From the headline, one might assume he directly edited or locked the page when he just commented on the article's discussion page that it should have a more neutral tone.
That understates the situation significantly. Wales posted a long comment under the headline,
Statement from Jimbo Wales: This message is from me, Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia
That's not just another comment; it's an official statement from the most powerful person on Wikipedia.
Wales goes on to say, "As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do."
In other words, an official body is watching and studying what you are doing, and policy actions may follow.
Finally, Wales does not accept any possibility that other points of view besides his own may be valid - not addressing many prior discussions. His belief is an assumed premise, and he demands ('asks') people to take actions on the basis of his beliefs. If you read the discussion, he continues that position.
That doesn't make Wales wrong or right, but he didn't 'just comment ... that it should have a more neutral tone.'.
I think that goes without saying. The real question is what's the line between neutrality and letting a vocal minority dictate editorial decisions? Especially when the vocal minority has biased incentives towards making those changes.
Nope, what makes Wikipedia good is that you can trust a majority of it. Let's not downgrade "Gaza Genocide", to "Killings in Gaza" just to please the perpetrators of said genocide. All the experts agree on the nature of what is happening there, the current wording of this page has been carefully weighted and debated against the evidence. If you have solid arguments, advance them on the discussion page of the article, as anyone is welcome to.
If it's a majority of topic experts, I think it is. I work with many (might even include myself) and we disagree constantly. If we do agree on something, I'm fairly confident it's accurate and trustworthy.
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
Go read the Grokipedia article about the Gaza genocide if you want a laugh. The first sentence is 83 words with multiple nested clauses. It's gibberish.
Thank you for sharing that, turns out to be a lot more measured and balanced than the news article makes it out to be. Damn media always fueling the fires rather than spreading understanding and clarify. I think both sides seems to be raising good points, and probably the truth and more balanced view sits in the middle.
I continued reading through the talk page and eventually come across this:
> the United States government is exerting serious political pressure on Wikipedia as a whole to reveal the real life identities of many editors here who disagree with the current military actions of the government of Israel.
I have not heard about this before, what specifically is this about, if it's true?
I always think of what was claimed to happened in video "collateral murder"
Where US killed several people , because a reporters telephoto lens was mistaked of a rocket launcher, when viewed from a few KM away - OR so we are told.
But so what? Is that unlawful in the US somehow today? That sounds absolutely bananas to be honest, aren't people supposed to have "true" freedom of speech, including being allowed to be biased against or for Israel?
What is really absolutely bananas is to continue to believe that United States has true freedom of speech. There are so many limitations and exceptions that the USA scores worse than Europe where they don't have such a thing enshrined in their constitution (in so far as they have a constitution to begin with):
Of course, you could be pedantic and say 'but freedom of expression isn't freedom of speech' but that would be precisely the kind of thing that continues to perpetrate the myth. A theoretical freedom on some narrow issue does not do much in competition with a much broader actual freedom. And that's the 2024 version, your guess about what the 2025 edition of that index looks like, I'm thinking not nearly as good for the USA. Blackmailing universities for starters.
It's not nationally illegal, and yes I would I agree that this seems in clear violation of freedom of speech.
There have been some similar laws passed at the state level like this one in Texas https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant... that have somehow held up in the courts
Here is the letter from two US congressmen, requesting information from Wikipedia, including "Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by [Wikipedia's arbitration committee]": https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
I never thought I'd see the day where the same government that says "Freedom of Speech is important" would go around doxxing people on the internet. I always thought it'd eventually happen, but not during my lifetime.
Reading the discussion, this appears to be an instance of the system working as intended. People are discussing Jimbo's message and weighing his position against the position of previous editors of the article, and they are weighing the merits and adherence to Wikipedia policy of each.
> As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do. It should go without saying that I am writing this in my personal capacity, and I am not speaking on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else!
I've definitely noticed this a lot more lately on Wikipedia where an article will be really quick to label something as "pseudohistory" or "pseudoscience" or likewise in the summary. Sometimes it makes sense, but there are quite a few articles where the difference between "crackpot" theories and acceptable "fringe" areas of study are fairly subjective. Or that someone feels the need to stand up a separate page about "denialism" of a topic where it was largely unnecessary.
And even for actual pseudoscience topics like Flat Earth Theory - the page has so much good information on it. But the summary on the page is terrible and does not even reflect a good summary of the page's own content! Mostly because people feel an unnecessary need to shoehorn in assessments of the myth status of the theory.
This is how the "Wikipedia Row" "Erupted" at Jimmy Wales:
> It is a bad faith read of the community when suggesting that among the most read and debated articles on the community is poorly done. there has been dozens of hours of discussion and rfcs galore to reach this version of the article and im certain there will be more. Consensus is always evolving but this article represents the latest consensus.
Ultimately it's a numbers game, and editors with an anti-Israeli agenda have the numbers. Jimbo's post reads as if he's encouraging chances so that the article adheres to NPOV, but I think he understands that's rather futile, and is really just trying to draw attention so that more readers will be aware of Wikipedia's biases.
