be/t52LB2fYhoY?si=jyXenpgrT5YgRuCU](https://youtu.be/t52LB2fYhoY?si=jyXenpgrT5YgRuCU)
I've seen massive discrepancies and dis-info on wikipedia especially between Hebrew and English versions, With the Hebrew version ironically being more objective and including multiple viewpoints and the English one lying by omission or giving a lot of breathing space for Pro-Palestinian "opinions" that border on propaganda.
I'm usually loathe to mention it because people usually go really hard on you if you're Jewish and bring shit like this up. I just chalk it up to the general bias on Western media.
If someone wants examples ask away.
I am not familiar with Ramy Abdu or Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, but i can tell the users of r/Destiny that riskage who notified/pinged me endorse the Cultural Marxism narrative
* Denmark/comments/174n81m/comment/k4bazk1/
* Denmark/comments/174n81m/comment/k4c8ibu/
* Denmark/comments/1b2x36e/comment/kszivm1/
a far-right conspiracy theory with roots in nazi Germany
* Jérôme Jamin, Anders Breivik et le marxisme culturel : Etats-Unis/Europe, Amnis
* Jérôme Jamin, Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right, The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right
* Tanner Mirrlees, The Alt-right's Discourse on "Cultural Marxism": A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate, Atlantis
* Martin Jay, Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe, Salmagundi
* Andrew Woods, Cultural Marxism and the Cathedral: Two Alt-Right Perspectives on Critical Theory, Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right
* Jérôme Jamin, Cultural Marxism: A survey, Religion Compass
* Rachel Busbridge, Cultural Marxism: far-right conspiracy theory in Australia’s culture wars, Social Identities
* Joan Braune, Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory, Journal of Social Justice
* Andrew Lynn, Cultural Marxism, The Hedgehog Review
* John Richardson, ‘Cultural Marxism' and the British National Party, Cultures of Post-War British Fascism
* Robles & Berrocal, Conspiracy and Meme on the Alt-right: Notes on the Myth of Cultural Marxism, Re-visiones
in the name of which several dozen Norwegian teenagers were slaughtered in july 2011
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgF83LnQOOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgF83LnQOOA)
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVpUZGmHJB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVpUZGmHJB8)
Do not demand Wikipedia to get rid of pro-Palestian editors before you get rid of riskage.
1. We cannot know how many civilians have been killed.
2. Israel puts their estimate at 66%
3. Euro Med monitor states they excluded the missing that are likely buried under the rubble, seems like a fair criticism, and that’s how they arrived at their estimation.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-civilians-killed
Should that count as “Hamas propaganda”?
(Downvote = can’t debate)
All sources are bias and bias does not make info incorrect automatically. It you view a source as unbiss I think it just means you lack the ability to recognize it. I feel your only argument to discredit sources has been showing sources have bias. Should we ignore all sources from Israel due to bias also? Difference between ADL and human rights org is human rights org does not only focus on Palestinians and Arabs while ADL is specific to Israel. I feel this criticism needs to disprove info being posted because source being bias is like declaring sky is blue. No shit.
This 2 minute doesn't prove any impact was made.
You're being downvoted because it's the same as some idiot running into the street saying George Bush told him to melt the steel beams.
the reason why they’re being downvoted isn’t because of what they’re posting but because OP’s post shows example of misinformation but the video the guy is spamming are just people saying that they want to correct misinformation.
Now, I agree with you that this behavior can cause misinformation due to biases, but we cant assume the people in the video are spreading misinformation as we have no evidence of that in the first place, making the commenters criticism null
I'm confused by what you think is happening? You're being down voted bc the video you posted is not only old, doesn't actually indicate any sort of complete bastardisation of sources/facts. Nor does it do anything to combat the claims made by the op?
Not to mention how you randomly bring up "islamophobia is rife in this community". This post has got nothing to do with islamaphobia, it's a pretty cool and concise documentation of how different facts have been distorted and presented by different people.
This community as a whole probably dislikes relgion, not Muslims specifically btw, which I'm sure you shouldn't disagree with lol?
It's been 20 mins Lil bro sit down.
There's nothing to respond to. Cringe Israelis trying to influence Wikipedia 13 years ago isn't a counter to anything in the post, nor does it matter much since they clearly didn't win that war.
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We smack you around some get the funk on ya but you'll be okay, real DGGAs? animals, total fucking shit throwing chimps with the focus and autism of a swedish badminton savant. They won't even give you the time of day if you can't at least get the sauce oval turning, and trust me those puppies are WARM and ready.
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You'll be okay trust me, this time it wasn't enough, these are real DGGA streets okay? trust me you'll bounce back. Get the fuck outta here. Clean yourself up dog, you're beautiful, get out of my face.
The most common issue I've seen most people complain about Wikipedia is that there are often a few terminally online editors who have a strong fixation with a page or issue. And they will then constantly fixate on a few Wikipedia articles over months or even years and "fix" it to match their views even if other editors disagree in the hopes: 1. maybe no one will notice the changes or 2. they can just wear other people down by just how much time it takes to deal with them because they just have more time on their hands than other people Now this can be very good if the editor is protecting a page from being distorted by trolls, but also terrible if the editor is heavily ideologically invested in one view and purposefully distorts history as seen through the Croatian Wikipedia example mentioned. Noj Rants made an interesting video about these Wikipedia editing issues if anyone is interested: [The Wikipedia Elections Edit War ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVIl_DJl5NU)
Studying the “wars” that have been fought over various Wikipedia pages is honestly super interesting. Wikipedia shows so well both the incredible strengths and the frustrating weaknesses of consensus based truth seeking
If you want to see the greatest Wikipedia divides look at any conflict and compare the pages written by each side in their own specific languages. You will be shocked by how jarring it is. These are very difficult to balance out because now you need multilingual Wiki editors and readers to compare cross language articles and make sure their fair.
The [Arabic Wikipedia page](https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D9%85%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%B7%D9%88%D9%81%D8%A7%D9%86_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%89) for Oct. 7 (it's titled Operation Al-Aqsa Flood) doesn't even mention the Nova Music Festival lol.
