Wikipedia has removed two pages written by the brother of a slain hostage, saying it “doesn’t write entries about soldiers.”
Dan Sherman, the brother of Sgt. Ron Sherman, 19, took to Facebook on Monday to write about his battle to feature the pages on Hebrew-language Wikipedia. Ron Sherman was serving as a coordination and liaison soldier in COGAT on the Gaza border when he was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7.
He was killed in captivity, and his body was recovered from Gaza by the IDF in December 2023. He is survived by his parents, Alexander and Maayan, and his siblings, Dan and Eden.
Sherman explained that, a year and a half ago, he created a Wikipedia entry for Ron, thinking it would be “a meaningful way to commemorate him.”
“I wrote the entire article with zero prior knowledge [of writing Wikipedia pages], hours upon hours of work, for several days, from morning to night. But I was excited, because I knew that Ron would finally have his own page after everything he went through. And rightly so.”
However, the day after the page went live, it disappeared.
'We don’t write entries about soldiers'
When Sherman reached out to the editors at Wikipedia, he was told, "We cannot discriminate between one person’s blood and another’s,” and “We don’t write entries about soldiers.”
In his Facebook post, Sherman pointed out that this is not true, given there are many Wikipedia pages about soldiers who were kidnapped or killed, not least Tamir Nimrodi, who was abducted alongside Ron.
Following the deletion of his first page, Sherman spent many more hours writing a new entry named “The kidnapping of the three soldiers from the Gaza outpost,” which he was told by Wikipedia would be accepted. The entry was to include details about Ron, Nimrodi, and Nik Beizer.
However, again, within minutes, the article disappeared “as if it never existed.”
The explanation Sherman received was that “October 7 was a large-scale event, not a private one. Some people won’t get a page written about them, and it wouldn’t be fair to them.”
“Ron Sherman, a soldier who was featured on every news channel around the world, whose photo people held up in rallies across countries, is not being allowed a Wikipedia page, unlike other soldiers and victims of October 7 who did receive one,” lamented his brother.
“People need to know his story. He could have been any one of us. Wikipedia’s position contradicts my values – and my country’s values. I refuse to give up on this – for Ron. It hurts,” he wrote.
The Jerusalem Post reached out to Wikipedia for comment.