ANTISEMITISM AT WIKIPEDIA,
Weakipedia, TOOL OF THE JIHAD

Is there no one that can stand up to evil? Seriously. Must everything be corrupted by Islamic thuggery and bullying? Wikipedia ……… another, in a long line, of surrender monkeys and useful tools. Doesn’t historical accuracy mean anything anymore?
Bottom line, this does enormous harm to the credibility of wikipedia. It is not a credible source – it will increasingly be perceived as a propaganda tool of the jihad. Frankly, the mainstream medai really ought to pick up on this piece. Students, fact finders, researchers beware.

Exposed –
Anti-Israeli Subversion on Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can
edit, may strive for pure democracy, but that doesn’t mean it’s always fair. Our
colleagues at CAMERA learned this the hard way last month when their effort to
fight anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia ended in several members being banned from
the site and bad press for the organization. CAMERA’s campaign involved
recruiting volunteers and instructing them in the basics of Wikipedia
participation. The Palestinian advocacy group, Electronic Intifada (EI),
however, branded the effort "a plan to rewrite history" and filed a bitter
complaint with Wikipedia administrators, resulting in unusually stiff penalties
for the CAMERA volunteers involved.

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EI’s chief evidence against CAMERA was a series of private
e-mails exchanged by CAMERA staff and their volunteers. An EI staff member
infiltrated the group and turned the e-mails over to Wikipedia, claiming they
revealed a plot by CAMERA to manipulate Wikipedia and to pass off "crude
propaganda as fact." An investigation followed, resulting in two indefinite bans
and several shorter-term bans for CAMERA members.

A closer look at Wikipedia’s inner workings, however,
reveals there is more to the story. Research carried out by Social Media expert
Dr. Andre Oboler, a Legacy Heritage Fellow at NGO Monitor, reveals that it was
EI, not CAMERA, that manipulated Wikipedia to achieve its ideological
goals.

Dr. Oboler and HonestReporting also found that despite
Wikipedia’s clear policy against political advocacy, initiatives such as "Wiki
Project Palestine" and the Yahoo group "Wikipedians for Palestine" used the
Wikipedia platform to promote their ideological views, largely unopposed by the
Wikipedia community. CAMERA, however, was singled out by the administrators in
order to "send
a strong message to lobbying groups, campaigns and other advocacy
groups."

WIKIPEDIA AND THE NEUTRAL POINT
OF VIEW

With
nearly 60 million visitors a month and 10 million entries in 253 languages,
Wikipedia has become a primary resource for students across the world. A Google
search for almost any topic will return a Wikipedia entry at or near the top of
the list of results.

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But despite its popularity, Wikipedia does not always provide
the most accurate information. What sets the encyclopedia apart from other
sources is its reliance on the "wisdom of crowds" –
allowing any user who spots an error in any
entry to simply change it himself, anonymously if he
chooses.

Not surprisingly, this feature turns controversial topics such
as "Jerusalem" or "Terrorism" into battlegrounds between people with sharply
different agendas. To counter the problem, Wikipedia established the neutral
point of view (NPOV) as one of its guiding principles. The NPOV policy is
meant to ensure all sides are presented equally on a topic until a consensus
eventually emerges, a process that can take many months of intense debate.

Unfortunately, NPOV is another noble
goal not always applied equally by Wikipedia users. Dr. Oboler tracked the
activity of Wikipedia user Bangpound, an individual revealed to be EI staff
member Benjamin Doherty, who appears to be looking to spin EI’s view of CAMERA’s
campaign. Here is how Dr. Oboler describes his activity:

At 14:08 on April 21 EI boasted publicly to
someone thought to be a member of CAMERA’s staff that CAMERA and its editor have
been exposed. He links to the EI article about CAMERA [accusing CAMERA of a
Wikipedia conspiracy]. At 14:26 the same person edits the
CAMERA page making it say "CAMERA also attempts to use Wikipedia to
covertly disseminate discredited pro-Israeli propaganda."  They add
that EI have e-mails that "outlined an attempt to subvert Wikipedia
editorial controls and leadership structures" – an accusation designed
to make Wikipedia editors see red. At 14:44 they edited the
Wikipedia page on reliable sources adding "CAMERA cannot possibly be
considered a reliable source" and again they outline their accusations.
These edits appear aimed both to discredit CAMERA and to promote EI. It was
clever marketing as well as clever advocacy, and it took under half an hour.
[For the full transcripts of these edits see Dr.
Oboler’s research on Zionism on the Web].

But according to Dr. Oboler, EI’s manipulations on
Wikipedia pale in comparison to other pro-Palestinian groups such as "Wiki
Project Palestine" – an effort supposedly aimed at improving articles related to
Palestinian culture and society but misused to promote a political agenda, and
the Yahoo group "Wikipedians for Palestine."

The real organized effort [to recruit outsiders to
promote pro-Palestinian views on Wikipedia] appears to be from "Wikipedians for
Palestine," a group that was advertised to individuals both on Wikipedia and
through at least one Palestinian campaigning organization. That group was active
for over two years. It was detected, questions were raised on and off Wikipedia,
and then …nothing seemed to happen, then or now.

People commenting on the CAMERA case who were shown to
be involved in this Palestinian group first proclaimed the group’s innocence.
Then they made a number of misleading claims off Wikipedia, stating, for
example, that they "never recruited neophytes to edit Wikiepdia," and that their
group is "independent and never bankrolled and backed by any organization, let
alone one as well staffed and funded as CAMERA."  They were challenged by an
administrator to give access to their group so the archives could be checked, as
was done to CAMERA. They promptly deleted the group – destroying all
archives.

