Wiki Wars

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP)

On Aug. 27, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched a probe into the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, to determine the role and the methods of foreign individuals in manipulating articles on the platform to influence U.S. public opinion. In the committee’s letter to the foundation’s CEO, committee Chair James Comer and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity Chair Nancy Mace requested “documents and information related to actions by Wikipedia volunteer editors” to uncover “potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles.”

I shed light on these organized efforts in an October 2024 investigative report. Specifically, I identified a network of more than three dozen editors—whom I dubbed the “Gang of 40”—who systematically pushed the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives on Wikipedia. These editors have made 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 articles related to Israel, effectively reshaping the entire topic area. Last month, the group scored its latest and perhaps most brazen victory when a Wikipedia administrator issued a final rejection to an appeal on an extraordinary 12-month freeze these editors had pushed to place on the lead section of the “Zionism” article, thus prohibiting any changes to their edits during that period.

The episode began in January 2024, when Gang of 40 editors implemented what they called a moratorium on a hotly debated sentence inserted by one of the group’s leading members in the article’s opening paragraph: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.”

That claim—which represents the Gang of 40’s underlying strategy of equating Zionism with ethnic cleansing or genocide—now caps the second sentence of the most important resource defining Zionism online, and Wikipedia has ruled that it cannot be challenged or corrected for a year.

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