Would be cool if Sudan was also on people's minds. The UN is currently giving the 400,000 refugees there 1/3 the calories that Gaza was receiving when it was considered starving Gaza.
> Others said that Wales did not have control over Wikipedia, and was only an editor like anyone else, but had been “trying to pull an authority-based argument while promoting a book”.
>“I'm not sure Jimbo's plea needs to be entertained much beyond demonstrating that current consensus is something different than what he thinks it should be,” one user said.
Wikipedia editors do not actually consider Jim to be an authority on the matter. They ask him to substantiate his claim that the "Gaza genocide" article is not "neutral" in voice. They don't really seem to care about what he thinks.
Wikipedia has over 400 active accounts who can turn on article protection. They include such diverse people as current CS professors and someone who wants you to know on their page that soccer is more important than life and death, and a person who's personal page opens with a picture of their feet. In fact, the Jimbo Wales account is not currently an administrator. Jimmy could not have locked the article.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those accounts spend more time and effort espousing wiki editing philosophy than any other topic.
When I look through those Wikipedia talk pages what always strikes me is that it is as if a whole raft of not-so-smart people have finally found something they can be experts on. These then use their own developed lingo and the fact that they have more time and expertise about WP than their usually smarter and better informed subject expert counter party to bludgeon them with all kinds of mumbo-jimbo to the point of abandoning the issue altogether. The really sad thing is that this still produces an encylopedia that is better than anything that you could have paid money for.
I think it has been discussed a few times that Wikipedia is a place where various kinds of zealots, fanatics, and obsessives can go and play a variant of the game of Diplomacy. This tends to drive away normal people who have subject matter knowledge, but are not interested in investing their time in long political campaigns over Wikipedia rules and power struggles.
It seems this happens in many places where the opportunity presents itself. StackOverflow seems to suffer from a similar (not identical) issue.
I mostly agree with Jimmy's statement [1] which is far more neutral than this article. I have concerns, though. It is difficult to find good sources without a large political bent.
If we look at the following article "Casualties of the Gaza war" [2]. If you read link (108) you see a Guardian article "Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war" [3], which says:
> Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
See how the language in the article itself walks back the strong claim. The argument made is that all persons not in the Israeli military intelligence database are automatically civilians. If there was a similar Israeli database of confirmed non-combatants, and this only contained 17% of the people who have died, would this mean that the remaining 83% were military? Of course not. And this all assumes that these databases are actually accurate.
Then we must ask ourselves, how are the number of deaths in total calculated? How do we know that each death is attributed to Israeli actions? How many deaths are due to direct action and secondary action (i.e. illness, dehydration, starvation)?
When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda. How much of what we currently see is propaganda?
I think we need to think extremely carefully and consider all possibilities.
Often when people talk about bias, they assume it must be bias against their interests. They don't realize that, if there is room for bias, it's just as easily bias in their favor. The article could overstate either side - or both at different times.
> When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda.
That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
It should be said that he is not advocating for a “we need to hear both sides” sort of disingenuous argument common among right wing rhetoric but a sense of balanced intellectual humility (even if I believe the behavior and evidence strongly supports the view that Israel is aiming for something akin to genocide) - whether this is a hill he (Wales) should dying on is also another matter.
There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.
But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.
Per Wiki's own article, there are many countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#/media/File:Inte...) that disagree with the genocide distinction. Those countries are not just the US - they are large and small nations from all parts of the world. Is that not the definition of highly contested?
The point of the editors is that it is long standing precedent on Wikipedia that the statements of politicians have little factual relevance except for the statement itself, so they are normally not taken into account.
"Highly contested" but not by genocide scholars or international law bodies.
Every genocide is contested by the people doing it and its apologists. Let's imagine someone commented on the holocaust wikipedia page:
> I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Holocaust "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Nazi Germany committed genocide, although that claim is highly contested.
This would rightly trigger a lot of outrage. Yes, it's also accurate to say that it's "highly contested". Honestly this really highlights issues with striving for "neutrality", when there is bias in the people defining what neutrality is.
Exactly. There's another 20th century genocide that is "highly contested" in specific odious circles, but there's no reason to present that opposing viewpoint in an encyclopedic treatment of it, given mounds of evidence of intent and outcomes for both.
Holodomor's an interesting example because unlike the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, or genocide in Gaza, there's no explicit evidence of it being intentional, despite mounds and mounds of evidence of Soviet atrocities that were released over the past century. In the cause of the genocide in Gaza, when you take the statements of those in leadership such as Ben-Gvir, you have clearly articulate plans to eradicate an entire people followed by indiscriminate killing and engineered starvation. In the case of the Holodomor, there's no such articulated plans to eradicate a people, which is why its Wikipedia article has an entire top level heading called "Holodomor genocide question." In the case of Gaza, there are enough explicit quotes of intent that it seems far closer to Armenian genocide denial, which is to say that it's only "questioned" by its perpetrator and allies with a vested interest in placating the perpetrator.
