More than 40 Jewish organizations sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Board of Trustees expressing “concern and dismay” over Wikipedia editors’ recent actions to downgrade the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) reliability and urging the WMF to “to start the process for administrative reconsideration.”
As I have previously written, Wikipedia editors designated the ADL as being “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that ADL is only “marginally reliable” (meaning that its use is context-dependent) on antisemitism outside of matters related to Israel and Zionism.
“As leading Jewish communal organizations, we express our concern and dismay by Wikipedia’s attack on ADL’s reliability on the topic of antisemitism and other issues of central concern to the Jewish community,” the 43 Jewish organizations, which include the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith International, wrote to the WMF. “Fundamentally, Wikipedia is stripping the Jewish community of the right to defend itself from the hatred that targets our community. We urge you to immediately launch an investigation into this decision and the motivations behind it, and to start the process for administrative reconsideration. We hope that you will simultaneously speak out clearly and unequivocally in support of the Jewish community’s right to defend against antisemitism.”
“Fundamentally, Wikipedia is stripping the Jewish community of the right to defend itself from the hatred that targets our community. We urge you to immediately launch an investigation into this decision and the motivations behind it, and to start the process for administrative reconsideration.”
The Jewish organizations argued that antisemitism is “one of the oldest and most pernicious” as well as “the most often understood” form of hate, and as organizations “most closely connected to, and representative of the Jewish community, and as organizations that have studied, monitored, and worked to counter antisemitism for decades, we are deeply concerned that Wikipedia’s decision will enable others to undermine our community’s claims or charges of antisemitism and simultaneously use Wikipedia’s decision as cover to perpetuate antisemitism,” they wrote. “At a time when antisemitic attitudes are increasing, and antisemitic incidents are skyrocketing, this is simply unacceptable, and it puts our entire community at risk.”
The Jewish organizations defended the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism “as a meaningful tool to describe, understand, and educate others on modern manifestations of antisemitism in society.” This definition, the letter stated “is the preeminent and most widely accepted definition of antisemitism today, embraced in the 2023 U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism and adopted or endorsed by more than half of the U.S. states and the District of Columbia,” they continued. “It is also used by over 1,000 other governments, universities, NGOs, and other key institutions, demonstrating a clear international consensus. We are firmly united in the belief that an attack on ADL’s reliability over its use of the IHRA definition and advocacy on behalf of the Jewish people weakens us all.”
WMF Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability Maggie Dennis told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), “This letter represents a misunderstanding of the situation and how Wikipedia works. Firstly, it’s important to note that the letter was addressed to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; neither the Board or the Foundation make content decisions on Wikipedia. A community of volunteers makes these decisions subject to Wikipedia’s terms of use.”
The issue of Wikipedia’s recent change on the ADL’s reliability was brought up on Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales’s talk page; in response to an editor noting that how one views the decision depends on whether or not they like the ADL, Wales wrote: “I hope that attitude, which I agree is inevitable in many parts of the media, stays far away from our discussions of the issue. Liking or not liking, agreeing or disagreeing, is really a terrible way for anyone to decide whether a source is reliable, and not the way that Wikipedians approach it.”
But based on past comments from an editor, that is precisely what is happening when editors discuss the reliability of a source. This editor has told me that discussions at the Reliable Sources/Noticeboard forum, where editors discuss the reliability of sources, have generally shifted “away from asking ‘is this article reliable for this claim’ to ‘can we get this entire source thrown out because we don’t like it?’” The editor has also lamented that Wikipedia’s reliability system “is not only broken but it is gamed to get blanket acceptance/rejection of sources vs reading the specific claim and the article that provides it and asking does the claim make sense?”
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