It takes Wikipedia nearly 7,500 words into its main entry on China to mention the word “genocide,” tucked in a section on “sociopolitical issues and human rights,” and even then, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia hedges.
“Since 2017, the Chinese government has been engaged in a harsh crackdown in Xinjiang, with around one million Uyghurs and other ethnic and religion minorities being detained in internment camps aimed at changing the political thinking of detainees, their identities and their religious beliefs, in what some described as a genocide or crimes against humanity,” Wikipedia states.
As of Dec. 11, Wikipedia states as a matter of fact, just some 425 words into its main page on Israel, that “following the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
Prior to Dec. 11, the Wikipedia entry had stated that there were “accusations that it has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The crowdsourced encyclopedia is reportedly one of the main sources upon which artificial intelligence “feeds.”
Deborah Lipstadt, former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism and professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, recently told JNS that she had “pretty much lost faith in Wikipedia as anything resembling a neutral source” and that it was “pretty close to, but not yet identical with, the BBC.”
JNS asked her about the new change to the main “Israel” page.
Lipstadt said her views on Wikipedia may have changed “a little” since she last discussed it with JNS. “I said Wikipedia was almost as bad as the BBC,” she said. “Maybe I’d leave out the ‘almost’ this time.”
Rafael Medoff, founding director of the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, told JNS that Wikipedia “sometimes includes blatantly false information, such as the lie that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.”
“By publishing such malicious Holocaust-inversion, Wikipedia is earning for itself a reputation as an untrustworthy source,” he said.
There are other “falsehoods and distortions” on the main Wikipedia entry for Israel, according to Medoff.
Those include “whitewashing the Palestinian Arab atrocities against Jews in 1920 and 1921 as simply ‘the Palestine riots,’ and omitting any mention of the Palestinian Arab pogroms against Jews in Hebron and elsewhere in 1929,” he told JNS.
“Nor is there any mention of the substantial illegal Arab immigration into British Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “This pattern of bias suggests that some of the authors of the entry had a partisan agenda.”
‘Tirade’
Archives of discussions on the “talk” pages for the Wikipedia main entries on Israel and China suggest that editors on the site, who are often anonymous and unpaid volunteers, approached the two countries very differently.
On the China page, editors rejected the view that the article should state high up that the country is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. One editor said that such an insertion would be “recentism” and “contentious.” Another editor said that “describing a country usually doesn’t include the crimes it’s committed. The lead is for the straight basics about the country, not going on a tirade about its controversial policies.”
Wikipedia also renamed its page that used to be on “Uyghur genocide” to “Persecution of Uyghurs in China” in February 2024, after editors said there weren’t enough sources describing it as a genocide. Wikipedia lists both that page on the Uyghurs and a page on the “Gaza genocide” in its “list of genocides.”
When it came to stating high up in the Israel page that the Jewish state was guilty of “genocide,” Wikipedia editors appeared to be evenly split on whether to make that statement, so a “closer” was brought in to render a verdict.
The person, who is supposed to be uninvolved in the matter, decided that the yeas rather than the nays had it, so it was added. That ruling is being challenged, as of publication time.
