Thread by @bandlersbanter

My latest on @Wikipedia in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Wikipedia Editors Add “Gaza Genocide” to “List of Genocides” Article
Editor who “closed” the debate says that “we follow the scholarly sources.” jewishjournal.com/news/united-st…

The discussion over whether or not to add “Gaza genocide” to the list began in July; those in favor argued that it was only natural to include after an article title was changed from “Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza” to “Gaza genocide” earlier the month. They also argued that it fits the list’s inclusion criteria for “acts which are recognized in significant scholarship as genocides” and that other genocides on the list are considered controversial, such as Rohingya genocide and Darfur genocide. Those opposed to inclusion contended that the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip is too widely disputed to warrant mentioning it in a neutral voice (wikivoice) in the article, especially when the International Court of Justice has yet to make a ruling on the matter.

The discussion was a formal discussion known as a Request for Comment (RfC), where editors put in their “!votes” with their stated position and rationale on the dispute at hand; oftentimes, a closer (an uninvolved Wikipedian in good standing) renders a verdict on the discussion based on the numbers and the strength of site policy arguments. British Wikipedian Stuart Marshall ultimately closed the discussion in September, finding consensus in favor of inclusion based “on the strength of the arguments …  and it’s not close … I discarded the argument that scholars haven’t reached a conclusion on whether the Gaza genocide is really taking place,” Marshall wrote. “The matter remains contested, but there’s a metric truckload of scholarly sources linked in this discussion that show a clear predominance of academics who say that it is. I discarded the argument that it is for the U.N. or the International Courts to decide what’s a genocide and what isn’t. This is Wikipedia, where we follow the scholarly sources.”

One editor with many years at Wikipedia, almost entirely outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict topic area, told me: “When he says ‘we follow the scholars,’ he’s saying ‘we follow a subset of sources guaranteed to find Israel guilty of everything, including the Lindbergh kidnapping’… Anti-Israel bias is baked into the Wikipedia power structure, as he could have easily used his discretion not to have Wikipedia accuse Israel of genocide in ‘wikivoice.’” Another editor told me that “when you have a field filled with partisanship, ‘a predominance of academics’ means nothing. It’s about quality of scholarship, plain and simple, and maintaining a robust and self-critical neutrality that is not common enough in a space currently filled with an abundance of veiled politicking.”

One editor, however, defended Marshall as “a veteran closer” who has made numerous closes in the topic area and “usually does it by the book”; there were no irregularities in the close that would warrant it be overturned, the editor told me.  “I think he was right to discard some of the arguments that either argued against the system, or argued against academia,” the editor argued, adding that while The Economist is considered a reliable source on Wikipedia, it is an opinion piece and is “just not on the level of peer-reviewed academic journal articles. It can still be used in the article but would probably be attributed although it may not need to be for facts since Economist is generally reliable. But as far as its heft in the discussion, I think Marshall is probably in line with the community sentiment on how to handle it in that dispute.”

That said, the editor said they “roughly agree” with arguments in the RfC that the sourcing isn’t strong enough to put it in wikivoice and argued that “people should do a better job of impeaching the credibility and bias of academics who are anti-Israel, while finding more good sources that are somewhat balanced or pro-Israel. The other side successfully impeaches the credibility of ‘Zionist’ scholars and American Jewish scholars … I think a big part of what burnishes scholarly credibility has to do with expertise, publications and bylines, citations in other RS, affiliations with reputable institutions, etc… This all has to be analyzed and argued by editors in the RfC, like a court case where you need to construct evidence and have a case with different pillars and premises.”

A source survey highlighting where various academics stand on whether or not Israel’s actions in Gaza are tantamount to a genocide was cited in the RfC; the same survey can be found on the top of the talk page on the Wikipedia “Gaza genocide” article. Two of my editor sources pointed to a couple of the scholars’ cited in the survey should be discounted, such as a French sociologist and anthropologist writing an op-ed in Le Monde quoting someone from Jewish Voice for Peace and an international relations professor being interviewed in Anadolu Agency, the Turkish state-run media outlet that Wikipedia considers as being generally unreliable on international politics and contentious topics. “He’s literally quoting an activist in an [Le Monde] op-ed,” an editor who grew disillusioned with Wikipedia after making thousands of edits told me. “That means nothing regarding scholarly consensus and would very rarely even be proper for an article.” Regarding the Anadolu Agency citation in the survey, the editor said that “if the highest quality source for something like this would be, say, a well-known professor of international law publishing a peer-reviewed paper in a high-quality academic journal, then this guy who’s in an ‘adjacent’ field with no specific expertise giving his unreviewed opinion in the state-run media of an enemy state is not very high.” Further, the editor noted that establishing the majority view among scholars “is also somewhat of a numbers game as whoever has more people looking is likely to find more sources supporting their side. There are thousands of academics in many fields.”

That said, another editor told me that “the lack of pro-Israel academics is one of the major gaps here.”

It is also worth noting that the current inclusion criteria in the “List of Genocides” article was changed in April from “that are recognised in significant scholarship as genocides in line with the legal definition of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide” to its current iteration after enough editors argued that it would be better to simply follow what the scholars say as opposed to having it be narrowly toward the 1948 definition and follows the criteria for other lists on Wikipedia. “This definitely seems to be related to recent politics and this sort of discarding precedent, moving target and ground shifting under us is one of the major challenges,” an editor said.

Read the full story here: jewishjournal.com/news/united-st…

Here is my prior article on how Wikipedia editors titled an article "Gaza genocide"

https://x.com/bandlersbanter/status/1818461874897260977

And here is my @JewishJournal cover story from May explaining the basics of how Wikipedia works, and some tactics used by editors to spread bias

https://x.com/bandlersbanter/status/1795913613930037252