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Wikipedia apparently dropped the issue because no one
had infiltrated the group or had evidence revealing the content of the deleted
archives. According to Dr. Oboler, it is impossible to know exactly what it
accomplished over the past two years.

What is clear is that its claims on the group’s home
page were designed not only to defend themselves but also to attack CAMERA. The
group may or may not have actually recruited people who were not editors, but
they certainly tried to. The penalties to CAMERA are for trying to recruit
people, not for any problematic editing on Wikipedia (itself a very unusual
thing in a Wikiepdia investigation – normally only actions on Wikipedia are
considered).

COMMON FORMS OF ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS
ON WIKIPEDIA

Anti-Israel bias in Wikipedia takes three primary
forms: vandalism, blatantly false allegations, and attempts to marginalize the
Israeli perspective.

Vandalism, such as efforts to change Jerusalem to ‘Capital of
Palestine,’ tends to be relatively harmless. Editors discover these kinds of
changes quickly and "revert" them to the ‘community
consensus‘. Wikipedia allows editors to be notified by email if someone has
changed a favorite entry. It also keeps a history of all changes, making it easy
to restore the original content.

A more insidious form of bias is the use of false
information. An example can be seen on the ‘Egypt‘ ‘Camp David Accords‘
entry, where clear anti-Semitic incitement in the Egyptian press was dismissed
as simple ‘Anti-Zionist criticism’. This entry alone attracts 150,000 viewers a
year, and the related ‘Egypt‘ entry, which doesn’t
mention the issue at all, is viewed 3.5 million times annually.

More common are attempts to marginalize Israeli and
Zionist content and lend more weight to the Palestinian or Arab narrative. The
entry "Massacres
committed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war," for example, lists only those
allegedly committed by Jews. Another example is the original ‘Hebrews‘ entry, which fails to
mention the undisputed fact that Jews always prayed in Hebrew, and that it
became their primary everyday language in Israel since the early 20th
century.

This category also includes entries that serve to
diminish the perception of threats against Israel. For example, several Iran
articles are apologetic about Iranian president Mahmoud
Admadinejad’s calls for erasing Israel from the map, reassuringly explaining
the threat as mistranslation of Farsi, which supposedly only meant ‘erase off
the pages of time.’ However they fail to mention that the same slogan was also
painted on ballistic missiles in Iranian army parades.

PRO-PALESTINIAN ADVOCACY:
WIKIPROJECT PALESTINE

A WikiProject is a Wikipedia’s community feature
allowing people with common interests to collaborate on particular encyclopedia
topics. A project’s homepage is essentially a central billboard allowing users
to share articles of interest with the Wikipedia community.

The ‘Palestine
Project‘ goals, stated on its page, fall within the accepted Wikipedia
guidelines:  To "Maintain information on Palestine including history, culture,
geography and contemporary political, socio-economic and ideological context;
Improve Palestine-related articles by expansion, verification and copyediting."
And finally: "Be thorough and watch for POV in particularly controversial
articles."

Despite the warning, however, the actual content
promoted by the project appears geared towards online advocacy. There are 210
articles marked as "high importance". About half are related to the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Many appear because of their influence on public opinion on the
Palestinian cause.

In its hall of fame for best articles, the Palestine
Project page lists four best biographies. One is by Norman
Finkelstein, a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, whose
controversial bestseller "The Holocaust Industry" accused Jews of exploiting the
Holocaust for financial and political gain.

There is also a large number of small articles that
appear to have been posted to add weight to the Project’s page, giving it the
appearance of significant substance. Many of these articles are posted by
anonymous users so that they will be difficult to track. This is particularly
suspicious behavior considering the community-building nature of
WikiProjects.

According to Dr. Oboler, the entire project appears to
be an organized effort to promote the Palestinian point of view on
Wikipedia.

In trying to kill off an attempt by CAMERA to get
pro-Israel people involved in Wikipedia, Electronic Intifada may just have
thrown a spotlight on the real and far more successful campaign to control
Wikipedia… the campaign that caused CAMERA so much concern in the first
place.

THE PROBLEMS ON
WIKIPEDIA

A study of
user involvement on Social Media sites such as Wikipedia suggests that only 1%
of site visitors become heavy contributors. But according to Dr. Oboler, the
involvement of more people and greater diversity ultimately benefits sites like
Wikipedia:

CAMERA was right about the problems on Wikipedia.
People should consider getting involved in Wikipedia and making use of the
resources they have (such as books) to improve the accuracy of articles they
take an interest in (on any topic imaginable). The first goal must be to improve
Wikipedia. That this helps reverse manipulation of the truth is one side effect.
Good well-sourced arguments will not only expose mistakes, they will also make
Wikipedia better.

Editing Wikipedia is not hard and, in time, people will
learn how it works and become part of the community. If you do want to get
involved, pay attention to the policies, the five pillars and other information
you will be shown when you join. If you run into problems there are plenty of
people on Wikipedia more than happy to help or provide clarity about Wikipedia
itself.

The truth will win out, but someone needs to make sure
it is heard, footnoted and properly sourced.

Dr. Oboler is also a post-doctoral fellow in
Political Science at Bar-Ilan University where he is researching online public
diplomacy. This research covers Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Earth and
Wikipedia among others online platforms. More on his research can be seen at 
http://www.zionismontheweb.org/internet_warfare/
. Details on Wikipedia (the background data of which was shared with
HonestReporting) are being added during this week.

HonestReporting.
com

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