Two findings came before our audit, and both matter: an outside monitor documented a coordinated editing campaign, and Wikipedia's own court agreed enough to ban people over it. This page is that record, in brief. The measurement is next door.
For most people, Wikipedia is the record: the top search result, the answer the AI assistants quote. Which is why who edits it matters. In 2025, both the Anti-Defamation League and Wikipedia's own arbitration committee documented something specific on the Israel-Palestine articles: not honest disagreement, but a coordinated campaign to bend the record.
In March 2025, the ADL published an investigation finding a network of roughly 30 editors working in concert to skew Israel-Palestine coverage. They made about twice as many edits as comparable editors and communicated with one another up to 18 times more. The pattern, intensifying after October 7, was consistent: strip out sourced material on Palestinian terrorism, antisemitism and calls to destroy Israel, while amplifying criticism of Israel and voting in tandem to make it stick.
This is the part that lifts it above accusation. In February 2025, Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, the platform's internal court, topic-banned eight editors from the Israel-Palestine area and tightened the rules to stop further distortion. To its credit, the committee sanctioned both sides: six editors from the pro-Palestinian camp and two from the pro-Israel one. But the finding stands: these pages were bent enough that Wikipedia moved to stop it.
Wikipedia tells readers its source-reliability votes are neutral housekeeping, a technical filter, not a fight. In June 2024, Wikipedia's editors voted to treat the ADL itself as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and “unclear” even on antisemitism where it touches Israel or Zionism. They sidelined one of the world's foremost monitors of antisemitism on the very topic where it was sounding the alarm.
In the same window, those same editors kept Al Jazeera, the state broadcaster of Qatar, Hamas's chief patron, rated as a usable source. The body that tracks antisemitism was ruled unreliable on antisemitism; the state media of Hamas's financier was waved through. The referee was thrown out of the game it was refereeing.
The ADL read 13 articles and named no accounts. Wikipedia's court banned eight editors and closed the case. Both told you the record was bent and left you no way to check it yourself, which is exactly the position that lets the next round happen quietly. So we harvested the record: 61,944 articles, twenty years of revisions, every claim linked to the exact version it came from.
See the measurement →