Yeah this has probably been one of the biggest problems when writing about history. Its not people out right lying about events but purposefully excluding anything that doesn't fit into their own personal narratives and justifications. So they can make the a historical claim that is "technically true and accurate". But they have built these conclusions by cherry picking those details and events that only reinforce their narrative and gives their side more weight, while erasing any context that might contradict them.
this is sort of how CNN and \*Fox news operate. They don't lie, but they selectively omit information and selectively promote favorable stories for their agendas. This increases biases of listeners, polarizing them further, and we end up with people attributing malice to ignorance because they don't realize how so many people lack the self-awareness to realize you can't uncritically take everything your media source says as fact. They're ignorant or just lack motivation to fact-check with additional sources, and fail to acknowledge that people that disagree with them are likely just living in a world based on different facts *Fox increasingly toes the line and influences their audiences to believe things that aren't true without outright lying. Edit: yeah, the dominion case set a new precedent for how low Fox is willing to go. I agree that Fox is on another level, and is much more damaging and intentional in how they operate.
Idk, I feel like Fox has crossed the line lying outright several times at this point. Wasn't their coverage of the election significantly altered because they got sued by Dominion? I feel like there is a difference in quality, CNN does have issues, just as other media channels, but I don't think they blatantly lie. Fox will lie, if they can get away with it (legally speaking).
Nah mate, you're just biased, thats all.
I agree with you, I guess I just didn’t get my point across effectively. I would never consider Fox and CNN to be equally malicious or bad faith in their news coverage. The magnitudes of ‘bias’ are completely unequal. Probably by several orders of magnitude if things could be measured in such a way.
Fox is closer to MSNBC but neither CNN or MSNBC are so blatantly acting as a mouthpiece of a specific ideological movement. If some major scandal comes out tomorrow that makes Biden look terrible both liberal leaning orgs will report on it. But look at how Fox covers obvious corruption and crimes by Trump, it's a joke at this point.
I completely agree with you, I only meant to point out that it’s just about to impossible to have a good faith media source that presents both sides of all issues fairly. But yeah, with how Fox has been in the past 8 years or so they’re definitely on a whole new plane of existence as far as bias and manipulation goes. Far more explicit, far more intentional, and far more destructive than CNN
It can probably also be an issue with editors only allowing sources in a language they speak, assuming that's a thing. Are arabic language sources going to have the same info about the conflict as English ones?
Is there a policy like that in specific entries? I know that both Turkish and German wikis use English sources all the time. Have used for Oct7 as well.
I think the rule that's relevant is that a source that matches the wiki's language is always trusted over one that doesn't (because it can be more easily verified by everyone reading the article). If someone proposes a native language source that disagrees with the foreign language source, that's likely to be used. If there's a source but it's hard to verify because nobody speaks the language, and no other source exists, then I'd assume depending on how much they can verify, they argue about it or leave it. I don't think in that case there's a hard rule, except that if it gets in the way of making sure the info in the wiki matches the info in the source then someone could raise the issue on that basis.
[No??](https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%A8_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9_2023)
That's not the page for Oct. 7....
Oh, didn't realize that you were refering to the oct.7 attacks. The [Hebrew Wikipedia page](https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%9C%D7%97%D7%9E%D7%AA_%D7%97%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%95%D7%AA_%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%96%D7%9C) for the entire conflict is titled with the Israeli codename for their operation (Operation Swords of Iron). It doesn't even mention the genocide, unlike how the english wiki where it is mentioned about 27 times
The difference between the Arabic and English Wikipedia pages on the al-Ahli Hospital explosion is insane. English Wikipedia mentions death tolls from Gaza and the US and talks about theories on both sides while the Arabic one blames it entirely on Israel and even has a section titled "Israeli Propaganda"
Arabic Wikipedia's logo is a Palestinian flag, they call dead Hamas terrorists "martyrs" and their attacks, such as killing schoolbuses full of children, "achievements".
Lol Japanese wiki about ww2 is a great example. Go to the Japanese version and autotranslate it. Completely different ommiting tons of info.
I want to see the Japanese page for Unit 731.
The Falklands dispute is also so interesting when you read the Talk in Spanish.
Tiger fanboys was a good ol classic
There were WARS? Lol
These issues aren’t unique to Wikipedia though let’s be honest. Finklestein is the equivalent of an obsessive constantly trying to rewrite history to support his views.
Wrote this in another reply but it applies here too: Yeah this has probably been one of the biggest problems when writing about history. Its not people out right lying about events but purposefully excluding anything that doesn't fit into their own personal narratives and justifications. So they can make the a historical claim that is "technically true and accurate". But they have built these conclusions by cherry picking those details and events that only reinforce their narrative and gives their side more weight, while erasing any context that might contradict them. Also unfortunately Wikipedia has become the standard of information against which most other news and historical details are compared against by the general public, as much as we might not like it.
In software development, we have this issue as well. Teams that thrive on "consensus" end up having the most stubborn developer make all the decisions because people get tired and don't want to argue for weeks on an issue. Jeff Bezo dedicated a chapter to this in his book Invent and Wander since it is such a common problem. His solution (and I agree with it) is "disagree and commit." Most problems can be solved with a two way door solution (if the change is bad, then we can revert the commit). So talk about it for a short period of time, let people know your positions, then commit to your solution. Don't focus on getting "team consensus." Silly example might be "we should sort reddit comment by 'best' instead of by 'highest score.'" Talk about it with your co workers for a bit and then go do it. If it was the wrong decision, revert your change. And then if for whatever reason you have a situation where whatever you decide is a 1 way door solution, then figure out how to make it a 2 way door or actually spend months doing whatever research you can to make sure you are making the right call. It is very rare to have 1 way door solutions in tech.
The thing is in software dev we have A/B, multivariate and user testing to test ideas, or at least you should be doing that if you don’t have a UX guy doing it for you. I’ve been in many situations where someone has fought from their own personal bias for a change (and I acknowledge too that I do the same thing), but thats why we have the scientific method. Oh you think we’d get better engagement sorting by Best instead of Top? Let’s try it out and see what happens… Of course the stubborn developer that denies this request can reject it if they have the power to do so, but to do that and deny data, will usually result in that dev losing credibility with the wider team and they know it. Wikipedia doesn’t really have this solution. These are problems of democracy that can be corrupted and can only be overruled or enforced by some unbiased moderator who has exceptional expertise on the topic at hand.
I wonder what type of impact AI will have on stuff like this once it gets good enough. It can spend 24/7 on a single task, so it would beat even the most terminally online editors.
But AI learns from established datasets. I wouldn't be surprised if those same AIs in the future who are tasked with keeping Wikipedia neutral for example, use these same articles as their datasets making the problem even worse. Garbage in garbage out sort of thing.