>In the case of the Holodomor, there's no such articulated plans to eradicate a people
You're incorrect. The Holodomor was an implementation of the clearly set policy to subdue peasantry and "clean up" rich peasants (the rich peasant were basically any peasant who wasn't completely destitute) as peasants weren't carriers of proper communist ideology (only dirt poor village laborers who didn't have their own land/horse/etc. were considered to be ideologically close to proletariat).
Where it gets a murky for some people not well knowing history of Russian Empire and USSR is whether Holodomor was a genocide of Ukrainians or genocide of peasants.
As it happens the Ukrainian people and their language were spread far beyond modern Ukraine and well into all those agricultural fertile lands where Holodomor happened: http://iamruss.ru/little-russians-on-the-1897-census/
The peasants in those fertile areas did better because of Nature as well as because of history - those weren't classic Russian territories where peasants had been enslaved for centuries, and thus the peasants there were more close to US/European farmers than to classic Russian poor peasant. Thus they became target.
So while more evidence point to it being genocide of peasants, one can't dismiss that the majority impacted were Ukrainians, and that is especially pronounced in the areas, further from the modern Ukraine, where peasants were mostly Ukrainians while cities, due to cities naturally speaking Imperial language (i.e. Russian in this case) and having recent large influx of Russian speaking population due to industrialization, were mostly Russian.
Can you provide a concrete piece of evidence that the USSR government set out to accomplish this? For example, I can easily pull up correspondence that shows the intent of top brass in the regimes responsible for other 20th century genocides. For example, you can easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.
>easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.
that is what i was talking about - disciplining kulaks, successful peasants, which basically meant destroying significant part of the peasant population there. And if you look at the map i linked - those regions had mostly Ukrainian speaking peasant population.
You probably have different than bolshevik's notion what "disciplining" is. Bolsheviks were outright genociding whole social stratas (and kulaks were one of such a strata) because bolsheviks saw no place for those people in the supposedly beautiful future the bolsheviks were supposedly building. And just for an example - you probably not aware how bolsheviks used chemical weapons against peasant revolt in Tambov region.
I don't see "genocide" there. It all sounds just like some killing here and there like everywhere else whereis HAMAS does systematic and methodical killing of other clans/tribes/families, and in such a tribal society it falls under "genocide".
Fair enough. In case you didn't know, if you want to have any chance of impacting what's on Wikipedia, create an account and make your point clear in the talk page. Protip before you do that: Don't randomly use ALL CAPS, don't engage in bad faith arguments, and honestly listen to what others say before replying. It isn't impossible to convince people if you can remain neutral about it. Good luck and more importantly, have fun!
Hamas carried out executions of a few dozen ranking members of opposition groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government. This is not a "genocide"
We saw what HAMAS does - all the video from Oct 7 - and we have to believe that same HAMAS abuot some mythical "groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government"
>We saw what HAMAS [sic] does - all the video from Oct 7
Not relevant to this topic, nor is it true (there's no video from Oct 7 that has any bearing on this)
>and we have to believe that same HAMAS [sic] abuot some mythical "groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government"
You actually don't. Yasser Abu Shabab is an example of one of them who has his own Wikipedia page, along with one for his gang (Popular Forces). The latter has 5 citations for the fact that his group is both Israeli backed and linked to ISIS. For example, see [1].
These Israeli backed groups have been responsible for murders of civilians such as Saleh al-Jafarawi, as well as attacks on Hamas soldiers, which is why Hamas executed them for collaboration.
I would recommend you do a bit more research, as it's not a good sign if your propaganda is easily shown to be false with CNN links.
man, are you kidding? you rationalize extrajudicial killings by a well known terrorist group which has so far performed numerous terrorist acts, war crimes and acts of genocides against civilian population.
It's not extrajudicial if it's done by the governing body of that state.
As far as being a terrorist group, there's not a single definition of "terrorism" that includes them but not the US and Israel.
I'm not a fan of Hamas, most due to how they treat their people rather than how their military behaves, but you seem to be operating under the impression that they're similar to Al Qaeda when in reality that's just the name of the party that governs the Gaza Strip.
>acts of genocides against civilian population
Also not true and something you just made up.
Again, really weak propaganda. This stuff doesn't work on people anymore now. It's not 2022, people don't just assume "Hamas" and "ISIS" and "Al Qaeda" are all just the same scary Muslim groups anymore.
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
Yeah but in this case what's a high quality source for "Israel isn't actually commiting genocide"? Israeli government representatives? Why are they high quality, because they went to prestigious universities and have real power? Not trolling, serious question.
