Wikipedia’s “Gaza genocide” entry fails to meet the website’s standards and is an example of how neutrality needs to be improved, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Sunday in a statement on the discussion page for the disputed entry.
Wales said he was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, when he urged editors to focus on impartiality in their work on the entry.
“This article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention,” the online crowdsourced encyclopedia’s founder stated in a media interview about it.
“As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV (neutral point of view) working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas, including ‘Zionism,’” he continued.
“While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do,” wrote Wales. “I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this ‘Gaza genocide’ article. At present, the lead and the overall presentation state – in Wikipedia’s voice – that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” Wales said.
For starters, Wales said, the lead-in sentence had to be corrected because it was in violation of a neutral point of view and attribution policies.
While the controversial article begins with “the Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war,” Wales suggested that a more neutral approach would be to write that “multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.”
Wales called for editors to begin making “concrete improvements immediately,” avoid personalizing disagreements, focus on using “significant, high-quality sources from all sides,” and not to declare an unattributed legal conclusion in Wikipedia’s voice.
Wikipedia editors say Wales submits to 'political pressure'
Wikipedia editors debated Wales’ statement in the article’s discussion page, with one user asserting that the founder had submitted to “political pressure” to ask editors to “betray scholarship.”
Wales rejected the allegation, insisting that outside pressure was “irrelevant.”
“The neutrality of this article is disputed, and there are very good reasons for that – it inappropriately, and contrary to our policy and traditions, takes sides in an ongoing controversy when it ought to accurately and fairly summarize all relevant views,” Wales responded. “That’s true no matter what.”
Amid the debate, Wales agreed with one editor’s proposal for Wikipedia standards and a working definition to determine when an event should be described as a genocide in an article.
The “Gaza genocide” entry has been barred from editing until Tuesday, limiting who can work on it until disputes are resolved.
According to Jewish News Syndicate journalist Aaron Bandler, who has written about Wikipedia bias extensively, the “Gaza genocide article” was one of the most viewed sites on the internet since it was created last July.
Bandler wrote in JNS on October 1 that on September 21, attribution was lifted in order to change the allegation of genocide to a stated “fact,” and a day later, the entry was moved into the In the News section of Wikipedia’s homepage.
On Monday, the “Gaza genocide” article was still on the Wikipedia homepage’s In the News section. Notably, a discussion began on Friday about removing the event from ongoing matters, given the October 10 ceasefire that has taken root.