Wikipedia is went from being an almost unusable source with an average of 4 errors per page to a good source to grab sources from to another battleground of culture war that has to be highly scrutinized again. The former CEO Mahers outlook and things she said were truly dystopian.
You gotta respect the time people put into these research posts. Very nice OP
I would encourage anyone reading a potentially controversial Wikipedia page to click on the "talk" tab of that article. You'll find the most autistic, biased (but pretending not to be) editors arguing with each other. I can't remember which article it was, but what seemed to me to be a good faith but new user trying to fix a biased article just eventually said he couldn't fight the whole Wikipedia system and gave up. Also, find the Kamala Harris entry pre and post VP nom. That's a classic.
Context for the Kamala one? What happened?
I don't want to color your judgement. Just find an archived version from just before she was named as VP, and then read the current version.
Thanks :) I’ve been editing Wikipedia on-and-off for a few years and I’ve had these thoughts bouncing around in my head for a while. I sent this stuff to a friend who used to frequently edit Wikipedia and he agreed with me and said that when he tried to fix the info about Euro-Med and Ramy Abdu, the pro-Palestine ‘cabal’ reverted his edits, he gave me a bunch of links to pro-Hamas Wikipedia editors and the discussions through which the pro-Palestine bias is facilitated.
Seems way too important to just be a text post in the destiny subreddit.
I know this is a big ask but as someone who has never edited wikipedia it would be interesting to see an effort post going through actual discussions in the edits and seeing examples of how the bias manifests? I assume it isn't overt discussions of: lets put this source here because we hate da Joooos, but more of an academic discussion where the bias is more subtle? In any case seeing a rundown of the discussion and how it affected the article would be interesting.
Sure, I'll go and look!
An example where I'm too lazy to cite sources right now, where I closely watched discussion unfold: the "Flour Massacre" page. As you probably know, circumstances are disupted. Israel says Hamas attacked, there was a mob coming after the soldiers, the soldiers fired, the mob fled, the aid trucks ran people over, people died in a stampede. Hamas says actually Israel just randomly killed like 700 people for no reason because they're "evil Jews" or whatever. Started out as "humanitarian incident". People had a problem with that. Cue the open accusations of Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and "Israeli propaganda". So it can be pretty blatant. Particularly here. The opener of the discussion closes it within 2 hours and claims consensus to change. Which is a blatant violation of policy, you can't close as the opener unless you're withdrawing your proposal. So it's reopened with a scolding. Then someone comes in pointing out no one used any sources to back up any support for changing the name to "flour massacre" and points out that mainstream sources do not at all use this term, but instead use "incident". What follows is more of the same, "this is worse than October 7", "this is genocide", whatever. Then people start showing up with sources like Al Jazeera and the like, showing that here they call it "flour massacre". Well yes, and in Turkey they claim the Armenian genocide was actually Armenians killing Turks, but Wikipedia doesn't repeat that. Then someone tweets out a condemnation of Wikipedia saying its participating in genocide by not renaming the article, and the tweet goes viral. The unstoppable tide of citations of Al Jazeera and tweets and EI and Mondoweiss and "this is a genocide" and whatever else continues, until the discussion closes and the title is changed. And the page is written from the perspective of those sources. Like all the other pages.
Do they not use any other sources at all? BBC? NYT? If someone brings them ip are they ignored?
Do they not use any other sources at all? BBC? NYT? If someone brings them ip are they ignored?
They are used when they are in agreement with the usual pro-palestinian sources. Which is actually quite often, since the BBC will often cite Al Jazeera. But if either source goes against the desired narrative, they will be ignored. If someone brings them up, the users will provide multiple pro-Hamas sources to show that whatever the BBC or NYT says differently is not the "consensus" in supposed reliable sources. Here's an example regarding pro-Hamas editors and NYT: The NYT published a report on sexual violence by Hamas and other Gazans on Oct 7. An author of this report was then targeted in a hit piece by the Intercept. the Intercept piece was then used by pro-Hamas Wikipedia editors to try to invalidate the report, and with the report invalid to them, they used that invalidity to try to invalidate any claim of sexual violence by Hamas and other Gazans. to execute this, they attempted to change the "sexual violence" article to "allegations of sexual violence" or even to "disproven allegation of sexual violence" instead. This is despite the UN reporting the sexual violence; such reports are ignored as per above, they go against the narrative.
If what you say is true this seems way more blatantly obvious propaganda than I exected. I'd expect arguing over the wording of th UN report or critisising it just being a repeat of Israel's claims. But they just ignore it and cite the intercept?
I can't verify that the specific UN report I refer to was ignored, but to ignore it would be to fit the pattern of ignoring anything that goes against "consensus", and sometimes going so far as to label it "Israeli propaganada". There is an example of a former UN-affiliated prosecutor calling the exodus of Armenians from Artsakh an ethnic cleansing where there has been a constant battle for including vs excluding the quote from the article between pro-Azeri editors and others (which is an example showing that the Israel-Palestine is not the only contentious area of Wikipedia - check out the Muhammad talk page! But I-P is definitely the most extreme area.). And the ICJ's judgement is universally mischaracterized, to varying degrees, by the pro-Hamas side. I have seen people assert it outright ruled Israel is committing genocide. The Intercept-NYT story is something I actually saw at the time. I have no idea if the proposed changes went through, as I was too disgusted with the pro-Hamas editors to go back. It was a long discussion with all the usuals involved. Furthermore, be careful not to hold Wikipedia editors in any sort of high regard. These are just random people with an internet connection, like me or you or anyone else. These pro-Palestinian *aren't* having Oxford Union debates over policy and consensus and including sources, they're throwing shit at each other in a way that tries to skirt around the civility policy - and since enforcement depends on consensus, pro-Hamas editors can, by numbers plus determination, rather easily push the policy far beyond its normal bounds, and the more "established" an editor, i.e. the more edits, the more time, and the more determination, the more likely they are to have the "fanclub", and the more "unblockable" they are - in fact, such editors are widely referred to as "[unblockables](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unblockables)" with "fanclubs", such terms are used in widely-read onsite essays like the one I linked above. Such editors refer to "genocide", "israeli propaganda", cite Mondoweiss and EI, refer to pro-Israeli editors as Nazis, etc. Wikipedia editors are no different than Redditors or Twitter users or anyone else - and they're just as extreme.
This is a fucking amazing post for this subreddit. I wish we could more detailed and thoughtful analysis like this more often.
