Iranian regime leaders have long said “death to Israel” publicly, and Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, told the United Nations Security Council this week that the Islamic Republic’s avowed goal is to “annihilate the State of Israel.” Iranian terror proxies, including Hamas, call for Israel’s destruction in their charters.
But that isn’t enough for some editors at Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site globally in May, who are attempting to delete an article titled “Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy.”
The article, which was created on June 4 and has garnered about 42,000 views in the past 30 days, states that Iran’s “foreign policy doctrine includes calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state” and that “the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy has remained consistent across both hardline and moderate Iranian leaderships.”
Max Abrahms, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University who studies terrorism and the Middle East, told JNS that “Wikipedia is waging a disinformation campaign against Israel.”
If the page is deleted, or if it is merged into a larger article, “Israel will be less popular, the Islamic Republic will be more popular and readers will be stupider,” he said.
A Jewish Wikipedia editor, who has worked on many Israel-related pages on the site, told JNS that it is “interesting” that some editors are trying to delete the article, given that the subject is in the news.
That’s something that editors are supposed to avoid, the source told JNS. “We’re supposed to be somewhat insulated from the news,” added the editor, who declined to be named.
Wikipedia operates by a process it refers to as “consensus,” whereby disputed changes to pages are hashed out in what is supposed to be a civil fashion on the page’s “talk” section, per reporting in the Jewish Journal. Editors weigh in for or against the change and lay out their arguments, and then a “closer,” who was uninvolved in the topic, is called in to make a determination.
The online encyclopedia says that a “poll,” which it says is not a “vote,” is to be used as one of several factors in the closer’s decision, and that “polling is not a substitute for discussion.” It adds that “the strength of argument is also very important.”
The editor of the blog Wikipedia Flood, which documents “Wikipedia’s anti-Israel bias,” told JNS that 80% of the time when Wikipedia editors are evaluating changes to pages, like the one about Iran, it’s “a numbers game” that is subject to “the whims” of whoever “decides to close the discussion.”
“The whole thing is totally arbitrary,” the editor, who declined to be named, told JNS.
Some Wikipedia editors suggested that the page be rolled into a larger page, in a process known as a “merge.” The Jewish Wikipedia editor told JNS that such a move could be “a back-door way of deleting it, because then it can become lost in the noise of that other article.”
The editors, who argue that the page ought to be deleted or merged, say that it represents what Wikipedia calls a “content fork,” or a “point of view fork,” which the encyclopedia defines as something “that has the same scope as another piece of content that predated it, essentially covering the same topic.”
The Jewish editor told JNS that Wikipedia isn’t supposed to have the same material in separate articles. “You’re supposed to just incorporate the two views in the main article,” the source said. “If you’re going deep on a specific subtopic, that’s not a ‘fork’ necessarily.”
The argument that the page on Iranian policy to destroy Israel is a “fork” is being deployed “somewhat selectively,” because there are “so many articles that go deep on one specific topic” that aren’t viewed as a fork, the Jewish editor told JNS.
In the page in question, a “ton of sources” that go “back many, many years that discuss the phenomenon within the article,” the Jewish editor said. “It shouldn’t be that hard to defend its existence as an independent article.”
The editor of Wikipedia Flood told JNS that the effort to axe the page “is emblematic of the hypocrisy and double-standards that you see on these talk pages.”
“When pro-Israel pages like this are created, they are attacked and frequently deleted,” the source said. “If they’re anti-Israel, they are not in danger.”
The Jewish editor thinks the discussion is “pretty split” and the article ought to survive the deletion attempt. But the editor is concerned that the “closer” will rule that the arguments aren’t strong enough to keep it as a stand-alone page and that it will merge.
“It seems to be happening with some similar articles lately,” the Jewish editor told JNS.
If the article “gets folded in and framed in a way where they’re trying to minimize it and soft pedal it, then they’re trying to minimize the larger threat,” Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East historian and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told JNS.
“The naysayers and those who are trying to argue that American isolationism needs to be the foreign policy and that every American foreign policy is derivative of Israel, that will do damage to Israel as far as the public policy war,” Romirowsky said.