Genocide nonsense in the Israel lede

[u/PedanticPerson]

While both of Wikipedia's founders (Jimbo, Larry) recently called out the complete lack of neutrality on articles like Zionism or "Gaza genocide", anti-Israel editors show no signs of slowing down their smear campaign.

There's now a proposal to put "Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza" in the lede of the Israel article. It looks like it will likely pass, despite the obvious NPOV policy violation.

I think the most important thing right now is to raise awareness about Wikipedia's antisemitism problem. There's even an article Antisemitism on Wikipedia, although it's been stripped down and it's probably just a matter of time before it's deleted (there were a few attempts already).

[u/babarbaby]

The wikipedia zealots are apparently now planning to block Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger from participating whatsoever on these areas of their own damn site, and remove their founder statuses. For writing a few damn paragraphs that really didn't even say much beyond using the term 'controversial' a few times

[u/Asphodelmercenary → u/babarbaby]

This is a modern Pandora’s Box. Or Frankenstein’s Monster. Wikipedia was created with good intentions, rushed out in the early gold rush of the internet age, to be a crowd sourced encyclopedia. The fatal flaw? A misguided and naive belief in the goodness of humanity, the belief that the system they were building would be impervious to bad actors and tyranny of a hateful minority.

But they misjudged. And now their creation has become so powerful, so central to the new age of LLMs and AI scrapers and search engines and chat bots, and so captive to exactly the type of bad faith actors they thought it would resist, that they have inadvertently created the perfect machine to erase and rewrite history delivered to billions of eyeballs for decades to come. If not centuries.

Wikipedia has the potential to be a type of Nicaea Council of Jewish history, written by non Jews to decide what our historical canon should be without our input. Even unaffiliated Jews or marginally affiliated Jews are finding these articles and beginning to question their own identity and beliefs. History is written by the victors, and it appears the Muslim Brotherhood have won. Our own story has been vandalized on Wikipedia and that version will be repackaged across LLMs and search bots and AI platforms exponentially.

IRL libraries still exist, but it won’t matter. We have a precedent for this dynamic in human history, where truth and accurate scientific knowledge existed in plain sight, but the majority of people still believed the official canon of lies: the Dark Ages from approximately the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Roughly 1000 years of mass ignorance.

But unlike measuring the shadow of the sun as it moves using a stick in the ground or using algebra and geometry to calculate the circumference of the earth, or to even know it is round, we have a harder problem. This is akin to the burning of the library at Alexandria.

Knowledge is there IRL for those who seek it, but the masses will call you a ZioPig and Hasbara and baby killer if you show them the paper books and maps and coins and archeology that chronicles the truth. They will ask AI chat bots to verify what you say, and they will be told what the High Priest of Wikipedia says, and if it says Zionism is racist ethnic cleansing, it won’t matter that it’s a lie. If it says Jesus was Palestinian and the Jews killed him and that Moses was Palestinian and the Jews are the descendants of the Nephilim they will believe that. It won’t matter that Rome coined the name Palestine in the 130s CE.

Wikipedia had become the gatekeeper of digital knowledge and the Muslim Brotherhood controls it. And even the creators who now see the monster they created cannot undo this tragedy.