The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a report on March 18 highlighting what the organization believes to be “antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages.” The nonprofit identified a “group of 30 editors that appear to be in close coordination” on editing topics related to Israel and the Jews, which the ADL refers to as the “bad faith editors.”
The report begins by noting that “malicious editors frequently introduce biased or misleading information, which persists across hundreds if not more entries.” The Jewish group compared these 30 editors to the 30 editors most active on the “Gaza war” Wikipedia page (previously named “Israel-Hamas war”), the 30 editors most active on the “China-United States relation” article, as well as “30 random editors from Wikipedia’s overall set of 5,000 most active editors across all pages,” with the last group listed as the “Pro editors.”
“The Israel-Hamas war page editors engaged with similar topics as the suspicious editors, but appear to do so genuinely: they do not make nearly as many edits, nor do they appear to be collaborating in violation of Wikipedia’s rules,” the report states. “The 30 top editors we suspect of coordinating to bias Wikipedia content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were more than twice as active on average than these other groups of editors, based on total edits made over the past 10 years.”
The ADL also analyzed the time in between edits amongst the groups of editors and found that “the bad-faith editors made over 71,855 edits within an hour of each other on the same page over the past 10 years; Israel-Hamas war page editors made 45,925, while the China-U.S. relations editors made 4,961, and the Pro editors 486. In the past 12 months, the bad-faith editors made 19,605 edits, while the Israel-Hamas editors made 16,063, the China-US editors 815, and the Pro Editors only 42 (the 30 Pro Editors group is taken from a random sample of the top 5,000 most active Wikipedia editors, so the lack of overlap is not surprising). In the past year, the Israel-Hamas war editors have made more edits close together in time, but over the longer period, the 30 bad faith editors were much more likely to edit in tandem.”
Such close times between edits makes it appear that offsite coordination is occurring, per the report.
Further, “a small core” of the bad faith editors bullied and harassed other editors on talk pages and noticeboard threads, using words like “bulls—” and using “Zionist” in a derogatory manner, and have a penchant for reporting other editors who oppose them.
The bad faith editors make a string of anodyne edits to other topics as a means of “burying biased edits in a flurry of less consequential changes, which are harder to track and identify for the purposes of censure. These accumulated edits also help bad-faith actors to quickly gain credibility on Wikipedia, which requires a minimum number of edits for contributors to be allowed to make edits to certain articles.” A number of the editors also edit as long as eight hours a day, which raises questions if they’re being paid to edit. Paid editing is only allowed on Wikipedia if it’s disclosed.
These editors “have made more than a million edits” to Israeli-Palestinian conflict related articles. As examples, the report pointed to how an edit was made to the “Palestinian political violence” Wikipedia page in November 2023 removing text on how some of those behind the “political violence” call for the destruction of Israel. The report also focused on how the lead for the main Wikipedia page on Hamas was modified. “A sentence indicating that multiple governments designate Hamas as a terrorist group was moved from the beginning of the second paragraph to near the end of the fourth,” stated the report. “The first reference to Hamas as a terrorist organization now appears further down in the lead section, which also no longer mentions the more than 1,100 fatalities of the Oct. 7 attack. Instead, the lead section focuses on Hamas’ role as a political, social, and military organization that promotes ‘Palestinian nationalism in an Islamic context.’ A lengthy discussion of attacks against Israeli civilians and military targets was also removed, including a list of rocket attacks, a description of Hamas’ rocket arsenal, and language describing Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians as retaliation for assassinations of Hamas leadership.” One of the bad faith editors also scrubbed references to Hamas’ sexual violence on the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre from the Gaza war Wikipedia page. On the “2018-19 Gaza protests” page, a Palestinian quoted as saying that they flew an incendiary kite with a swastika on it to show Israelis that “we want to burn them” was removed from the article.
The report also discusses recent changes to the Wikipedia page on Zionism, as it now describes Zionism as an “ethnocultural nationalist movement” and that “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” I have previously reported on the various issues with the aforementioned text. The report also noted that on February 21 editors imposed a one-year moratorium on editing or discussing the use of that sentence, which means it’s locked into place.
