Et tu, Wikipedia?

Does Wikipedia have a Jewish problem?

Ask some Jewish community members and advocacy groups and you’ll get a simple answer: Yes.

Earlier this year, the Anti-Defamation League released the report “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality.”

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Researchers for the ADL’s Center for Technology and Science reported “extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias” on the internet’s largest and most popular encyclopedia, including a “coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia content related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and similar issues.”

A group of editors, the report states, “systematically evade Wikipedia’s rules to shift balanced narratives toward skewed ones, spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism.”

It further alleges that “pro-Hamas perspectives inform Arab-language content” on Israel and the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
The ADL said it found evidence of “at least 30 editors” who circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in order to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias and misleading information.

The report is the latest salvo in the war of information between the ADL and Wikipedia.

A 2024 Tablet article, “Wikipedia’s Jewish Problem,” reported that a group of Wikipedia editors and administrators, whose identity and credentials are unknown, rated the ADL as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “roughly reliable” on antisemitism “when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.”

Wikipedia’s “Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources,” a page the site said was “created to provide a list of repeatedly discussed sources, collected and summarized for convenience,” stated that “some editors regard the ADL’s opinion pieces as unreliable and should only be used with attribution.”

As a comparison, the same page lists Al Jazeera as “a Qatari state-funded news organization” and said that there was consensus on Wikipedia’s Request for Comments page, which allows the community to provide input on an article, that Al Jazeera was “generally reliable.” Most editors, the page noted, said Al Jazeera was biased on the Arab-Israeli conflict and topics for which the Qatari government had a conflict on interest.

In December 2025, the Jewish News Syndicate reported that Wikipedia editors decided to freeze discussion about the title of a page that refers to Israel committing a “massacre” in June 2024.

The decision means that the title of the page, “Nuseirat rescue and massacre,” cannot be changed until at least August 2026.
Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that “Wikipedia, once again, seems to be misleading its readers.”

Vlad Khaykin, executive vice president of social impact and North American partnerships at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that use of the word “massacre” in the title of a page ostensibly about Israel’s liberation of four hostages from Gaza is “not a neutral descriptor.”

“It is a verdict — one that draws its authority from casualty figures and claims that remain deeply contested, often circulated by those intent on recasting Israel’s efforts at self-defense as acts of villainy,” he said.

Speaking about the ADL’s report, the Wikimedia Foundation told JNS in a separate article that it “categorically” condemned “antisemitism and all forms of hate.”

The foundation said its preliminary review of the reports finds “troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data,” and said that they are “undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis.”

It added that content on its site “must be presented, as far as possible, without editorial bias.”

But even Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales has noted the site’s apparent anti-Israel bias.

Wales took the encyclopedia to task for its article “Gaza genocide” and the fact that it, too, was locked by administrators, as was the “Nuseirat rescue and massacre” page.

The New York Post reported that Wales wrote, “This article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention,” citing Wikipedia policies on neutrality and attribution to call out the biased tone of the entry.

Squirrel Hill resident Audrey Glickman has firsthand experience with Wikipedia’s bias.

Some of her friends, she said, were presenting troubling information about Zionism during discussions and said they got that information from Wikipedia.

The claim surprised her because she believed the site was crowdsourced and would therefore have the best information about a subject, since it was culling information from various sources.

Glickman, who has edited Wikipedia pages in the past, suggested changes to the Zionism entry.

Wikipedia rejected her changes saying that, like the “Gaza genocide” and “Nuseirat rescue and massacre” entries, the online encyclopedia wasn’t accepting any edits to the page.

“They said, ‘This page is closed. We voted on it.’ It was apparently a decision by a group,” she said.

Glickman is concerned, not only about the fact that editors can restrict changes, but that decisions appear to be made by consensus opinion, a nebulous term not clearly defined but one that doesn’t favor the Jewish community since it’s only .2% of the world’s population.

And while she understands the attempts to politicize a term like “Zionism,” Glickman said Wikipedia should be a neutral arbiter.

“[The Wikipedia entry on] Zionism should be, ‘The desire of the Jewish people to have a presence in the Holy Land,’ and that should really be it,” she said.

The inclusion of politics is especially concerning, given that at least one section of the page “Zionism and colonialism” seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on the argument that Israel is a colonial state, rather than present a balanced discussion of ideologies.

Glickman views her stance as David taking on one of the internet’s Goliath’s as vital.

“We need somebody out there saying what’s happening and we need to find a way to put forth what we mean,” she said. “We need to get this out there.” PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.