There are a number of them mentioned on Wikipedia itself [1]. I hesitate to use Wikipedia as a source given all the anti-Israel bias lately, but that particular section seems okay-ish for now and I'm not aware of a better list.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I think Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow. The model would write the article using all publicly available information. This would enable the article to feature all perspectives on the issue to avoid “lying by omission”. Articles would instead be overviews and about a topic rather than appearing biased to a particular set of talking points and coverage. Summary is much more approachable and benefits people who want to learn all about a topic rather than those who seek confirmation reinforcement. I think the end result of this would be that people would be equally happy/unhappy with Wikipedia because the rules would be applied to every article equally and would be a place to go when users didn’t know what to prompt while apps like Grok/ChatGPT are resources used when people already have a question prepared. I agree with Jimmy’s opinion that Wikipedia is not a place to adjudicate disagreements.
> Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow
This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia.
The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that.
As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique definition they’re loudly committed to, all of which makes the entire debate self obsessed.
I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocides against the genocide article then a more uniform interpretation of genocide across the entire site would be possible. I think the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency, to cover every viewpoint in a topic with rationale and to do so truthfully with associated references.
An issue not brought up is that LLMs are not deterministic enough to follow rules -- it would be nice if we had a perfect robot that could do all these things and then determine rules for it to follow. But it only took prompt tampering with Grok for it to start talking about mechahitler, and I'm pretty sure at least that wasn't entirely planned. Inconsistency is almost to be expected from LLMs.
> if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site
These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not.
> If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article
It would be worthless. Also, futile. You think when the world’s governments can’t agree on what genocide is, a random editorial decision at Wikipedia will control?
> the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency
It’s a goal, but certainly not the goal. Truth isn’t a mathematical schema, particularly when it comes to social constructs like genocide.
I don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea. I think it’s a worthwhile and valuable idea. Rules-derived articles with logical dependencies could hold a mirror to our own biases. I think truth should be logically derived and I don’t want people to be hostile to the outcomes since we’re approaching a future where technology will be able to do this.
> don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea
It’s useless and futile to this problem.
It could be useful. But as a compliment to Wikipedia. And not in adjudicating something like the definition of genocide.
> should be logically derived
Not really an option for social constructs, which rely on consensus more than logical consistency. You could create LLMs that logically derive an answer from a definition. But that is a semantic punt with extra steps (unless the LLM controls martial forces).
I lost respect for Wikipedia as an institution when I learned the constant "please donate again" nag screens were in-fact fundraising for WP's own political ends, and _not_ to keep WP online. (Its endowment is quite well-funded.)
But I can't fault him for reminding the terminally-online people who volunteer to be Wikipedia editors of the value of neutrality when you're the steward of the world's shared understanding of itself.
The money is going into an endowment, not funding random political activities. The point of an endowment is to eventually have enough money to live off of the interest forever (which is tough if the organization like Wikimedia keeps growing).
They actually make more money every year from the interest on their endowment than they do from donations at this point.
(All the more argument that they should be knocking off the massive nags though)
From the headline, one might assume he directly edited or locked the page when he just commented on the article's discussion page that it should have a more neutral tone.
That understates the situation significantly. Wales posted a long comment under the headline,
Statement from Jimbo Wales: This message is from me, Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia
That's not just another comment; it's an official statement from the most powerful person on Wikipedia.
Wales goes on to say, "As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do."
In other words, an official body is watching and studying what you are doing, and policy actions may follow.
Finally, Wales does not accept any possibility that other points of view besides his own may be valid - not addressing many prior discussions. His belief is an assumed premise, and he demands ('asks') people to take actions on the basis of his beliefs. If you read the discussion, he continues that position.
That doesn't make Wales wrong or right, but he didn't 'just comment ... that it should have a more neutral tone.'.
> he just commented on the article's discussion page that it should have a more neutral tone
He also said it in a '"high profile media interview about the article'.
Seems pretty important to require a neutral tone regardless of how egregious the acts are described in the entry.
This is what makes Wikipedia good.
I think that goes without saying. The real question is what's the line between neutrality and letting a vocal minority dictate editorial decisions? Especially when the vocal minority has biased incentives towards making those changes.
Nope, what makes Wikipedia good is that you can trust a majority of it. Let's not downgrade "Gaza Genocide", to "Killings in Gaza" just to please the perpetrators of said genocide. All the experts agree on the nature of what is happening there, the current wording of this page has been carefully weighted and debated against the evidence. If you have solid arguments, advance them on the discussion page of the article, as anyone is welcome to.
Is it true that "trust a majority" is a "good"? Or just the opinion of the majority?
If it's a majority of topic experts, I think it is. I work with many (might even include myself) and we disagree constantly. If we do agree on something, I'm fairly confident it's accurate and trustworthy.
You can read their arguments on the discussion page; don't act like this is just an appeal to authority.
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
This is very likely character assassination.
Wikipedia has been targeted lately as part of a marketing effort for grokipedia.
I recommend taking this as a grain of salt.
Also feel like Wikipedia was never the go to platform for unfolding situations.
