Wikipedia has banned several anti-Israel editors, but many of the edits that they made on the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia remain intact in Israel-related articles, and more recent efforts to introduce anti-Israel bias have become subtler, according to a new Anti-Defamation League report.
Daniel Kelley, senior director of the ADL’s center for technology and society, told JNS there are “high stakes” in the information Wikipedia disseminates. Large language models train on content from Wikipedia, which often appears first in online search results.
The report, released on Thursday, probes the edits of “Iskandar323,” an anti-Israel editor who was fully banned in January after being banned indefinitely from editing entries about Israel the prior year.
The user made 485 edits on six entries: the main articles about Zionism, Israel, Hamas, the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel, the Gaza war and Jews. Of those edits, he made 225 after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, according to the report.
Of the 398 of the user’s edits that the ADL found “assessable,” 91% “remain active on the platform,” Kelley told JNS.
Those edits span “years and years and years,” he said.
Shortly after Oct. 7, Iskandar323 took references to Jew-hatred in the Hamas charter and to the terror group’s use of human shields out of the main Hamas entry, which gets a lot more page views, and put them into a separate entry, with less visibility, called “criticism of Hamas.”
The ADL report accused the user of “softening Hamas” with those edits.
‘Putting a spotlight on these issues’
Since the ADL’s March 2025 report on coordinated anti-Israel editing on Wikipedia, which was cited as part of the basis for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s investigation into the site, coordinated anti-Israel editing has “sharply” decreased.
Coordinated activity among 30 editors on Wikipedia talk pages, which the ADL March 2025 report said made much of the edits, has declined 95% since the report was released, the new report says.
The ADL defines coordination as a “visible form of cooperation” between editors on talk pages. It noted that the editors could coordinate on external platforms.
The group of 30 anti-Israel editors has declined by a third since March 2025, after multiple editors were sanctioned and several others became inactive.
The new ADL report identified 19 editors, eight of whom were part of the original 30, who are “quietly” implementing anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias on Wikipedia in ways that are “more subtle and defensible under Wikipedia’s rules rather than overtly biased, while still reshaping what a reader encounters.”
“We saw that putting a spotlight on these issues resulted in the actual editors decreasing their coordination and their activity,” Kelley told JNS.
“I think that by casting a light again on the ways in which these editors have harmed Wikipedia, the false narratives and misleading information that they’re perpetuating across the site, we’ll be able to make a similar dent in the new crop of editors,” he said.
One method the ADL identified is to slowly rebuild an entry until one editor becomes the entry’s main author. The editor “DMH223344” was the second-most prolific editor on the Zionism entry despite being inactive since December, per the ADL report.
That user’s edits to the Zionism page include adding material describing Zionism as colonialism and stating that Arab population transfers discussed in the early Zionist movement were a means of ethnic cleansing.
The report also noted that editors are using a technique to slander Israel by repeatedly reverting edits to keep preferred framings intact.
The editor “Raskolnikov.Rev” did that from August 2024 to November 2025 to remove the framing from the Wikipedia entry on “sexual and gender-based violence in the Oct. 7 attacks.” The editor kept language saying that Israeli women and girls were “reportedly” victims of sexual violence that day.
“As a one-off, it doesn’t necessarily seem to be anything, but when they’re constantly reverting edits on a particular topic, and they are connected to this other activity, it does show that this is a very subtle part of their broader ideological push,” Kelley told JNS.
The ADL said that it contacted the Wikimedia Foundation to discuss the issues in the report but didn’t hear back.
Kelley called for Wikipedia to implement a “systematic review” of a user’s edits when the user is banned and to enact a form of identity verification for editors working in contentious topic areas.
“We’re not asking necessarily for a full public disclosure of people’s identity, but right now, not even the Wikimedia Foundation knows who any of the editors are on contentious topics,” he said.
Kelley said that editors working on contentious topics should be required to “disclose their identity to the Wikimedia Foundation for some base level vetting of them.”