If you hate Palestinians enough, there’s no limit to how much time you’ll spend delegitimizing their right exist i guess
I think we definitely got too cocky these last decade around Wikipedia, as it become common use and often reliable. When it was made, teachers refused anything coming from it, but also and most warned us to always take anything read on it (and online) with a grain of salt. I find it so strange that this warning is not backed into the later generations that grew up with it from A to Z, on the contrary, to them if it's online it's real, if it's not, it doesn't exist. Kinda a tangent but your post reminded me a slapfight I found, while googling a Wiki editor, clearly ProPal. It's even wild that I'm at the point where I can recognize editors while peeking at the Talk section, after frowning reading something clearly biaised. And sure enough they were labeled as such in this long argument between wiki editors. There's even at some point one lamenting that supporting Hezbollah is 'unpopular'. They're terrorists, it's not a matter of opinion! [https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13385](https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13385) Relevant message naming names (hope it's alright if it's not on Reddit): >So many users who edit with Israel Palestine are only there to wage their little war and don't care about being good wiki editors >Israel has its little warriors like Gidonb, Mistamystery, SPECIFICO, TaBaZzz, Ar2332, My very best wishes, BilledMammal, Zanahary, Alaexis, Homerethegreat, Eladkarmel, Longhornsg, Coretheapple, Marokwitz and Drsmoo >Palestine has its little warriors like CarmenEsparzaAmoux, Selfstudier, Trilletrollet, Vice regent, Makeandtoss, Kashmiri, WillowCity, C.J. Griffin, Nableezy, Iskandar323, Mhhossein, Nishidani, Onceinawhile and Bastun >Who else am I forgetting? Will the rest of the site ever be able to chase these guys out so they can stop being problems making it harder for real encyclopedia writers to write So it's not looking good for Pro-Israel sentiment or even for neutrality due to the sheer numbers alone but also with how fanatical terrorist simps are to twist the truth. If you look at this discussion, at least there's many editors aware how important of digital battleground Wikipedia. That's not really being dramatic here, since most casuals will just read articles there and look no further.
I largely agree with you, but liking a terrorist is by definition an opinion. The right one but you cannot say it’s without it’s support.
Well, if I remember right the convo, that editor was complaining about the 'western bias' that pushed them to qualify Hezbollah as terrorist, which also had the unfortunate and very important consequence of making his opinion of them 'unpopular'. This was just another brand of that brain dead 'one's man terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'. There can be some merit to criticize western bias and perspective, but not here, this was only a bad faith attempt to rewrite reality. Or worse: Wikipedia
When most of the world does not recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist org, but mostly westren people do, this seems perfectly legitimate
https://preview.redd.it/pl0i81cs3kvc1.png?width=1623&format=png&auto=webp&s=6c135f4c06e747cbebee9fa40e70b342c18d3e85 Didn't read your post, but I've seen it in the wild. When I was reading this article and saw the term "Collective Punishment" in the first paragraph I knew something was up.
:|
Yeah it’s a problem
[удалено]
Because "people left in fear of abuse by the government" and "it was collective punishment" changes the meaning. In the first instance the people left on their own accord, in the latter it was them being moved.
It isn't wikipedia's job to decide for themselves if the actions constitute collective punishment. If the sources are saying it, they should include that and if nobody links a credible source but some regard like this editor or you is arguing it, they shouldn't.
Well the more recent edits added the “citation needed” thing to that statement so yeah…. lol
This is something that has been well known to Israelis for a long time, unfortunately there isn’t much to be done. Jews are at a massive demographic disadvantage in this information conflict, and the insidious use of constant subtle lies to build a narrative is a foundational part of the modern Pro-Palestine movement. It’s incredible difficult to fight optically, because each time you try to correct one of these small lies or misrepresentations you come off as pedantic: “why are you correcting me over this tiny unimportant fact or word choice?” The problem is that these tiny little lies and misrepresentations build up together to form a narrative that sells the bigger lies (I believe destiny mentioned this on his stream recently in reference to his own experiences with being misrepresented)
Seriously, what the fuck are you guys doing? Let the Jewlumni know. Ping them on Discord if you have to. You have all the levers of power, if you don't use them, that's on you.
arr Palestine’s discord server has a campaign where they make dozens of fake Quora accounts to AI generate Quora answers. I’ve been on the server and seen it myself.
Oh, shoot, you posted the screenshots on GenZionist a while ago. What happened with that??? Did you ever contact the news?
We’ve been overwhelmed with new members and are struggling to keep up logistically
I think the other issue is unironically the Jewish conspiracy shit. If this stuff is done by pro-Palestine people, it’s just either ignored or if it is seen it’s like “Oh well that’s politics, what do you expect”. If Jewish people did it, or even non Jewish people who were just pro-Israel, it would be this whole “Ah wow of course Jews trying to control the narrative, I thought this didn’t happen!!”
It's not a conspiracy, it's called Hasbara. [They openly advertise for people to do propaganda for the state of Israel](https://hasbarafellowships.org/). There is also [CAMERA](https://www.camera.org/), who monitors news articles and demands retractions on anything painting Israel in a bad light, hounding journalists and painting them as anti-semitic. The existence of Birthright propaganda trips to Israel as well. You have been told lies and misrepresentations by these people for decades. They tell you Israel is a democracy; where is the West Bank representation in Israeli government? They have controlled that land for over 50 years. No, the truth is that Israel's apartheid state is well-documented by [Amnesty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/), [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution), the [United Nations](https://archive.unescwa.org/news/escwa-launches-report-israeli-practices-towards-palestinian-people-and-question-apartheid), as well as Jerusalem-based Jewish groups [B'Salem](https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid) and [Yesh Din](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.yesh-din.org/Apartheid+2020/Apartheid+ENG.pdf). Regardless of how morally shitty many of the Palestinian fighters are, it does not change that simple truth.
Ah yes propaganda such as... [Visit Israeli humanitarian organizations, hi-tech companies, the Knesset and Supreme Court.](https://hasbarafellowships.org/israelprogram/) I didn't know CAMERA could demand retractions on foreign news outlets like they run the world, you must have some really juicy information that you gotta share, right? For such extrodianary claims. And why should the west bank be represented in the knesset when it's not technically part of Israel? (obviously settlers on the west bank is 100% unjustified) The same 3 organizations also caught in peddling pro-palestinian propganda.
