Aaron Bandler

Lir conducted video interviews with 19 veteran Jewish editors between February and August 2025. Most remain active on the platform, though several have stopped editing. There was a “great sense of fear” among the editors to even talk about the subject, Lir told JNS. Some participants kept their cameras off during Zoom interviews, and one used a pseudonym. “Editing on Wikipedia is a great part of their identity, and the fear of being banned is great,” she said. “Some of the conversations were very alarming.”

“It’s yet another example of the Wikipedia editors’ anti-Israel bias,” Alyza Lewin, president of U.S. affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, told JNS. “They modify entries to support a distorted narrative that erases Jewish history and the Jewish experience. This time they added the word ‘blockaded’ to try and justify Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 massacre.” The claim on the Wikipedia page recalls statements from anti-Israel protesters, “who claim that ‘resistance is justified’ or U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s assertion that Oct. 7 ‘did not happen in a vacuum,’” Lewin said.

The Guess Who (including some of Randy Bachman’s BTO songs)

Sanger submitted an application on Friday for community approval on his proposed “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity” for contributors who believe in helping “reinforce Wikipedia’s original, firm commitment to intellectual diversity.” The crowdsourced online encyclopedia defines a “WikiProject” as being a “group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia” focused on specific topic areas. The initiative had a series of goals, including making Wikipedia’s decision-making processes more transparent, expanding the number of usable sources and reinforcing “genuine neutrality.”

TarnishedPath and another editor, “Sean.hoyland,” were accused of repeatedly defending “M.Bitton,” an anti-Israel editor who was recently banned from Wikipedia, and, in so doing, of violating Wikipedia policy against turning the site into “a battleground between factions.” One administrator initially imposed a 90-day ban on TarnishedPath from editing articles related to the conflict over conduct on the talk page for Wikipedia’s main Zionism entry, separate from the original complaint. After reviewing the editor’s broader conduct, other administrators escalated the sanction to an indefinite topic ban. Sean.hoyland received an informal warning, a notice from administrators cautioning that further problematic conduct could lead to sanctions.

Making that accusation against the Jewish state is “offensive,” and “it’s obvious that it was a response to one of the most brutal atrocities in the last 100 years,” Hilton told JNS, of Israel’s reaction to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. Using the term “genocide” to “describe a legitimate act of self-defense is preposterous and offensive,” Hilton said.

The author thinks that the war against the Islamic Republic is going well, but he thinks that the regime has an apocalyptic vision, in which adherents wind up in paradise. “We’ve had these negotiations, which are completely fruitless, because the Iranians over the past four to five decades have turned protracted negotiation into a tooth-pulling art form,” Black told JNS. “They’ll do anything to buy an hour, to buy a day, to buy 30 minutes.” “They’re on their way to making nuclear bombs to destroy humanity, because they want to destroy humanity, because they feel that on the ashes of an incinerated civilization, they will rise to their paradise,” he said. “There is no opportunity for compromise with these guys,” Black added.

Rosen recognized that the vandalism “was rooted in antisemitism, even if it had not been prosecuted as a hate crime,” Lewin said. Removing the district attorney “for recognizing discrimination against his people and saying publicly that he’s determined to try and protect Jews from antisemitism and that’s one of the things that motivates him and his work—that’s a statement that if it were made by someone who is a member of any other minority or ethnic group, everyone would recognize and support,” she told JNS. “It’s only when a Jew makes that statement that now that becomes a basis for disqualifying them,” she said.

The two are “veteran and highly influential,” Lir told JNS. The committee’s decision “should be understood not only as an expression of internal awakening but also as the result of growing external pressure,” over the ways that Wikipedia handles bias, according to the Israeli researcher. “According to current assessments, the issue involves a much broader network of nearly 100 editors, who have operated, or continue to operate, according to similar patterns, only a small number of whom have actually been blocked,” she told JNS.