Almost built against serving that specific need, and trying to avoid it as much as they can, one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Let_the_dust_settle
I know this issue is top-of-mind in the public discourse now, but the issue of Israel/Palestine has been ongoing for decades at this point.
The broader conflict yes but not the current programme.
Go read the Grokipedia article about the Gaza genocide if you want a laugh. The first sentence is 83 words with multiple nested clauses. It's gibberish.
I agree. Wikipedia is not for debate though. It’s good at settled facts.
This was not linked in the article, so here is what Jimmy wrote in the talk page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
Thank you for sharing that, turns out to be a lot more measured and balanced than the news article makes it out to be. Damn media always fueling the fires rather than spreading understanding and clarify. I think both sides seems to be raising good points, and probably the truth and more balanced view sits in the middle.
I continued reading through the talk page and eventually come across this:
> the United States government is exerting serious political pressure on Wikipedia as a whole to reveal the real life identities of many editors here who disagree with the current military actions of the government of Israel.
I have not heard about this before, what specifically is this about, if it's true?
It's a congressional inquiry, the claim is that the editors are biased against Israel. https://www.commondreams.org/news/house-gop-investigates-wik...
Another thing to reaize is ...
In war the first casualty is truth.
I always think of what was claimed to happened in video "collateral murder"
Where US killed several people , because a reporters telephoto lens was mistaked of a rocket launcher, when viewed from a few KM away - OR so we are told.
Ascertaining the truth isn't made easier when one side massacres journalists and forbids free domestic reporting.
RE ".... claim is that the editors are biased against Israel..." We ALL have Bias's
> the editors are biased against Israel
But so what? Is that unlawful in the US somehow today? That sounds absolutely bananas to be honest, aren't people supposed to have "true" freedom of speech, including being allowed to be biased against or for Israel?
What is really absolutely bananas is to continue to believe that United States has true freedom of speech. There are so many limitations and exceptions that the USA scores worse than Europe where they don't have such a thing enshrined in their constitution (in so far as they have a constitution to begin with):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
Of course, you could be pedantic and say 'but freedom of expression isn't freedom of speech' but that would be precisely the kind of thing that continues to perpetrate the myth. A theoretical freedom on some narrow issue does not do much in competition with a much broader actual freedom. And that's the 2024 version, your guess about what the 2025 edition of that index looks like, I'm thinking not nearly as good for the USA. Blackmailing universities for starters.
It's not nationally illegal, and yes I would I agree that this seems in clear violation of freedom of speech. There have been some similar laws passed at the state level like this one in Texas https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant... that have somehow held up in the courts
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Is a metalaw restricting the laws Congress can set.
Freedom of speech seems to be commonly regarded as having a far wider scope than it actually does. IANAL.
Yes, but please understand that the government of USA has a bias in favor of Israel that it needs to uphold. Why do you hate America and Freedom(TM)?
Here are more details on this: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...
Here is the letter from two US congressmen, requesting information from Wikipedia, including "Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by [Wikipedia's arbitration committee]": https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
I never thought I'd see the day where the same government that says "Freedom of Speech is important" would go around doxxing people on the internet. I always thought it'd eventually happen, but not during my lifetime.
Discussed recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799302
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043164
Reading the discussion, this appears to be an instance of the system working as intended. People are discussing Jimbo's message and weighing his position against the position of previous editors of the article, and they are weighing the merits and adherence to Wikipedia policy of each.
> As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do. It should go without saying that I am writing this in my personal capacity, and I am not speaking on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else!
I've definitely noticed this a lot more lately on Wikipedia where an article will be really quick to label something as "pseudohistory" or "pseudoscience" or likewise in the summary. Sometimes it makes sense, but there are quite a few articles where the difference between "crackpot" theories and acceptable "fringe" areas of study are fairly subjective. Or that someone feels the need to stand up a separate page about "denialism" of a topic where it was largely unnecessary.
And even for actual pseudoscience topics like Flat Earth Theory - the page has so much good information on it. But the summary on the page is terrible and does not even reflect a good summary of the page's own content! Mostly because people feel an unnecessary need to shoehorn in assessments of the myth status of the theory.
"erupts". They have a rowdy argumented discussion, no ad hominem that i found? To me it look like a very civil discussion on the internet.
This is how the "Wikipedia Row" "Erupted" at Jimmy Wales:
> It is a bad faith read of the community when suggesting that among the most read and debated articles on the community is poorly done. there has been dozens of hours of discussion and rfcs galore to reach this version of the article and im certain there will be more. Consensus is always evolving but this article represents the latest consensus.
Seems very reasonable to me.
Ultimately it's a numbers game, and editors with an anti-Israeli agenda have the numbers. Jimbo's post reads as if he's encouraging chances so that the article adheres to NPOV, but I think he understands that's rather futile, and is really just trying to draw attention so that more readers will be aware of Wikipedia's biases.
While obviously you're right that in practice "it's a numbers game", it shouldn't be. That's the point.