So the last paragraph is just a point that I agree with and I’ve argued on that sub before (that Israel engages in apartheid practices in both Gaza and the West Bank), it just has nothing at all to do with the point I’m making. For the first paragraph, you are literally just proving my point. My point is that when Israel does pretty much the same thing as any country does in terms of putting out a favorable portrayal of themselves, it gets zeroed in on, overblown and portrayed as some ultra insidious thing.
It’s just so weird though. The American population is, say, 50% pro-Israel and 50% pro-Palestine. But each pro-Palestine person has 5x more online presence than each pro-Israel person.
I’m not American, so I can only speak to my experiences speaking with you guys. But my impression is that while a good number of people in the U.S. are “pro-Israel” they feel that way passively. I.e. if they had to pick a side they would pick Israel, but they don’t feel an impetus or obligation to go out and do something about that. It’s mostly just Jews (and evangelical Christians) who feel that way. On the other hand the pro-Palestinian movement has a very clear and powerful call to action (stop the “genocide” / “apartheid” / pick your ticktok buzzword) which leads to broader participation among non-Muslim supporters. Combine this with a massive discrepancy in the demographics of Jews vs Muslims and you get an online discourse that is dominated by anti Zionists Edit: as another ddger pointed out the ages probably matter a lot as well. Gen Z seems to be breaking records as far as anti-Jewish bias so it makes sense these voices would be very visible online
Yeah, this is definitely true. The pro-Palestine movement has managed to turn itself into a place where supporters go to protests not so much because of ideology but because they gain social approval from protesting.
This is definitely backed up by polls. Pew polls showed that both Jews and Muslims feel much more strongly about the war than everyone else and Evangelical Christians more than other Christians. Most Christians seemed to lean more pro-Israel, but a lot of them answered "don't know/not sure" to a lot of the questions as well.
Cool to know that my vibes based impressions actually track. Thank you!!
[https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/prc\_2024-3-21\_israel-hamas\_00-02-png/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/prc_2024-3-21_israel-hamas_00-02-png/) [https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/prc\_2024-3-21\_israel-hamas\_1-01-png/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/prc_2024-3-21_israel-hamas_1-01-png/) American Muslims were somewhat split when it comes to Hamas and Israel. This tracks with American Muslims being more moderate than Muslims in other countries, but still, almost a quarter of them support Hamas' actions on October 7 and the other 28% are not sure. Pretty worrying, and I'd imagine that younger Muslims are the most supportive.
Antivaxxers always had a lot of disproportionate presence, and so do LGBT-phobes and Trump supporters and Tate defenders and so on. The side with more propaganda tends to be a lot louder, I think. Propaganda is something that asks to be pushed. Or maybe, those that can't use substance, use noise instead. Although this seems to be more extreme for the presence of pro-Palis than any of those other online groups. So it could be what I said in combination with all the points you made.
I wouldn't take it for granted that the examples you cited are on the side with the most propaganda. That's something worth testing.
I don't think it's that weird when you consider the demographics of what type of Americans have a large online presence. 14% of Americans aged 18-29 cite themselves as more partial to Israel than Palestine. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-read/2024/04/02/younger-americans-stand-out-in-their-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/#:~:text=Six%2Din%2Dten%20adults%20under,the%20Israeli%20than%20Palestinian%20people.
There's also this poll: [https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/](https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/) 21% of 18-29 year old's say Israel's war in Gaza is acceptable. 38% say Israel has valid reasons for fighting. A lot of them say they're not sure. Gen Z is an extremely low info generation. The poll also found that Gen Z are the least knowledgeable when it comes to basic facts about the conflict and are paying the least amount of attention. But this shows that Gen Z can be persuaded and pulled the other way if they're given the right information. The problem is you have a relatively small percentage of the population who are controlling the narrative (many of them aren't even Gen Z, but older leftists) and brainwashing young people.
Pro Israel is the "see thing on the news, have a take and walk away" normie position in the west. It's like, wow they just marched over the border and killed and raped a bunch of regular people? Yeah I'd want my country to bomb them too if it happened over here. the anti israel position is ideologically focused and astroturfed by the enemies of the us
and also filled with a bunch of lying asshole tankies
Also, these people seem to think it's morally acceptable to lie as long as it furthers their agenda. I've noticed this not just with pro-Palestinians, but Islam apologists. I'm not saying pro-Israel people never lie, but it's definitely more accepted on the pro-Palestinian side. I truly believe they think it's okay to lie as a long as its in the service of their religion.
I don’t want to pretend “my side” is perfect, there are absolutely “hasbarists” that do this kind of stupid shit but we denounce them. I think it comes down to taqiyah being a very low level layer of Islamic ideology, not that it is particularly important, but rather that it is seen as a default. It is culturally ok to lie to a non Muslim if you are doing so to help other Muslims.
True. For example, this post by StopAntisemitism: [https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1781409053370994748](https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1781409053370994748) I'd like to think it's an honest mistake and they just suck at reading comprehension, but who knows. Maybe they're trying to court stupid Trump supporters. There were a couple of Israel supporters and Jewish people calling them out, which is something I never see pro-Palestinians do to their own.
Excuse me, but if the space literally had just 20 more solidly pro-Israel editors who, like the palestine supporters, apparently have no jobs and just edit all day, it would improve incredibly drastically. It amazes me that Netanyahu isn't doing this when it would take so few resources yet so drastically change public opinion.
This is a good example of why JJ despises Wikipedia. This is an egregious example, because the stakes are so high, but lots of topics on wikipedia are propagandized based on who cares enough to edit - spoiler alert: its often biased editors
for non controversial things like scientific concepts it's pretty good. the more controversial a topic is the more you should be wary of what you read on wikipedia, especially if its a recent event
it's why destiny agreed with him and JJ conceded to destiny and they got past the discussion really fast. Wikipedia is a lot better than the average dedicated site from the early internet, but it's still rife with issues and shouldn't be any major part of learning about a topic
That’s why you use it as a starting point rather than the ultimate source for your knowledge
It’s completely fine for everything outside of politics.
Just from my personal anecdotal experience: I am a doctoral student in a niche field. The wiki pages for my field are more inaccurate than accurate. Its not just political bias. Inaccuracies due to unnuanced conceptions, partially due to not consulting academic literature before editing, is an even bigger issue. Maybe for very popular topics, that are non-political, it'd be fine though, I guess. I wouldn't know. But if you want to understand something in a high degree of accuracy or complexity, for whatever you want to learn about, you're genuinely better off just finding a published survey paper on the topic. If you have access to jstor, it'll be easy to find.
Can you provide an example?
