Arabic-language Wikipedia filled with terrorist propaganda, bias – report

The Arabic-language version of Wikipedia has been compromised by systemic bias and extremist propaganda, raising serious concerns about the integrity of one of the world’s most widely used sources of information, according to a report published Tuesday by the World Jewish Congress.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the popular crowdsourced encyclopedia site, responded to the report by saying that a number of its claims lacked context and sufficient scientific rigor.

Key articles related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel repeatedly violate Wikipedia’s core neutrality policies and rely heavily on sources affiliated with terrorist organizations and propaganda outlets, according to the WJC, which represents Jewish communities in 100 countries.

In some cases, it said, as much as 50 percent of citations in articles originate from propaganda put out by Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are frequently described as legitimate resistance factions, while attacks on civilians are labeled “martyrdom operations,” the report found. Some articles refer to designated terrorists as “martyrs” and celebrate suicide bombings and attacks on civilians as historical “achievements.”

Facilitating this are influential administrators within the Arabic site’s leadership who have publicly rejected Wikipedia’s neutrality principle as a “Western concept,” WJC charged. Editors attempting to introduce neutral language or verified facts have reportedly been blocked or banned.

The dangers of such misinformation go beyond the site’s readers, WJC noted. Information on the site provides fodder for training artificial intelligence models and influences search results, which may lead to further propagation to users in various languages worldwide, it said.

“When terrorist propaganda and hate-driven narratives are allowed to masquerade as neutral information, the consequences extend far beyond Wikipedia itself,” said Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the WJC’s Institute for Technology and Human Rights (TecHRI).

“Ensuring that this knowledge remains factual is particularly critical as emerging AI platforms increasingly rely on multilingual information sources to formulate responses to user queries.”

Wikipedia is one of the most widely visited sites in the world, with an estimated 3.3 billion monthly visits. The site has been criticized frequently for allowing antisemitism to spread unchecked.

The Arabic site gets about 95 million hits a month, according to SEO company Ahrefs.

WJC called on the Wikimedia Foundation to increase oversight and implement new monitoring mechanisms to ensure that local administrative biases do not override global policies. Until these reforms are made, AI companies should treat Arabic-language Wikipedia as a high-risk source, it said.

In a response, the Wikimedia Foundation said several findings in the report “appear to either ignore important editorial context or conflate the views of a single Wikipedia editor with the platform standards and safeguards set by Arabic language Wikipedia’s larger volunteer community.”

Wikimedia said the authors of the report failed to provide details of their research methodology, and that their findings were not shared with Wikimedia prior to the report’s publication.

“Neutrality is one of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies,” the organization said. “We welcome rigorous, good-faith research that helps improve Wikipedia — which this is not.”