Wikipedia OK to hate ‘outrageous, not surprising’

Wikipedia deems the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor to be “generally unreliable” sources to cite when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, but it finds that an organization with a documented history of antisemitism, including lauding the Oct. 7 terror attacks, “can be cited as an opinion source” on Israel and the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor — whose founder and chairman praised the Oct. 7 attacks and which has accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs — is on Wikipedia list of “reliable” and “perennial” sources, described as appearing “to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources.”

The group has been cited 95 times on Wikipedia, leading to “the perpetuation of misinformation, disinformation and blood libels,” said Daniel Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International. “If you are the one writing and editing these entries, and you are a fellow traveler in the anti-Israel realm, you can be an ultimate arbiter of ‘truth,’ trumpeting the big lie, where there is zero accountability.”

NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg, who notes Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor’s links to Hamas, said the Wikipedia standard “is outrageous, but not surprising.”

“Wikipedia’s decision-making process, especially on highly disputed arenas like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, amplifies prevailing ideological biases and agendas,” he said.

Richard Falk, chair of Euro-Med Monitor, is a “conspiracy theorist known for publicly supporting terrorist attacks on civilians and producing a ceaseless stream of false justifications for theocratic fascists and nihilistic killers — provided, of course, their bombs detonate in the general direction of Washington or Jerusalem,” according to Vladislav Khaykin, executive vice president of social impact and North American partnerships at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Falk’s “moral equivalencies between liberal democracies and violent authoritarians romanticizes reactionary violence simply because it opposes Western power,” Khaykin said.

David May, research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that Euro-Med Monitor “is part of a decades-long campaign by Palestinian terrorists to infiltrate the human rights space.”

“Wikipedia’s acceptance of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is another victory for terrorist-tied organizations, but it’s also another sign of the demise of Wikipedia,” May said. “Editors at the collaborative encyclopedia have launched a coordinated campaign to spread an anti-Israel narrative [and] poison people against the Jewish state and its supporters, the Jews.”

Wikipedia determines whether a source is “reliable” via a process it calls “consensus,” in which editors discuss the source and in some instances, a poll is taken of the editors. A “closer,” or a Wikipedian who is uninvolved in the topic, then renders a verdict based on the vote and the strength of the arguments.

The “closer” on Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor ruled on June 22 that the consensus of editors was that the organization was “marginally reliable,” meaning that it can be used in certain contexts.

While Wikipedia sees Euro-Med Monitor as a source that can be cited for its opinion, it deems the ADL — which was cited extensively in the Biden administration’s national strategy on combating antisemitism — “generally unreliable,” which means it “should normally not be used,” on Israel and the Palestinians, and NGO Monitor “generally unreliable” on all subjects.

“There were a couple of instances where EuroMed was basically laundering propaganda and mixing facts with opinions and things that weren’t factual,” a Jewish Wikipedia editor, who has worked on many Israel-related pages on the site and who declined to be named, told JNS. The editor therefore said that Wikipedia should view the group as “generally unreliable” rather than “marginally reliable.”

The editor of the Wikipedia Flood blog, which documents what it calls anti-Israel bias on the encyclopedia, told JNS anonymously that the “marginally reliable” rating for Euro-Med Monitor means that anti-Israel editors on the site can use it to further perpetuate messages that are “tediously and monolithically anti-Israel.”

Khaykin, of the Wiesenthal Center, said it is “digital malpractice” to consider the ADL unreliable with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He called for Wikipedia to “stop giving a platform to those who justify murder under the guise of human rights.”

Shany Mor, a lecturer in political theory at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and a researcher at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, said that Wikipedia’s sourcing decisions represent “a downstream effect of the capture of academia by anti-Israel forces, something that was already more or less complete by the early 1980s.”

“It will take decades of work to reverse that,” he told JNS.