Surprisingly I don’t see Wales commenting on the Armenian Genocide talk page. I don’t see the difference between the two. What am I missing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
There are vast differences
Would be cool if Sudan was also on people's minds. The UN is currently giving the 400,000 refugees there 1/3 the calories that Gaza was receiving when it was considered starving Gaza.
Jimmy Wales does what?
From the very article itself:
> Others said that Wales did not have control over Wikipedia, and was only an editor like anyone else, but had been “trying to pull an authority-based argument while promoting a book”.
>“I'm not sure Jimbo's plea needs to be entertained much beyond demonstrating that current consensus is something different than what he thinks it should be,” one user said.
Wikipedia editors do not actually consider Jim to be an authority on the matter. They ask him to substantiate his claim that the "Gaza genocide" article is not "neutral" in voice. They don't really seem to care about what he thinks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
The page is currently only protected until November 4th.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrato...
Wikipedia has over 400 active accounts who can turn on article protection. They include such diverse people as current CS professors and someone who wants you to know on their page that soccer is more important than life and death, and a person who's personal page opens with a picture of their feet. In fact, the Jimbo Wales account is not currently an administrator. Jimmy could not have locked the article.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those accounts spend more time and effort espousing wiki editing philosophy than any other topic.
When I look through those Wikipedia talk pages what always strikes me is that it is as if a whole raft of not-so-smart people have finally found something they can be experts on. These then use their own developed lingo and the fact that they have more time and expertise about WP than their usually smarter and better informed subject expert counter party to bludgeon them with all kinds of mumbo-jimbo to the point of abandoning the issue altogether. The really sad thing is that this still produces an encylopedia that is better than anything that you could have paid money for.
I think it has been discussed a few times that Wikipedia is a place where various kinds of zealots, fanatics, and obsessives can go and play a variant of the game of Diplomacy. This tends to drive away normal people who have subject matter knowledge, but are not interested in investing their time in long political campaigns over Wikipedia rules and power struggles.
It seems this happens in many places where the opportunity presents itself. StackOverflow seems to suffer from a similar (not identical) issue.
I mostly agree with Jimmy's statement [1] which is far more neutral than this article. I have concerns, though. It is difficult to find good sources without a large political bent.
If we look at the following article "Casualties of the Gaza war" [2]. If you read link (108) you see a Guardian article "Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war" [3], which says:
> Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
See how the language in the article itself walks back the strong claim. The argument made is that all persons not in the Israeli military intelligence database are automatically civilians. If there was a similar Israeli database of confirmed non-combatants, and this only contained 17% of the people who have died, would this mean that the remaining 83% were military? Of course not. And this all assumes that these databases are actually accurate.
Then we must ask ourselves, how are the number of deaths in total calculated? How do we know that each death is attributed to Israeli actions? How many deaths are due to direct action and secondary action (i.e. illness, dehydration, starvation)?
When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda. How much of what we currently see is propaganda?
I think we need to think extremely carefully and consider all possibilities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20250821135825/https://www.thegu...
Often when people talk about bias, they assume it must be bias against their interests. They don't realize that, if there is room for bias, it's just as easily bias in their favor. The article could overstate either side - or both at different times.
> When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda.
That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
It should be said that he is not advocating for a “we need to hear both sides” sort of disingenuous argument common among right wing rhetoric but a sense of balanced intellectual humility (even if I believe the behavior and evidence strongly supports the view that Israel is aiming for something akin to genocide) - whether this is a hill he (Wales) should dying on is also another matter.
TLDR: Wales does not say there is no genocide. He says that it's "highly contested" and therefore Wikipedia shouldn't present it as fact.
I say "it's only highly contested by Israel".
> I say "it's only highly contested by Israel".
There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.
But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.
Per Wiki's own article, there are many countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#/media/File:Inte...) that disagree with the genocide distinction. Those countries are not just the US - they are large and small nations from all parts of the world. Is that not the definition of highly contested?
The point of the editors is that it is long standing precedent on Wikipedia that the statements of politicians have little factual relevance except for the statement itself, so they are normally not taken into account.
There's also this big list of various professional opinions on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Expert_opinions_in_th...
"Highly contested" but not by genocide scholars or international law bodies.
Every genocide is contested by the people doing it and its apologists. Let's imagine someone commented on the holocaust wikipedia page:
> I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Holocaust "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Nazi Germany committed genocide, although that claim is highly contested.
This would rightly trigger a lot of outrage. Yes, it's also accurate to say that it's "highly contested". Honestly this really highlights issues with striving for "neutrality", when there is bias in the people defining what neutrality is.
Highly contested by the people committing the genocide, while Jewish figures from across the world are calling for Israel to be sanctioned [1]
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/jewish-notable...
It is mentioned in the article, but buried pretty deep:
> The Israeli government ... denying that their military operations constitute genocide.
You have to scroll pretty far to find it.
I think Jimbo is saying, NPOV would have that assertion much higher, even in the lede.