The ADL also analyzed the voting patterns of the bad-faith editors, highlighting how they all tended to vote in lockstep when it came to deletion discussions of articles (these are generally referred to on Wikipedia as “!votes” because the strength of the argument is also weighed in these types of discussions). Some examples where the bad-faith editors !voted 100% in lockstep included deletion discussions for the “Jewish Israeli stone throwing” and “Mass civilian casualties of Israeli bombing, shelling, and rocket attacks on the Gaza Strip” (since renamed “Casualties of Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip”), where they all argued in favor of keeping those respective articles. By contrast, the bad-faith editors all voted in lockstep to successfully delete articles like “Israeli humanitarian aid to Gaza” and “Anti-semitic anti-Zionism.”
Additionally, the report examined the top sources used by the bad-faith editors and found that one of their most cited sources is the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera; I have previously covered the issues with Al Jazeera and some of the past discussions on Wikipedia about its reliability. The report also centers on these editors’ penchant for citing Palestine Remembered, which the report describes as “an independent website critical of Zionism that contains mostly opinion and commentary rather than first-hand reporting or evidence. For example, the site includes an FAQ on why Palestinians purportedly want to ‘destroy Israel and drive Israeli Jews into the sea.’”
The report focused on the English Wikipedia and devoted some space to analyzing Arabic Wikipedia. The main article on Hamas in the Arabic Wikipedia “glorifies the terrorist organization, using phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and refers to its goals as ‘liberation’ of ‘Palestine’” and calls suicide bombers “martyrs.” The Arabic Hamas Wikipedia page also states that the European Union (EU) has designated Hamas as a terror organization in order to avoid the “Jewish issue” from returning to the continent.
The report concluded that ADL’s research “shows that with enough time and resources, concerted efforts to skew content can succeed, such as a group of editors dedicated to revising narratives about Jews and Israel … The research to uncover this coordination was painstaking and time-intensive, requiring resources that neither most Wikipedians (or ‘editors’) nor the Wikimedia Foundation have available. The level of coordination – and time involved in making these edits, both in terms of years spent gaining credibility and hours spent making changes – suggests some may be paid agents. We are not suggesting simply that people critical of Israel are systematically revising Wikipedia. Good-faith editors with multiple points of view, for example, contribute to Wikipedia’s Israel-Hamas (now Gaza war) page and don’t appear to be engaged in intentional, coordinated efforts to skew content in antisemitic or anti-Israel ways. While more explicit antisemitic sentiments rarely made it through Wikipedia’s deliberation process, the scale of antisemitic and anti-Israel bias is concerning.”
The ADL issued a series of recommendations for Wikipedia, including having a group of experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict weigh in on the most hotly disputed pages, provide better screening procedures for Wikipedians who close discussions, and apply better sourcing standards.
“Most readers assume Wikipedia is a reliable online encyclopedia, but in reality, it has become a biased platform manipulated by agenda-driven editors on many topics,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Recent Wikipedia efforts toward neutrality are nothing but a Band-Aid on a problem that’s getting worse, with persistent antisemitic and anti-Israel bias still far too present. We urge Wikipedia and policymakers to act quickly before rampant disinformation on one of the most visited sources of information leads to tragic consequences.”
Former Wikipedia editor Ron Merkle, who currently edits Justapedia, a right-leaning competitor to Wikipedia, told me, “Wikipedia’s structure itself is facing a systemic failure in the respect that it tends to attract and incentivizes toxicity. In the end, Wikipedia should be subjected to congressional scrutiny and investigations.”
The Wikipedia Flood blog posted to X, “Bravo. The ADL has a first-rate research apparatus and this is precisely the work it should be doing. But don’t let this be a one-off. Make Wikipedia research a regular feature. Devote resources to it.”
Bravo. The ADL has a first-rate research apparatus and this is precisely the work it should be doing. But don't let this be a one-off. Make Wikipedia research a regular feature. Devote resources to it. https://t.co/70LQjFSiEM
— The Wikipedia Flood (@WikipediaFlood) March 18, 2025
But one Wikipedia editor told me that that they thought that the ADL’s report has “no real smoking gun… Probably will not move the needle much if at all.”
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia, said in a statement to The New York Post; “The values of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation reflect our commitment to integrity and accuracy, and we categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate. Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis.” The spokesperson said it was “unfortunate” the ADL didn’t contact the Wikimedia Foundation prior to releasing the report.
This article has been updated to state that Merkle currently edits at Justapedia.
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