Biased Wikipedia edits on Israel, Oct. 7 remain on site despite editor bans, ADL says

Years of biased editing on Wikipedia’s pages about Hamas, Zionism and the October 7 onslaught remain largely uncorrected, while a new group of contributors continues to shape the encyclopedia’s coverage, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The report, published Thursday by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society, found that, although six editors had been banned from the topics and three were barred from editing on the site altogether, none of their work was systematically reviewed, let alone corrected.

It also finds that biased editing has continued quietly, using subtle techniques like undoing other editors’ changes, hedging factual claims, and rebuilding articles slowly so that no single edit draws attention.

The report is a follow-up to an investigation ADL published in March 2025 that identified what the US antisemitism watchdog described as a coordinated, multiyear campaign by approximately 30 editors to inject antisemitic and anti-Israel narratives into the online encyclopedia.

Since that investigation, congressional, federal and media scrutiny caused coordinated editing by bad actors to plummet by 95 percent, while tandem editing on the same articles declined by 88%, the report said.

Despite this, however, biased editing has continued through less conspicuous methods, ADL said. It identified 19 accounts actively editing Israel- and Palestine-related articles, including eight members of the original group who avoided sanctions and 11 newly identified accounts.

These biased pages continue to flow into AI training pipelines and search engine results, influencing how millions of readers encounter this information, ADL said.

“Banning individual editors was never going to be enough,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “The pages that millions of people read, and that AI tools learn from, still bear the marks of a systematic disinformation campaign that Wikipedia itself has sanctioned but never cleaned up.”

One of the report’s central examples concerns the Wikipedia entry on Hamas. According to the ADL, three days after the terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, an editor moved much of the article’s material on Hamas’s antisemitism, use of human shields, child combatants and human rights abuses to a separate page titled Criticism of Hamas.

The move made it less visible to readers of the main article, which was receiving close to one million views a day right after the attack, the report said. Even today, the main article’s lead does not identify Hamas as a designated terrorist organization until the very end of the first section, ADL noted.

Another example involves the Gaza war article. In November 2023, a user called Iskandar323 removed approximately 17,000 characters of text and citations documenting evidence of atrocities committed during the Hamas-led October 7 attack that started the war, according to the report. The removed material included forensic accounts of victims who were bound and burned, evidence relating to sexual violence, and video evidence of an attempted decapitation. Roughly 7,400 additional characters were removed two days later.

The remaining text refers to terrorists who “reportedly engaged” in such violence, leaving a substantially diminished account of the forensic evidence, the ADL said.

Iskandar323 was subsequently banned from Wikipedia altogether after continuing to edit in violation of an earlier topic ban. However, 346 of 382 edits by the account remain intact across six articles, ADL said.

The ADL also highlighted the Wikipedia article on Zionism, whose introduction defines the movement as having been achieved “through colonization” and says Zionists sought a state with “as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” Wikipedia editors have themselves flagged the characterization as disputed, ADL noted.

One contributor, identified by the ADL as DMH223344, made 543 edits to the Zionism article, adding approximately 193,000 characters and removing about 188,000 so the article appeared almost unchanged in length while its contents were substantially altered, the report said.

For Wikipedia’s coverage of sexual violence during the October 7 attack, 19 accounts were responsible for 832 of 9,576 revisions across four related articles and their discussion pages, ADL found. Regarding Shiri Bibas and her young sons, Kfir and Ariel, whose bodies were returned to Israel in February 2025, one editor made 64 changes to the relevant article and its discussion page in the weeks after their return.

The ADL’s findings are based on an analysis of Wikipedia’s public editing records. The organization acknowledges that overlapping editing activity does not, on its own, establish coordination, but argues that the patterns it documented warrant a systematic review.

While increased scrutiny and enforcement have reduced the visible signs of coordination, they haven’t necessarily led to corrections in the resulting content, ADL said. It also cautioned that a decline in public coordination likely reflects a shift to less visible methods rather than the complete disappearance of coordinated activity.

“Even in cases where the Wikipedia community took some modicum of action against editors who went against their policies, the activities of that banned editor remain,” noted Daniel Kelley, the ADL’s senior director of its Center for Technology and Society.

While the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has announced investments in anti-abuse measures, including stronger detection of ban evasion and coordinated inauthentic behavior, those measures do not address the failure to review existing articles after editors have been sanctioned, ADL said.

The report calls on the organization to conduct a structured audit of articles substantially edited by contributors banned for non-neutral conduct, beginning with the six prominent entries examined in the report. It also urges search engines and AI developers to disclose when Wikipedia is the source of an answer, consider editorial caveats for contested topics, and update their indexes after documented corrections.