Does NPOV mean emphasizing biased voices on all sides as a sort of balance, like much of journalism? Or is it emphasizing NPOV voices?
Exactly. There's another 20th century genocide that is "highly contested" in specific odious circles, but there's no reason to present that opposing viewpoint in an encyclopedic treatment of it, given mounds of evidence of intent and outcomes for both.
Yes, the Holocaust is also "highly contested".
I was referring to the Armenian genocide, whose primary perpetrator refuses to acknowledge it, with the support of Western governments.
But the Holocaust is more ironic in this case.
Here's another one: Holodomor is also contested in many places - only 34 countries recognize it. Crazy world.
Holodomor's an interesting example because unlike the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, or genocide in Gaza, there's no explicit evidence of it being intentional, despite mounds and mounds of evidence of Soviet atrocities that were released over the past century. In the cause of the genocide in Gaza, when you take the statements of those in leadership such as Ben-Gvir, you have clearly articulate plans to eradicate an entire people followed by indiscriminate killing and engineered starvation. In the case of the Holodomor, there's no such articulated plans to eradicate a people, which is why its Wikipedia article has an entire top level heading called "Holodomor genocide question." In the case of Gaza, there are enough explicit quotes of intent that it seems far closer to Armenian genocide denial, which is to say that it's only "questioned" by its perpetrator and allies with a vested interest in placating the perpetrator.
>In the case of the Holodomor, there's no such articulated plans to eradicate a people
You're incorrect. The Holodomor was an implementation of the clearly set policy to subdue peasantry and "clean up" rich peasants (the rich peasant were basically any peasant who wasn't completely destitute) as peasants weren't carriers of proper communist ideology (only dirt poor village laborers who didn't have their own land/horse/etc. were considered to be ideologically close to proletariat).
Where it gets a murky for some people not well knowing history of Russian Empire and USSR is whether Holodomor was a genocide of Ukrainians or genocide of peasants.
As it happens the Ukrainian people and their language were spread far beyond modern Ukraine and well into all those agricultural fertile lands where Holodomor happened: http://iamruss.ru/little-russians-on-the-1897-census/
The peasants in those fertile areas did better because of Nature as well as because of history - those weren't classic Russian territories where peasants had been enslaved for centuries, and thus the peasants there were more close to US/European farmers than to classic Russian poor peasant. Thus they became target.
So while more evidence point to it being genocide of peasants, one can't dismiss that the majority impacted were Ukrainians, and that is especially pronounced in the areas, further from the modern Ukraine, where peasants were mostly Ukrainians while cities, due to cities naturally speaking Imperial language (i.e. Russian in this case) and having recent large influx of Russian speaking population due to industrialization, were mostly Russian.
Can you provide a concrete piece of evidence that the USSR government set out to accomplish this? For example, I can easily pull up correspondence that shows the intent of top brass in the regimes responsible for other 20th century genocides. For example, you can easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.
>easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.
that is what i was talking about - disciplining kulaks, successful peasants, which basically meant destroying significant part of the peasant population there. And if you look at the map i linked - those regions had mostly Ukrainian speaking peasant population.
You probably have different than bolshevik's notion what "disciplining" is. Bolsheviks were outright genociding whole social stratas (and kulaks were one of such a strata) because bolsheviks saw no place for those people in the supposedly beautiful future the bolsheviks were supposedly building. And just for an example - you probably not aware how bolsheviks used chemical weapons against peasant revolt in Tambov region.
Your comment goes against HN Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . That's it.
Could you please specify which guideline?
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There already is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Extrajudicial_killings_o... (there even is a larger article about "Capital punishment in Gaza" if that wasn't enough already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Gaza... [goes beyond Hamas])
Did you honestly spend any time at all to see if it was already included in Wikipedia or not before you wrote your comment?
I don't see "genocide" there. It all sounds just like some killing here and there like everywhere else whereis HAMAS does systematic and methodical killing of other clans/tribes/families, and in such a tribal society it falls under "genocide".
Fair enough. In case you didn't know, if you want to have any chance of impacting what's on Wikipedia, create an account and make your point clear in the talk page. Protip before you do that: Don't randomly use ALL CAPS, don't engage in bad faith arguments, and honestly listen to what others say before replying. It isn't impossible to convince people if you can remain neutral about it. Good luck and more importantly, have fun!
Hamas carried out executions of a few dozen ranking members of opposition groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government. This is not a "genocide"
We saw what HAMAS does - all the video from Oct 7 - and we have to believe that same HAMAS abuot some mythical "groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government"
Hamas is not an acronym, it's "Hamas" not "HAMAS"
>We saw what HAMAS [sic] does - all the video from Oct 7
Not relevant to this topic, nor is it true (there's no video from Oct 7 that has any bearing on this)
>and we have to believe that same HAMAS [sic] abuot some mythical "groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government"
You actually don't. Yasser Abu Shabab is an example of one of them who has his own Wikipedia page, along with one for his gang (Popular Forces). The latter has 5 citations for the fact that his group is both Israeli backed and linked to ISIS. For example, see [1].
