Wikipedia, one of the internet’s most viewed websites, includes the “Gaza genocide” but not Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks or mass killings of Christians in Nigeria, on a page listing genocides, which, per its statistics, has drawn 62,700 views in the past 30 days.
JNS asked Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism and Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, about the page.
“I have pretty much lost faith in Wikipedia as anything resembling a neutral source,” she told JNS.
Wikipedia is “on my list of untrustworthy sources,” Lipstadt told JNS. “It is pretty close to, but not yet identical with, the BBC.”
The scholar said that she did not use Wikipedia as a diplomat and “would have frowned on anyone citing it.”
“Generally, we had much better sources of information,” she said.
Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said the killings in Nigeria are “not random violence” but amount to “genocide, wearing the mask of chaos.”
There have been recent suggestions on Wikipedia to include Oct. 7 and the Nigerian attacks on the genocide page, but editors declined quickly, saying there was a need for multiple scholarly sources classifying them as such.
The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is probing Wikipedia over, in part, concerns of “potentially systematic efforts” to insert antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda into various Israel-related articles.
