Wikipedia’s take on a supreme court, its arbitration committee, has opted in recent months to ban two anti-Israel editors indefinitely—a “significant step” for the crowdsourced encyclopedia, which is one of the most visited websites on the internet, according to Shlomit Lir, a University of Haifa researcher, who specializes in Wikipedia.
The two are “veteran and highly influential,” Lir told JNS.
The committee’s decision “should be understood not only as an expression of internal awakening but also as the result of growing external pressure,” over the ways that Wikipedia handles bias, according to the Israeli researcher.
“According to current assessments, the issue involves a much broader network of nearly 100 editors, who have operated, or continue to operate, according to similar patterns, only a small number of whom have actually been blocked,” she told JNS.
The two banned accounts, which went by Iskandar323 and M.Bitton, “knew each other and operated in the same sensitive editing spaces,” Lir said. “According to the available documentation, they also cooperated in certain discussions and content areas.”
“These are not merely two isolated cases but part of a broader phenomenon of veteran editors, who worked over a very long time to shape narratives in areas related to Israel, Judaism, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” she said.
And banning editors like those two “does not repair the content contamination they left behind,” according to the researcher.
“Most of the biased edits, omissions, changes in wording, cherry-picked references and acts of framing have already been embedded in the articles, and many of them remain in place even after the editors’ removal,” Lir told JNS.
The Wikipedia editor who went by “M.Bitton,” who had made more than 64,000 edits on the site, was banned on April 28
“His conduct is deeply corrosive to the collaborative environment, and I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to undo that damage,” one arbitrator stated.
The committee voted 12-0 to ban M.Bitton, who can appeal the ban in a year.
In January, the committee voted 7-5 to ban the editor “Iskandar323” indefinitely after determining that the person behind the account, who had already been banned from editing topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, had violated that ban repeatedly.
Iskandar323, who had made almost 50,000 edits, can also appeal in a year.
If someone banned tries to create a new “sockpuppet” account on Wikipedia, the site has a mechanism to “help detect new accounts that continue the behavioral patterns of blocked editors by combining behavioral evidence with technical checks,” Lir told JNS.
“Possible indicators include returning to the same topics, using the same sources, similar wording, familiar editing patterns, activity appearing shortly after a ban or a new account adopting the same editorial line,” she said.
There are also “limited” tools that can be used to check technical data, like IP addresses, according to Lir.
A sockpuppet investigation can “help identify direct attempts to evade bans, but it does not provide a full response to the broader phenomenon of organized or sustained knowledge bias,” she said.