These Israeli backed groups have been responsible for murders of civilians such as Saleh al-Jafarawi, as well as attacks on Hamas soldiers, which is why Hamas executed them for collaboration.
I would recommend you do a bit more research, as it's not a good sign if your propaganda is easily shown to be false with CNN links.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/06/middleeast/israel-arming-hama...
man, are you kidding? you rationalize extrajudicial killings by a well known terrorist group which has so far performed numerous terrorist acts, war crimes and acts of genocides against civilian population.
It's not extrajudicial if it's done by the governing body of that state.
As far as being a terrorist group, there's not a single definition of "terrorism" that includes them but not the US and Israel.
I'm not a fan of Hamas, most due to how they treat their people rather than how their military behaves, but you seem to be operating under the impression that they're similar to Al Qaeda when in reality that's just the name of the party that governs the Gaza Strip.
>acts of genocides against civilian population
Also not true and something you just made up.
Again, really weak propaganda. This stuff doesn't work on people anymore now. It's not 2022, people don't just assume "Hamas" and "ISIS" and "Al Qaeda" are all just the same scary Muslim groups anymore.
>>acts of genocides against civilian population
>Also not true and something you just made up.
Oct 7.
The rest of your post is similarly utterly wrong.
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> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
LOL
People are dense. If there aren't any high quality sources on mRNA turbo cancer then you don't need to lower your standards to include it.
Yeah but in this case what's a high quality source for "Israel isn't actually commiting genocide"? Israeli government representatives? Why are they high quality, because they went to prestigious universities and have real power? Not trolling, serious question.
There are a number of them mentioned on Wikipedia itself [1]. I hesitate to use Wikipedia as a source given all the anti-Israel bias lately, but that particular section seems okay-ish for now and I'm not aware of a better list.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_and_legal_responses_t...
Sounds like Wikipedia is turning into reddit.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I think Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow. The model would write the article using all publicly available information. This would enable the article to feature all perspectives on the issue to avoid “lying by omission”. Articles would instead be overviews and about a topic rather than appearing biased to a particular set of talking points and coverage. Summary is much more approachable and benefits people who want to learn all about a topic rather than those who seek confirmation reinforcement. I think the end result of this would be that people would be equally happy/unhappy with Wikipedia because the rules would be applied to every article equally and would be a place to go when users didn’t know what to prompt while apps like Grok/ChatGPT are resources used when people already have a question prepared. I agree with Jimmy’s opinion that Wikipedia is not a place to adjudicate disagreements.
> Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow
This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia.
The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that.
As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique definition they’re loudly committed to, all of which makes the entire debate self obsessed.
I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocides against the genocide article then a more uniform interpretation of genocide across the entire site would be possible. I think the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency, to cover every viewpoint in a topic with rationale and to do so truthfully with associated references.
An issue not brought up is that LLMs are not deterministic enough to follow rules -- it would be nice if we had a perfect robot that could do all these things and then determine rules for it to follow. But it only took prompt tampering with Grok for it to start talking about mechahitler, and I'm pretty sure at least that wasn't entirely planned. Inconsistency is almost to be expected from LLMs.
> if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site
These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not.
> If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article
It would be worthless. Also, futile. You think when the world’s governments can’t agree on what genocide is, a random editorial decision at Wikipedia will control?
> the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency
It’s a goal, but certainly not the goal. Truth isn’t a mathematical schema, particularly when it comes to social constructs like genocide.
I don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea. I think it’s a worthwhile and valuable idea. Rules-derived articles with logical dependencies could hold a mirror to our own biases. I think truth should be logically derived and I don’t want people to be hostile to the outcomes since we’re approaching a future where technology will be able to do this.
> don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea
It’s useless and futile to this problem.
It could be useful. But as a compliment to Wikipedia. And not in adjudicating something like the definition of genocide.
> should be logically derived
Not really an option for social constructs, which rely on consensus more than logical consistency. You could create LLMs that logically derive an answer from a definition. But that is a semantic punt with extra steps (unless the LLM controls martial forces).
I lost respect for Wikipedia as an institution when I learned the constant "please donate again" nag screens were in-fact fundraising for WP's own political ends, and _not_ to keep WP online. (Its endowment is quite well-funded.)
But I can't fault him for reminding the terminally-online people who volunteer to be Wikipedia editors of the value of neutrality when you're the steward of the world's shared understanding of itself.
The money is going into an endowment, not funding random political activities. The point of an endowment is to eventually have enough money to live off of the interest forever (which is tough if the organization like Wikimedia keeps growing).
They actually make more money every year from the interest on their endowment than they do from donations at this point.
(All the more argument that they should be knocking off the massive nags though)
Do you have a source for those allegations about their funding?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
Which part of this substantiates that description?