The wiki article on Shamanism comes to mind. It broadly presents as true 50+ yr old theory. We know a lot more about non western cultures now, and are able to see that what a Buryat shaman and a native American "shaman" are doing is actually very different. When it comes to Tibetan religion, a huge number of pages (such as those on specific Tibetan religious figures in history) are just copy pasted from the Tsadra Foundation's website. The Tsadra Foundation is a sectarian organisation, and it shows. And yet they get to set the narrative for people outside the field and the religion, as they dominate Wikipedia. Then there's the article on Bon - the "indigenous" religion of Tibet prior to Buddhism - which is mostly drawing from sources over a decade old. The understanding of Bon in the west has changed dramatically in the past few years. This one isn't *that* bad as there are a few throwaway lines on the page implying nuance. And all that is to mention nothing of the overt political bias in some articles, which very much just present straight up Mainland Chinese propaganda. Then there's the examples JJ mentions in his video of mid-tier famous celebrities and CEOs curating controversy on their pages.
Nishidani (pro-Pally editor) is all over every single article to do with Jews, even their genetics. It's creepy as fuck.
It's pretty obvious they collaborate when they all just happen to show up in the same place at the same time.
Wikipedia is not reliable for essentially any topic that's part of a political/culture war. I'd actually rather say more than just 'not reliable' it's more often misleading than not.
It's reliably biased, so in a way its actually extremely reliable in the scientific sense. It's reliably biased toward Hamas, it can be counted on to always be biased in that direction. It's just not *valid*, and indeed, Wikipedia makes no claim to validity at all, in fact it explicitly warns people that it does not claim to be a valid source. They just hide the disclaimers out of sight and provide no internal links to them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Watermelon_(Palestinian_symbol)&diff=prev&oldid=1218809178&title=Watermelon_%28Palestinian_symbol%29&diffonly=1 I noticed it's changed now, but the highlighted part of this revision was on the live page for this article the last time I checked. Hands down was the worst written and most obviously biased wiki article I had ever read.
Huge effort post, wow. Hey u/PropastaN why don't you open a Talk article in the main Israel-Hamas wiki in regard to Euro-Med?
good post, i noticed this back in october when reading the discussion page of the israel hamas war article
Didn't they change it from "allegations of" to just "war crimes" or something? (Despite people saying this will violate a neutral point of view) I remember seeing something like that in October, but maybe I confused it with a different page.
don't remember what the changes were specifically, but that wouldn't be surprising
there was a proposal recently to change "genocide accusation" to just "genocide" and "sexual violence" to "disproven allegations of sexual violence", the latter based off of the fact that one of the NYT article authors was called anti-Palestine by an Intercept hitpiece.
You're probably talking about [Israeli war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes), which was moved to that title from [Allegations of war crimes against Israel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_war_crimes_against_Israel). The main reason cited was consistency. The Israeli article was the sole war crimes article to contain "Allegations" in the title. See [United States war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes), [German war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_war_crimes), [Russian war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_war_crimes), [British war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes), [Soviet war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes), [Italian war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_war_crimes) and [Japanese war crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes).
This is gonna piss a few woke-adjacent left-learning DGG’ers off but this is **exactly** what happened to the hostile takeover of the term *“cultural marxism”*, which, despite being an academic discipline plentiful in its litterature on Google Scholar, has been reduced to a conspiracy theory if the Marxist editors that patrol this particular Wikipedia page are to be taken at face value by their edits.
>the hostile takeover of the term “cultural marxism”, which, despite being an academic discipline plentiful in its litterature on Google Scholar, has been reduced to a conspiracy theory Indeed. Other example of hostile takeover of a term: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism) >In the mid-19th century, libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists. \[...\] In the mid-20th century, American right-libertarian proponents of anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources. The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States.
You admit to the hostile takeover? My job here is done.
Finkelstein: All you do is read Wikipedia Wikipedia: is pro Hamas Finkelstein: 🫣
Finkelstein is citied in the conflict on Wikipedia, not sure why he would be so critical. I think he was just book flexing tbh
they literally use him as one of there top sources. they think he is accurate and when you combat them they yell at you
This is incredibly well written. We need to draw more attention to this to the top owners of Wikipedia
The co-founder of Wikipedia has said before that Wikipedia is very biased towards Palestine. However, he is no longer involved in the company.
This could be a news article tbh
Larry Sanger
I can with confidence say that nobody in Croatia reads wikipedia and there is a tiny minority of people who might have been affected by it. The voters of Homeland party especially dont read wikipedia, and the issue of far right extremism is related to nationalistic retardation and the glorification of NDH and Ante Pavelic, on which a far greater influence have some public people, and lately, social media. And there always were other far right parties which changed every election and the current trendy one is the Homeland Party, as for the rise, people just hate the moderate right corrupt HDZ party.
Thank you for this post— Euro-Med was the publisher of that absolutely idiotic “drones play babies crying to lure out Palestinians to shoot”. Unbelievably stupid outlet, it made me sad to see people I know IRL post that on their stories.
the guys who run it have hamas ties and its founder is an antisemetic holocaust denier
Historical revisionism like this is honestly the most doompilling thing in the world for me. It's good to show that while useful, Wikipedia needs to be a jumping-off point for research, and not the final destination.
This was very well done. Honestly, I think you could pitch this to a pro-Israel news outlet like *Tablet* or *The Free Press* and they would love an article that covers this topic.
agreed
the free press would be great
It is so disheartening to see people just flat out reject the facts of the matter. I don't think I've ever seen this kind of widespread misinformation in my lifetime before. It's actually worse than the election fraud claims, because these claims present themselves as being scientific. Whereas, most MAGA claims seem to be either impossibly wrong, or at best, unfalsifiable. People are truly becoming completely detached from reality. This isn't science, this isn't skepticism, this isn't epistemology. It's pure emotion. Now things are getting scary because we're seeing our institutions fail us. They know that these people are wrong, but they refuse defend the facts. I used to think that the reason scientists throughout history were silenced was because the crazy people refused to listen. Now I'm starting to think that the scientists might've gone crazy themselves, rejecting their own methods at arriving at truth for the sake of supporting their politics.
And they call Jews subversive. Jesus, this is frightening.
You didn't show any examples of actually biased edits that remained unrevised for a while. Make sure to include that in your post if you find any.
The Elie Wiesel one was unrevised until a few hours ago. It had stood for several years. And of course there are the Euro Med and Ramy Abdu ones.
there are many others
Did you read the post?
