Statement from Jimbo Wales: This message is from me, Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia
That's not just another comment; it's an official statement from the most powerful person on Wikipedia.
Wales goes on to say, "As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do."
In other words, an official body is watching and studying what you are doing, and policy actions may follow.
Finally, Wales does not accept any possibility that other points of view besides his own may be valid - not addressing many prior discussions. His belief is an assumed premise, and he demands ('asks') people to take actions on the basis of his beliefs. If you read the discussion, he continues that position.
That doesn't make Wales wrong or right, but he didn't 'just comment ... that it should have a more neutral tone.'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
This page represents ONE viewpoint and, read the "Talk" page, strongly fights against that any other viewpoint is represented at all. That, by itself, is directly against the stated goals and policy of wikipedia. A page is to have a short description of the subject, and then immediately delve into the different viewpoints on the subject. This page, and this is putting it mildly, does not acknowledge any viewpoint other than it's own even exists (and then gives endless reasons, pages of justification, for why it's viewpoint is supposedly reasonable, but without any mention of any other viewpoint. This page is a mad rant, not a serious wikipedia entry)
Wikipedia's EXPLICIT goal is to show the different viewpoints on any issue, to the point that there's many long articles on "exceptions" (like why the Flat-Earth theory is not mentioned on the earth entry)
And this page has A LOT of very worrying statements that can also be characterized as extremist. For example, the article ends with a statement that this gaza genocide pre-emptively justifies massacres against US civilians (yes, really, US civilians) "in a hypothetical future war between the US and a peer power such as China". Seriously? Who has this viewpoint?
And then there is just WHAT viewpoint this page puts forth ... This can only be described as an extremist viewpoint, even for the gaza = genocide camp. Do any reasonable people actually have this viewpoint? Every part of it is presented with zero mention of any disagreement at all, which in my experience is absolutely not true.
1) there was a genocide against innocents in Gaza (not a war against hamas, that is not mentioned at all), that what happens in Gaza, which in reality is of course firefights between 2 military groupings, is comparable to what happened in nazi death camps ...
(in fact I would argue that this page, for this comparison and other reasons, is extremely racist)
2) (directly copies hamas' viewpoint) that there are no combatants in gaza at all. In fact there is NO offensive or defensive action by any palestinian mentioned as far as I can tell.
3) (directly copies hamas' viewpoint) that to there is no hamas use of hospitals as weapons (even against their own people), their use for imprisoning hostages and as rocket launch sites, and so on
4) (directly copies hamas' viewpoint) in reporting casualty figures
5) there is ONE side mention of the other side of the conflict, and how it started: with a genocide ... by Palestinians. Despite several of the references being titled "October 7 ..." there is no mention of what happened on October 7 other than a single word: "attacks". And even that did not happen without a fight (see the talk page)
(despite the obvious remark one can make: what hamas and random Palestinians did on Oct 7 2023 satisfies the definition of genocide. They emptied 2 fully automatic rifles in a kindergarten classroom because the kids were Jews. And like with all such racist acts, of course, turns out 2 of the kids (the black ones) weren't even Jews. You would think that an article that devotes ~1 page to the "extensive targeting of children" would find a sentence to mention this)
6) That EVERYONE (not just Israel) is responsible for this, US, the Netherlands, ... not just countries either. Facebook is responsible for this. Bank of America. Exxon Mobil. BNP Paribas (a Belgian bank) ...
(Except, of course, Palestinians. The attack on October 7 has nothing to do with this conflict. Nothing whatsoever ...)
I must say, I don't understand how this viewpoint can make it to that page. This is, even for the "Gaza genocide" camp, an absurd and extremist viewpoint. Additionally, it is extremely racist.
And after all that this long and absurd rant of a wikipedia page, ends by "justifying" that China should go on a massacre against civilians in the US.
Can we please agree there are serious problems here?
He also said it in a '"high profile media interview about the article'.
This is what makes Wikipedia good.
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.
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.
Wikipedia has been targeted lately as part of a marketing effort for grokipedia.
I recommend taking this as a grain of salt.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
I think that my comment left room for this. But I felt it important to offer an opposition to what is the "leading narrative" in the West.
> That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
I should have been clearer that one side would make such claims, and the opposing side would also make such claims to their benefit. Propaganda has, and always will be, a significant part of war. It reminds me of the 2020-2021 China-India mountain battles [1] where both sides minimised their losses and claimed victory with large losses on the other side.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
LOL
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.
