Wikipedia editors decided to roll a page on the “destruction of Israel in Iranian policy,” which garnered more than 62,000 page views in the past 30 days, into a larger article called “Iran-Israel relations.”
Experts told JNS that, while discussions were underway on whether to delete the page or combine it with another, it ought to be a standalone article.
Max Abrahms, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, said at the time that if the page was deleted or merged, “Israel will be less popular, the Islamic Republic will be more popular and readers will be stupider.”
The “closer,” Wikipedia’s term for someone uninvolved in the topic brought in to look for a consensus of editors and decide what to do with the page, stated that “it appears most appropriate to merge into the parent article and discuss the content there first.”
Shlomit Aharoni Lir, a research fellow at the University of Haifa who studies Wikipedia, participated in the discussion on the online encyclopedia about what should be done with the page.
“The article provided a focused and well-sourced examination of a documented policy that is particularly relevant to understanding current events,” she told JNS.
She said the arguments to delete or merge the article are “part of a recurring trend of proposals to delete or merge entries that don’t conform to the dominant editorial stance on the platform.”
Something similar happened with what she called a “comprehensive” article about “Antisemitism on Wikipedia,” which, she said, “was reduced and demoted to a section under ‘Criticism of Wikipedia.’”
The article “Calls for the destruction of Israel,” which is now a subsection under “Legitimacy of the State of Israel,” is another example, according to Lir, who authored a World Jewish Congress report on Wikipedia’s bias.
“The decision reflects a growing trend, in which Wikipedia undermines its foundational principles of neutrality and open knowledge by failing to disclose facts related to sensitive topics and actively concealing them, especially regarding subjects related to Israel,” Lir said.
A Wikipedia editor, who declined to be named and who has made thousands of edits on the online encyclopedia, told JNS that it’s “fairly obvious it won’t fit into another article,” because it has 50 sources.
“I can easily identify 20 high-quality sources that would be difficult to challenge, although I’m sure that won’t stop them trying,” the anonymous editor said.
The editor told JNS that it is “ridiculous” that anti-Israel editors are “trying to suppress anything that makes their heroes look bad.”
That editor thinks the page may well break out into a new one again, “and it will be hard to challenge again.”
“It’s just a delay tactic in this case,” the editor said.