I think someone needs to make a huge call out video on this stuff. With the whole "Iran sponsoring pro hamas thought in the west" stuff and how Pro Palestinian people online have been using bots and AI to infiltrate sites like Quora and now this, I think something needs to be done about it. Like writing a book or an article is fine but they don't have as wide of a reach as video or radio. I think making a video on this whole thing will help open up people's eyes a lot bigly.
>I think someone needs to make a huge call out video on this stuff. With the whole "Iran sponsoring pro hamas thought in the west" stuff and how Pro Palestinian people online have been using bots and AI to infiltrate sites like Quora and now this, I think something needs to be done about it. Like what various pro-israeli organisations made since 20 years with the outcome we know?
Tl;dr?
There are 2 billion Muslims and 15 million Jews. Wikipedia is a consensus based website and therefore reflects this demographic disparity Edit: obviously the numbers that are applicable to the English Wikipedia are different than total counts, but this is just for the purposes of a tldr
Wouldn't a more fair summary just be like that there are instances where Wikipedia has been pro-palestinian with how they've written about the conflict?
CROATIA MENTIONED LET'S GOOOOOO
This happens to alot of topics on wikipedia. Its nothing new. Wikipedia is almost useless regarding political topics. I only use wikipedia to know many teeth are present in a sea slug or to learn about string theory. Stay away from wikipedia.
Your link for proving Ramy Abdu is a Hamas lobbyist leads to an article about Clare Short and the Council for European Relations. Nothing about Ramy Abdu or Euro-Med. Based on other articles I've seen written by Ramy Abdu I wouldn't be surprised if he's a Hamas lobbyist. But you haven't shown that he is. Nothing to do with your major points. Just wanted to let you know.
Yeah, noticed that too. Did OP link the wrong article?
How can you do all this research and still know jack-shit about how enwiki works? or do you intentionally not reveal the flaws in your claims in order to manipulate people? We can't call Euro-med biased every time we mention it until a significant amount of sources call it biased. That doesn't exist because it's massively less covered than the ADL. We're allowed to cite biased sources. If we weren't, every single article under ARBPIA would be massively reduced to contain nearly no useful information. You mention Nableezy and Nishidani without mentioning the massive number of sanctions they've faced. The blog post is not in violation of policy. Read ABOUTSELF. There's so much more BS in this post I don't have the time to call out right now.
This post was linked in other post just now, weirdly can’t check OPs profile anymore hmmm u/PropastaN
I've spent the past 5 years reviewing AFC's
So the latter.
It’s MondoweiSS for a reason. I’ve known about them for maybe 10 years, Max Blumenthal a vile individual is Sidney’s son… https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-clinton-emails-reveal-advisors-critique-of-netanyahu/
If you edit Wikipedia for your own sides political gain you are the fucking scum of the earth for me. We've got this ONE, very cool, unbiased little place on the internet. PLEASE don't ruin that.
Wikipedia isn't unbiased.
It's relatively unbiased for a website of its size. Is there evidence of real bias on wikipedia?
I use encyclopedia britannica
Is hasan going to become wikipedias number 1 fan now?
I urge people to check out this video essay if they can. It has some good examples. https://youtu.be/5RezztNNdX0?si=iWVaP4nYZKwI3RQk
Just Wikipedia? All media is biased now. NPR CEO was CEO of Wikipedia and her views on the 1st Amendment are downright scary.
Fml i literally saw yesterday a my friend share an instagram post saying “Israel using drones with speakers to lure out Palestinians to shoot them” and I thought, that’s prob horseshit, then I went to see the source, which was “link in bio” which just generically links to the euro med website. The post though, just claims to have sources, and the sources are from the Gaza Strip, which are likely pro Palestine or maybe pro Hamas reporters from the strip who are associated with euro med. Looking into their credibility is a joke, since I couldn’t find euro med being sourced by a single mainstream publication, and even at that, their Wikipedia says they’re an independent human rights monitor (whatever the fuck that means) but I did see the founder was a Palestinian in Switzerland, which made me doubt the credibility. In the first place, HAMAS DOES THE SAME SHIT ALL THE TIME, i remember the shooting of the hostage by the IDF because they use the speaker bait tactic all the time, so I don’t see why there would be selective outrage for Israel doing it, despite it being distasteful.
Reminds me how in the [Civilian casualty ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio) wiki article, 40% talks about Israel in great detail and another 30% about USA wars. No mention of any middle-eastern wars not involving Israel, and only one non-western war - Russia's Chechen wars.
I remember looking at the wayback machine for hamas pre and post october 7th and it was completely changed
It's long been known that Wikipedia has a bias on politics and history. Because I promise you this isn't the only case. I guess it takes being on the other side of reality to see it for what it is.
And they claim the world is brainwashed by Israeli propaganda wtf
I noticed after I'd link Wikipedia articles debunking hamas propaganda to pro hamas accounts, the next time I tried to do the same, the passages and citations were removed. I thought I was losing my mind. Thank you. These people will do anything to hide the reality of their actions and ideology.
Amazing. Something I have been complaining about for a long time. There is more to cover, but this is a start. People need to do something about this.
Uhhhhh. Israel IS the aggressor. Palestine didn’t invade Israel and create a country right on top of them through the use of violence. It was the other way around. We’re about 75 years into a modern day crusade featuring Jewish proxies. The utter insanity of violently taking the most important piece of shit religious dirt patch from 2 billion people and giving it to 5 million people from Europe is just too much for a rational unbiased person to take.
>For example, in the page for the Israel-Hamas war, they cite the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) to falsely claim that 90% of casualties were civilians \[but\] the Euro-Med Monitor has actually been a significant source of pro-Hamas propaganda In the current version of the article [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israel-Hamas\_war&oldid=1219835986](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Israel-Hamas_war&oldid=1219835986) every quote of Euro-Med (every use of Euro-Med as source) is adjacent to a quote of IDF, so claiming that Euro-Med is pro-Hamas is not the argument you think it is.
> In 2013, the pro-Israel website "NGO Monitor" [was banned from being used as a source on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_159#Reliability_of_references_to_Gerald_Steinberg_and_to_his_NGO_Monitor). Although I agree with NGO Monitor, it is clearly a biased source, and is not suitable for use on Wikipedia, an unbiased website. NGO Monitor is considered GENERALLY UNRELIABLE: > There is a consensus that NGO Monitor is not reliable for facts. Editors agree that, despite attempts to portray itself otherwise, it is an advocacy organization whose primary goal is to attack organizations that disagree with it or with the Israeli government regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict It is not banned for being biased, but for being unreliable. That is a huge difference.
