Aaron Sull, Jewish Breaking News

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has intervened in a heated editorial war over the site’s biased article on Gaza.

An arbitration committee was formed earlier this year by Wikipedia after an investigation led by Pirate Wires revealed that a powerful group of roughly editors coordinated to delegitimize Israel after the Hamas-led Oct. 7th massacre.

Over the past two years, Wikipedia editors have been caught creating new articles with loaded titles like “Gaza Genocide,” which claimed that Israel is committing “genocide” against the Palestinian people.

Another article titled “Israeli Apartheid” asserted that Israel had built “a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination.”

One editor removed mention of Hamas’s 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the Hamas article just six weeks after the attack.

The group also reportedly sought to suppress documented human-rights abuses by Iran, and a related effort by a Discord-based collective known as “Tech For Palestine” coordinated mass editing of articles related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Anti-Defamation League lent credibility to these concerns in March when it published a report titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality,” which claimed that “at least 30 Wikipedia editors acted in concert to circumvent Wikipedia’s policies to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.”

But despite the ongoing arbitration, internal tensions have only deepened. The conflict reached a boiling point on Sunday when Wikipedia’s own co-founder, Jimmy Wales, personally entered the debate — warning that the site’s neutrality crisis had spiraled out of control.

“At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” he wrote on Wikipedia’s Talk page. “No side should speak in Wikipedia’s own voice, all articles must not declare a legal conclusion, and should include significant, high-quality sources from all sides, including governments, courts, non-governmental organizations, and commentators.”

On the forum, Wales’s comments triggered backlash from several pro-Hamas editors who accused him of silencing discussion of Israeli war crimes. Some claimed that labeling the page “biased” was itself a political act while others argued that the United Nations has already characterized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide.

Wales rejected that criticism, insisting his concern is not political but procedural.

“The job of a Wikipedian,” he wrote, “is not to take sides, but to carefully and neutrally document the debate.”