https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
I continued reading through the talk page and eventually come across this:
> the United States government is exerting serious political pressure on Wikipedia as a whole to reveal the real life identities of many editors here who disagree with the current military actions of the government of Israel.
I have not heard about this before, what specifically is this about, if it's true?
But so what? Is that unlawful in the US somehow today? That sounds absolutely bananas to be honest, aren't people supposed to have "true" freedom of speech, including being allowed to be biased against or for Israel?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
Of course, you could be pedantic and say 'but freedom of expression isn't freedom of speech' but that would be precisely the kind of thing that continues to perpetrate the myth. A theoretical freedom on some narrow issue does not do much in competition with a much broader actual freedom. And that's the 2024 version, your guess about what the 2025 edition of that index looks like, I'm thinking not nearly as good for the USA. Blackmailing universities for starters.
Is a metalaw restricting the laws Congress can set.
Freedom of speech seems to be commonly regarded as having a far wider scope than it actually does. IANAL.
In war the first casualty is truth.
I always think of what was claimed to happened in video "collateral murder"
Where US killed several people , because a reporters telephoto lens was mistaked of a rocket launcher, when viewed from a few KM away - OR so we are told.
Here is the letter from two US congressmen, requesting information from Wikipedia, including "Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by [Wikipedia's arbitration committee]": https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
I've definitely noticed this a lot more lately on Wikipedia where an article will be really quick to label something as "pseudohistory" or "pseudoscience" or likewise in the summary. Sometimes it makes sense, but there are quite a few articles where the difference between "crackpot" theories and acceptable "fringe" areas of study are fairly subjective. Or that someone feels the need to stand up a separate page about "denialism" of a topic where it was largely unnecessary.
And even for actual pseudoscience topics like Flat Earth Theory - the page has so much good information on it. But the summary on the page is terrible and does not even reflect a good summary of the page's own content! Mostly because people feel an unnecessary need to shoehorn in assessments of the myth status of the theory.
He also said it in a '"high profile media interview about the article'.
I say "it's only highly contested by Israel".
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/jewish-notable...
Here's another one: Holodomor is also contested in many places - only 34 countries recognize it. Crazy world.
You're incorrect. The Holodomor was an implementation of the clearly set policy to subdue peasantry and "clean up" rich peasants (the rich peasant were basically any peasant who wasn't completely destitute) as peasants weren't carriers of proper communist ideology (only dirt poor village laborers who didn't have their own land/horse/etc. were considered to be ideologically close to proletariat).
Where it gets a murky for some people not well knowing history of Russian Empire and USSR is whether Holodomor was a genocide of Ukrainians or genocide of peasants.
As it happens the Ukrainian people and their language were spread far beyond modern Ukraine and well into all those agricultural fertile lands where Holodomor happened: http://iamruss.ru/little-russians-on-the-1897-census/
The peasants in those fertile areas did better because of Nature as well as because of history - those weren't classic Russian territories where peasants had been enslaved for centuries, and thus the peasants there were more close to US/European farmers than to classic Russian poor peasant. Thus they became target.
So while more evidence point to it being genocide of peasants, one can't dismiss that the majority impacted were Ukrainians, and that is especially pronounced in the areas, further from the modern Ukraine, where peasants were mostly Ukrainians while cities, due to cities naturally speaking Imperial language (i.e. Russian in this case) and having recent large influx of Russian speaking population due to industrialization, were mostly Russian.
There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.
But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.
> The Israeli government ... denying that their military operations constitute genocide.
You have to scroll pretty far to find it.
I think Jimbo is saying, NPOV would have that assertion much higher, even in the lede.
Every genocide is contested by the people doing it and its apologists. Let's imagine someone commented on the holocaust wikipedia page:
> I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Holocaust "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Nazi Germany committed genocide, although that claim is highly contested.
This would rightly trigger a lot of outrage. Yes, it's also accurate to say that it's "highly contested". Honestly this really highlights issues with striving for "neutrality", when there is bias in the people defining what neutrality is.
This is what makes Wikipedia good.
LOL
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_and_legal_responses_t...
But I can't fault him for reminding the terminally-online people who volunteer to be Wikipedia editors of the value of neutrality when you're the steward of the world's shared understanding of itself.
They actually make more money every year from the interest on their endowment than they do from donations at this point.
(All the more argument that they should be knocking off the massive nags though)
From the very article itself:
> Others said that Wales did not have control over Wikipedia, and was only an editor like anyone else, but had been “trying to pull an authority-based argument while promoting a book”.
>“I'm not sure Jimbo's plea needs to be entertained much beyond demonstrating that current consensus is something different than what he thinks it should be,” one user said.
Wikipedia editors do not actually consider Jim to be an authority on the matter. They ask him to substantiate his claim that the "Gaza genocide" article is not "neutral" in voice. They don't really seem to care about what he thinks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
The page is currently only protected until November 4th.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrato...
Wikipedia has over 400 active accounts who can turn on article protection. They include such diverse people as current CS professors and someone who wants you to know on their page that soccer is more important than life and death, and a person who's personal page opens with a picture of their feet. In fact, the Jimbo Wales account is not currently an administrator. Jimmy could not have locked the article.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those accounts spend more time and effort espousing wiki editing philosophy than any other topic.
It seems this happens in many places where the opportunity presents itself. StackOverflow seems to suffer from a similar (not identical) issue.
Wikipedia has been targeted lately as part of a marketing effort for grokipedia.
I recommend taking this as a grain of salt.
If we look at the following article "Casualties of the Gaza war" [2]. If you read link (108) you see a Guardian article "Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war" [3], which says:
> Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
See how the language in the article itself walks back the strong claim. The argument made is that all persons not in the Israeli military intelligence database are automatically civilians. If there was a similar Israeli database of confirmed non-combatants, and this only contained 17% of the people who have died, would this mean that the remaining 83% were military? Of course not. And this all assumes that these databases are actually accurate.
Then we must ask ourselves, how are the number of deaths in total calculated? How do we know that each death is attributed to Israeli actions? How many deaths are due to direct action and secondary action (i.e. illness, dehydration, starvation)?
When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda. How much of what we currently see is propaganda?
I think we need to think extremely carefully and consider all possibilities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20250821135825/https://www.thegu...
> It is a bad faith read of the community when suggesting that among the most read and debated articles on the community is poorly done. there has been dozens of hours of discussion and rfcs galore to reach this version of the article and im certain there will be more. Consensus is always evolving but this article represents the latest consensus.
Seems very reasonable to me.
angelgonzales•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia.
The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that.
As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique definition they’re loudly committed to, all of which makes the entire debate self obsessed.
angelgonzales•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not.
> If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article
It would be worthless. Also, futile. You think when the world’s governments can’t agree on what genocide is, a random editorial decision at Wikipedia will control?
> the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency
It’s a goal, but certainly not the goal. Truth isn’t a mathematical schema, particularly when it comes to social constructs like genocide.
angelgonzales•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•5h ago
It’s useless and futile to this problem.
It could be useful. But as a compliment to Wikipedia. And not in adjudicating something like the definition of genocide.
> should be logically derived
Not really an option for social constructs, which rely on consensus more than logical consistency. You could create LLMs that logically derive an answer from a definition. But that is a semantic punt with extra steps (unless the LLM controls martial forces).
undeveloper•6h ago