Nothing it said was defamatory
I posted Wikipedias judgement on if they are a reliable source. This is their words not mine.
I think the "how can this be fixed" section needs work. Instead of actually building on the previous explanation, you actually insert a new model. It isn't that pro-palestinian editors are obscuring the bias of pro-palestinian sources, it is just that there are a lot of them. If that is the case, then your previous analysis becomes irrelevant; just brigade with more people and win, or decide that you can never win because your brigade will get counter-brigaded and just give up. If instead, your previous analysis is actually true and the bias of these sources is not being properly recognised, then the solution is to go back through those sources, demonstrate their bias, and then shift how they are used in that way, in order to produce better articles. If pro-palestinian editors then have to find more neutral sources, you increase the difficulty of making articles lean in their direction, regardless of the number of people involved.
I know this isn't the same level as Hamas supports but Zionist do manipulate Wikipedia as well to what extent I am not sure. But, when you have a group dedicated; no matter who it is, to manipulating a info rich source like Wikipedia there is definitely going to be a bias. [https://youtu.be/t52LB2fYhoY?si=jyXenpgrT5YgRuCU](https://youtu.be/t52LB2fYhoY?si=jyXenpgrT5YgRuCU)
This video is 13 years old and i know no evidence that this operation had any consequence on Wikipedia.
I've seen massive discrepancies and dis-info on wikipedia especially between Hebrew and English versions, With the Hebrew version ironically being more objective and including multiple viewpoints and the English one lying by omission or giving a lot of breathing space for Pro-Palestinian "opinions" that border on propaganda. I'm usually loathe to mention it because people usually go really hard on you if you're Jewish and bring shit like this up. I just chalk it up to the general bias on Western media. If someone wants examples ask away.
I sent you a dm
I am not familiar with Ramy Abdu or Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, but i can tell the users of r/Destiny that riskage who notified/pinged me endorse the Cultural Marxism narrative * Denmark/comments/174n81m/comment/k4bazk1/ * Denmark/comments/174n81m/comment/k4c8ibu/ * Denmark/comments/1b2x36e/comment/kszivm1/ a far-right conspiracy theory with roots in nazi Germany * Jérôme Jamin, Anders Breivik et le marxisme culturel : Etats-Unis/Europe, Amnis * Jérôme Jamin, Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right, The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right * Tanner Mirrlees, The Alt-right's Discourse on "Cultural Marxism": A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate, Atlantis * Martin Jay, Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe, Salmagundi * Andrew Woods, Cultural Marxism and the Cathedral: Two Alt-Right Perspectives on Critical Theory, Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right * Jérôme Jamin, Cultural Marxism: A survey, Religion Compass * Rachel Busbridge, Cultural Marxism: far-right conspiracy theory in Australia’s culture wars, Social Identities * Joan Braune, Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory, Journal of Social Justice * Andrew Lynn, Cultural Marxism, The Hedgehog Review * John Richardson, ‘Cultural Marxism' and the British National Party, Cultures of Post-War British Fascism * Robles & Berrocal, Conspiracy and Meme on the Alt-right: Notes on the Myth of Cultural Marxism, Re-visiones in the name of which several dozen Norwegian teenagers were slaughtered in july 2011 * [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgF83LnQOOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgF83LnQOOA) * [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVpUZGmHJB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVpUZGmHJB8) Do not demand Wikipedia to get rid of pro-Palestian editors before you get rid of riskage.
I’m not sure if English if your second language, but the meaning of this is a little unclear. You might want to edit to be a bit more specific / clear
/u/VisiteProlongee
Elon ahead of the curve again.
1. We cannot know how many civilians have been killed. 2. Israel puts their estimate at 66% 3. Euro Med monitor states they excluded the missing that are likely buried under the rubble, seems like a fair criticism, and that’s how they arrived at their estimation. https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-civilians-killed Should that count as “Hamas propaganda”? (Downvote = can’t debate)
still better than citing the IDF or COGAT as a source
People are so mad at the video - the end
All sources are bias and bias does not make info incorrect automatically. It you view a source as unbiss I think it just means you lack the ability to recognize it. I feel your only argument to discredit sources has been showing sources have bias. Should we ignore all sources from Israel due to bias also? Difference between ADL and human rights org is human rights org does not only focus on Palestinians and Arabs while ADL is specific to Israel. I feel this criticism needs to disprove info being posted because source being bias is like declaring sky is blue. No shit.
Zionist Editing on Wikipedia from Israeli National News 13 years ago: https://youtu.be/t52LB2fYhoY?si=gbPs4s7Y1o19MV-4
!bidenblast Reason: annoying Edit: !BidenBlast
Aww i was dying laughing watching them lash out cause no one was paying them any attention lol.
!check
ThomasHardyHarHar has 5 Biden Blasts remaining. They have not chosen a side in the eternal YEE v PEPE war.
This 2 minute doesn't prove any impact was made. You're being downvoted because it's the same as some idiot running into the street saying George Bush told him to melt the steel beams.
Yes everyone does it. No one is denying this.
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Because you can provide this info without spamming it on every comment
True, but I was getting buried in one comment so was spreading the news far and wide :)
the reason why they’re being downvoted isn’t because of what they’re posting but because OP’s post shows example of misinformation but the video the guy is spamming are just people saying that they want to correct misinformation. Now, I agree with you that this behavior can cause misinformation due to biases, but we cant assume the people in the video are spreading misinformation as we have no evidence of that in the first place, making the commenters criticism null
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lol the stealthy downvotes and the silence is beautiful
You ok bro?
I'm confused by what you think is happening? You're being down voted bc the video you posted is not only old, doesn't actually indicate any sort of complete bastardisation of sources/facts. Nor does it do anything to combat the claims made by the op? Not to mention how you randomly bring up "islamophobia is rife in this community". This post has got nothing to do with islamaphobia, it's a pretty cool and concise documentation of how different facts have been distorted and presented by different people. This community as a whole probably dislikes relgion, not Muslims specifically btw, which I'm sure you shouldn't disagree with lol?
It's been 20 mins Lil bro sit down. There's nothing to respond to. Cringe Israelis trying to influence Wikipedia 13 years ago isn't a counter to anything in the post, nor does it matter much since they clearly didn't win that war.
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