A Timely Study Emerges as Wikipedia Weighs 'Israel/Palestine'

 

I've been offline for a while, neglecting this blog, and during my absence a number of things have happened.

Two very important ones are related:

1. Wikipedia's highest tribunal, its "arbitration committee" or "Arbcom," has  voted to open a "case" to consider complaints that anti-Israel and sometimes antisemitic editors have bullied their way into dominating a vast swath of articles on Israel and the Gaza war. The "case" will commence on November 30th.

2. Just as the Arbcom case is about to commence, Canadian researchers have released an impressively thorough study quantifying the behavior of anti-Israel editors. 

A National Post article on the study, by its authors, can be found here. Their analysis "reveals alarming patterns of bias that can cascade through the digital information ecosystem, infecting everything from search engine results to academic citations to social media posts and even AI training data."

I wrote about the arbcom case when it first commenced back in August, and updated several times. As I've described, it began promisingly, with postings by several respected editors pointing out the pattern of anti-Israel "ownership" of articles, much of it (as I revealed in this blog), coordinated offsite in violation of Wikipedia rules.

What I call the "Wikipedia Flood" of pro-Hamas editors fought fiercely against Arbcom's taking up the case, gaslighting and producing reams of verbiage and meaningless "data" to prove that the blatant anti-Israel propaganda in the artcles, and the misconduct that produced it, is just a figment of everyone's imagination.

The phony "data" they generated was crucial, as arbcom often takes a nerdy approach and is swayed by "data," no matter how bogus.

The arbcom case drew outside attention as it dragged on for months, especially articles by Aaron Bandler in Jewish Journal, which raised the stakes and made it harder for arbcom to just sweep it all under the rug. 

Revelations about outside coordination, by this blog and Ashley Rindsberg in Piratewire, made it still harder.

In voting to go ahead with the case, the arb "Moneytrees" specifically pointed to the canvassing:

I also want to look at offsite behavior and canvassing, which has been chronic for a while and been difficult to address with our current processes. The scope should be an examination of how to address these offsite issues, and how we can empower admins to act on them.

And now comes this latest development, the Canadian study, just as the case is about to begin.

The study was conducted by Neil Seeman, a Senior Fellow at Massey College. the University of Toronto, and Jeff Ballabon, Senior Counsel for International and Government Affairs at the American Center for Law and Justice. These are serious researchers, which Wikipedia usually hold in higher esteem than journalists. 

In their National Post article, they wrote:

We conducted a comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia’s structural bias, using as our case study the page about South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Our findings unearthed patterns of systematic bias that can shape and contort public understanding of critical global issues.

Through a detailed examination of over 1,000 page revisions, we identified several key mechanisms through which bias can enter and metastasize inside Wikipedia.

Our analysis identified 27 highly active editors who contributed significantly to the page. These weren’t hobbyist contributors — they averaged over 200,000 edits across Wikipedia, suggesting they’re highly experienced editors with considerable influence over content. The bias expression analysis identified patterns of anti-Israel bias among power-user editors, highlighting how personal viewpoints can seep into supposedly neutral content.

While none of the researchers' findings will come as a surprise to readers of this blog and the other coverage, their work dovetails neatly what I've been documenting sinch March, and what Aaron and Ashley have written about.

Their findings concerning editor behavior are significant because, remember, Arbcom's jurisdiction is confined entirely to that realm:

What’s particularly remarkable is these biases contradict the spirit of a “wiki” — an ethos of bottom-up collaboration and respect expressed toward all its volunteer editors. These biases include: elite theory bias, that is, a preference for academic sources over grassroots knowledge; high-contributor frequency bias (disproportionate influence of frequent editors); citation gaming (strategic use of citations to push particular viewpoints); temporal bias (over-representation of recent events or perspectives); institutional capture systematic bias (from organized editing groups); language complexity bias (use of complex language to obscure bias); and source selectivity bias (selective choice of sources to support particular views).

So there it is, all laid out. The arbcom case won't commence until the end of November, so you can bet that the Wikipedia Flood--and their sponsors and backers--will be minutely examining the Canadian study to rip it to shreds and extract as much blood as they can from the editors who have sought to counter them.

The Flood is tightly organized offsite, experienced and well-established onsite. They've achieved their objective since 10/7, spreading poison, turning Wikipedia into a propaganda website, and there's no reason to believe they won't win again, study or no study.

Why? Because Wikipedia belongs to them.

Wikipedia needs to be starved of money and discredited. This new study will go a long way toward achieving the latter objective.