Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I think Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow. The model would write the article using all publicly available information. This would enable the article to feature all perspectives on the issue to avoid “lying by omission”. Articles would instead be overviews and about a topic rather than appearing biased to a particular set of talking points and coverage. Summary is much more approachable and benefits people who want to learn all about a topic rather than those who seek confirmation reinforcement. I think the end result of this would be that people would be equally happy/unhappy with Wikipedia because the rules would be applied to every article equally and would be a place to go when users didn’t know what to prompt while apps like Grok/ChatGPT are resources used when people already have a question prepared. I agree with Jimmy’s opinion that Wikipedia is not a place to adjudicate disagreements.
From the headline, one might assume he directly edited or locked the page when he just commented on the article's discussion page that it should have a more neutral tone.
The Gaza page in question is not very good though. To be honest, this is one of the most eggregious pieces of bad information on Wikipedia I have seen yet.
Don't take my word for it, look up the sources yourself. The formality at least is decent, so you can look up the sources most statements in the article itself are based on.
In that context, I think "neutral tone" can quite safely be read as an euphemism.
There is no good solution to solve this dilemma specifically, good to see that Wales still cares.
Jimmy Wales is not asking for a neutral tone. He's asking for a change in the content of the article: specifically, it must no longer state that Israel is committing a genocide.
The "problem" is that almost all of the sources that Wikipedia typically considers reliable now say that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. Wikipedia editors discussed the sources ad nauseam and came to this conclusion.
Jimmy Wales wants them to just reverse that decision, regardless of what high-quality sources say. He's saying that Wikipedia should treat denials by various governments as being of equal reliability as academic journal articles studying the issue. So if Marco Rubio goes in front of a microphone and says, "There's no genocide in Gaza," that should be treated as an equally valid source as a dozen academics who study genocide publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Needless to say, what Jimmy Wales is demanding goes against Wikipedia's policies on sourcing and neutrality. "Both sides" is not always neutral.
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
> 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.
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 should be said that he is not advocating for a “we need to hear both sides” sort of disingenuous argument common among right wing rhetoric but a sense of balanced intellectual humility (even if I believe the behavior and evidence strongly supports the view that Israel is aiming for something akin to genocide) - whether this is a hill he (Wales) should dying on is also another matter.
I mostly agree with Jimmy's statement [1] which is far more neutral than this article. I have concerns, though. It is difficult to find good sources without a large political bent.
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.
This is how the "Wikipedia Row" "Erupted" at Jimmy Wales:
> 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.
The Armenian genocide killed approx 1 million out of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey in an attempt to wipe them out which is kind of where the term genocide originated. I don't think the Armenians attacked the Turks or took hostages or anything like that.
In Gaza maybe 3% of the population has been killed, partly as a side effect to fighting back against Hamas after they attacked and took hostages.
I guess it depends how you define the terms. Maybe we need some new term for trying to wipe out a people as opposed to causing casualties in war against people who attacked you?
Would be cool if Sudan was also on people's minds. The UN is currently giving the 400,000 refugees there 1/3 the calories that Gaza was receiving when it was considered starving Gaza.
23 comments
[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
This is what makes Wikipedia good.
Don't take my word for it, look up the sources yourself. The formality at least is decent, so you can look up the sources most statements in the article itself are based on.
In that context, I think "neutral tone" can quite safely be read as an euphemism.
There is no good solution to solve this dilemma specifically, good to see that Wales still cares.
The "problem" is that almost all of the sources that Wikipedia typically considers reliable now say that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. Wikipedia editors discussed the sources ad nauseam and came to this conclusion.
Jimmy Wales wants them to just reverse that decision, regardless of what high-quality sources say. He's saying that Wikipedia should treat denials by various governments as being of equal reliability as academic journal articles studying the issue. So if Marco Rubio goes in front of a microphone and says, "There's no genocide in Gaza," that should be treated as an equally valid source as a dozen academics who study genocide publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Needless to say, what Jimmy Wales is demanding goes against Wikipedia's policies on sourcing and neutrality. "Both sides" is not always neutral.
LOL
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
In Gaza maybe 3% of the population has been killed, partly as a side effect to fighting back against Hamas after they attacked and took hostages.
I guess it depends how you define the terms. Maybe we need some new term for trying to wipe out a people as opposed to causing casualties in war against people who attacked you?