Wikipedia co-founder says page on ‘Gaza genocide’ locked due to anti-Israel bias

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia, one of the most-read websites in the world, said that an entry on the site titled “Gaza genocide,” was locked due to its bias against Israel.

In a comment posted on the article’s talk page on Sunday, Wales wrote that the page in question “fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention.”

In a rare move, the article was locked by Wikipedia editors last week to prevent any further editing until either Tuesday night “or until editing disputes have been resolved,” in a banner that noted that the freeze on editing was “not an endorsement of the current version.”

In his statement on Sunday, Wales noted that the article in question states, “in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested.”

Israel has repeatedly and strongly pushed back against any claim that it carried out genocidal acts in Gaza, asserting that it was fighting Hamas operatives embedded in the civilian population and that it did everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, including evacuation warnings ahead of airstrikes.

In September, a United Nations commission of inquiry declared that Israel had committed genocide in the Strip, while a case before the International Court of Justice on the issue is still pending.

Wales said that the article page is a “particularly egregious example” of the issue of “neutrality” in Wikipedia articles, and that the current version violates the site’s demand for a neutral point of view and “requires immediate correction.”

The current opening sentence of the page in question read, as of Tuesday afternoon: “The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war.”

Wales wrote that a neutral and unbiased opening line would instead “begin with a formulation such as: ‘Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.’”

In setting instructions for Wikipedia editors working on the entry, Wales wrote that he expects them to “attribute, don’t assert,” and that the article “must not declare a legal conclusion.” It must include sources “from all sides — governments, courts, NGOs, commentators.”

He also noted that he has been leading a “working group” to study issues of neutrality in Wikipedia articles on a variety of topics, including Zionism, and that there is “much more work to do.”

Last week, tech billionaire and X owner Elon Musk launched “Grokipedia,” a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that he is seeking to position as a rival to Wikipedia.

Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit.

Wikipedia for months has been a target of the political right. Republican lawmakers in the US Congress launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

AP contributed to this report.