It was briefly touched on a few posts up, but I've been meaning to write a longer post about the recent Gaza and Jimbo Wales drama.
Back on September 21, an RfC was closed declaring that Wikipedia would state, unequivocally in wikivoice, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The discussion is long:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_12#RfC_on_first_sentence
The closing admin was
User:Beland, who wrote a long justification, but one sentence seems to expose the main reason: "Option 1 was favored in more than a 2:1 ratio, and this determined the outcome." !vote indeed.
As a result, the following introductory paragraph was tacked on to the intro in an edit right after the close:
The '''Gaza genocide''' is the ongoing [[genocide|systematic destruction]] of the [[Palestinians|Palestinian]] people in Gaza by [[Israel]] during the Gaza war by means of blockade, invasion, and bombing of the strip with the manifest [[Genocidal intent|intent]] of [[Thirty-seventh government of Israel|senior Israeli leaders]] in the context of the [[Gaza war|war]] that is taking place there. This characterization of Israel's campaign in Gaza is supported by a wide academic consensus.
Of course, it's had many revisions since then.
This decision rippled across the encyclopedia. For example, there is now a
Gaza genocide denial article which aims to treat it like Holocaust denial.
I know many Farmers are not fans of Israel, but in my view it is inconsistent with the neutrality policy to state unequivocally that this is a genocide. One could say that Israel has committed atrocities or war crimes in Gaza, but a genocide is something rather specific and it is highly contentious that this is really Israel's policy.
However, overall this is probably a good development. For years, liberals have said that right-wingers hate Wikipedia because it tells the truth. Reality has a well-known liberal bias! But there's a large contingent of Jewish liberals who have leftist views on culture war issues (BLM/trans/etc.) who would support all of Wikipedia's disinformation on these topics, but who also support Israel, and now have to face the fact that Wikipedia's processes produce fake and gay articles. In other words, the number of people who see that Wikipedia is an untrustworthy and fake encyclopedia will substantially grow as a result of this.
This brings us to Jimbo Wales, (co-)founder of Wikipedia (so far as I know fully Gentile), who has had a positive relationship with Israel over the years. He was asked about the article by a reporter, and said it was "just terrible". He then posted a long, characteristically smug and didactic, comment to the Gaza genocide talk page:
Transcript of interview:
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ampr/date/2025-11-03/segment/01
The reaction from users was overwhelmingly negative. Should we cover both sides of the flat-earth controversy? Checkmate! The general sentiment was that the decision to call it a genocide was thoroughly considered before being made. One user made a comparison to covering both sides of the "race and IQ" debate (ha!). Meanwhile, Larry Sanger weighed in in support of Jimbo's positions, a rare case of the two agreeing.
For context, let us not forget that Jimbo has defended Wikipedia's terrible coverage of other topics over the years. For example, he defended the Gamergate article's accuracy. This may be the first case that made him critical of Wikipedia's processes.
The entire talk page section on Jimbo's comment was eventually collapsed by user Fram (remember Fram?) on the grounds of "Much, much more heat than light."
This drama seems to have largely petered out, although debate continues on the talk page about every choice of wording. However, in a hilarious aside to all of this, several idiot journos published pieces mis-reporting that Jimbo had locked the Gaza genocide article because of these concerns (which, by the way, he no longer has the authority to do). This falsehood was published in such diverse sources as Al-Jazeera and the Times of Israel:
Reliable sources indeed.
They did later change the articles to fix this.
