Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page
thenational.scotFrom 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.
That understates the situation significantly. Wales posted a long comment under the headline,
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.'.
I don't understand how someone can make a claim like this in good faith. READ the page on the Gaza genocide. I'll give you the link again. READ it:
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?
The page represents the consensus view among academics who study genocide, including the leading Israeli academics who study the subject.
Wikipedia has policies around what constitutes a reliable source, and academics who study a particular subject and publish in peer-reviewed journals are generally considered among the highest-quality sources. In this case, they nearly unanimously agree that what Israel has been doing in Gaza is a genocide.
It took Wikipedia a long time to come to this determination. At first, academics were divided, but as time went on and Israel's actions became ever more extreme, opinions shifted and nearly all academics in the field started calling it a genocide. That caused Wikipedia to start calling it a genocide. There was a very long process of discussion and debate on the talk page of the article leading up to this change, centered on an evaluation of the sources.
Jimmy Wales has now come along and essentially ordered the Wikipedia community to change the article. He's effectively ordering them to disregard the usual "reliable source" guidelines and instead represent a view that he personally feels is neutral.
The thing is that Wikipedia editors don't necessarily respect Jimmy Wales that much, and they generally don't think he has the right to dictate what any particular article should or should not say. Wikipedia has been around for more than 20 years. It has well established rules and a community of editors. Jimmy Wales is just the guy who originally set it up, but he's not necessarily an expert on anything.
> There was a very long process of discussion and debate on the talk page
Could you link to it? It's seems key to the issue. Many refer to it - including in the discussion with Wales - but nobody seems to link to, refer to, or analyse it.
This is the discussion that led to the opening sentence of the article being changed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_12#...
As you can see, it wasn't just a few editors saying, "lol, let's just say it's a genocide." Hundreds of people weighed in on the proposal. They looked at lists of recent sources.
There were previous discussions like this that came to a different conclusion. But as more and more sources started calling it a genocide, Wikipedia editors eventually decided the opening sentence had to be changed.
My complaint was not at all about the first sentence but about the total absense in the entire article of any alternative viewpoint, or even references to the conflict or the totally different treatment of scholarly consensus (because there is a scholarly consensus that hamas committed genocide too, in fact, there is consensus about multiple hamas genocides, and about many genocides committed by other palestinian factions including the PA). And as I pointed out even the beginning of the conflict, Hamas' attack, which is a genocide without any discussion about it, is barely mentioned at all, and only as an "attack".
Because once again, your comparisons just doesn't work.
Wikipedia title for an article that 90% of scholars (WITH academic credentials) agree hamas and palestinians committed genocide on Jews:
"Allegations of genocide in the October 7 attacks"
Wikipedia title for an article that 90% of scholars (who paid 20 euros to be considered scholars, the IAGS) agree Israel committed genocide against Gazans:
"Gaza genocide"
(IAGS does not require academic credentials to be a member, and many members have none)
Here is the link to the page about Hamas' (and random Palestinians) committing genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_in_the...
Note that the scholars alleging Hamas' committed genocide in the October 7 attacks are largely the same as the in the "Gaza genocide" article. In ONE of those articles both genocides are represented ... in the other they aren't (except in the non-user-editable part).
Of course, on the page describing the hamas' genocide, none of the your arguments apply. The various viewpoints are represented (frankly ad nauseam), including arguments by individual scholars denying the genocide. On that page Wikipedia seriously makes the argument that "a massacre with genocidal intent" does not constitute a genocide. On that page scholarly consensus that a genocide occurred is described as "allegations of genocide". It continues like that, with for every scholar mentioned every tiny caveat they put anywhere in their paper repeated. For example that information sources may not be reliable as to intent.
On that page it is extensively mentioned that there are accusations against Israel committing genocide in Gaza, whereas on the "Gaza genocide" page it is not mentioned at all that hamas' committed genocide (except in that consensus is that hamas' definitely committed genocide against Israeli too ... oh and of course, there's the title.
I could keep going, pointing out that even in this article it is not mentioned that hamas' has in fact committed multiple genocides, including against Palestinians (in Al-Shifa hospital, among other places), and that the Palestinian Authority has done so as well, including against Palestinians, Jordans, Lebanese, ...
You really need someone to explain to you why the systematic destruction of all of Gaza, murder of tens of thousands of civilians, and intentional blockade of food, water and electricity by Israel, a country with overwhelming military superiority over the Palestinians, is viewed as a genocide, while the Hamas raid on Israel on October 7th, 2023 isn't? There are some people - primarily Israeli propagandists trying to distract from Gaza - who have called the latter a genocide, but the former is being called a genocide by huge numbers of scholars of genocide and human rights organizations.
You really need someone to explain to you why "if your group is 'weak' you get to commit genocide without punishment" is an incredibly, incredibly bad principle?
And no, the UN has called hamas' actions genocide, as I pointed out, are mostly the same people as for the "Gaza genocide".
If your group is weak, it's impossible for you to commit genocide. The idea that Hamas would ever be able to commit genocide against the Israelis is absurd. The reason why Israel is able to commit genocide against the Palestinians is because it has overwhelming military dominance.
Israel can kill Palestinians at will with almost no resistance. It can cut off food, water and electricity. It can bomb every hospital in Gaza. It can bomb almost every apartment building. It can destroy every water treatment plant. Etc. Etc. The most Hamas can do is launch a raid a few kilometers into Israel for a few hours, and that's only if the Israeli military isn't paying attention.
There is only one thing holding Israel back: fear of international pressure, in the form of sanctions, boycotts, etc.
This word, impossible, I don't think it means what you think it means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_in_the...
Oh, one might even add: there was no need whatsoever to change the definition of genocide to come to that conclusion. There was no need to declare a paid mailing list "academic experts on genocide", just to get "academic experts on genocide" to say something is a genocide. No need for years of propaganda, change laws and definitions after the fact.
Who knew? Just emptying two automatic weapons in a kindergarten classroom, leaving no survivors, because hamas fighters thought they were Jews, that event, just that one incident, is genocide. Along with hundreds of other war crimes that also count. Even if two of those children (the black ones) weren't even Jewish. Raping, killing and torturing women because they're Jewish is genocide.
Is your claim seriously that cutting off electricity is worse, or justifies something like this? Because we all know why people think those victims aren't worth caring about ...
The IDF has killed more babies alone than the total number of Israelis killed on October 7th.
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has nothing to do with Judaism itself, and the Palestinians don't care that the Israelis are Jewish, so I don't know why you keep bringing Jews into this (except to somehow relate it to the Holocaust).
I don't see how that relates to my comment at all. Could you quote some part of my comment that you think relates to yours and respond to it directly?
And when you go to the page about the Holocaust, it doesn't mentioned alternative opinions either, and barely mentions that holocaust denial is a thing (instead, "Holocaust denial" has its own article)
Do you believe Wikipedia should "both sides" the holocaust? Or do you not hold the genocide of Palestinians to the same standard?
Any ongoing genocide will have its deniers, its minimizers, and its apologists. Those people will even persist after the "dust is settled". That doesn't mean an article needs to give the same attention to the beliefs of people who are not experts, who are misled, or who are intentionally dishonest.
That becomes circular: if it's a genocide then deniers shouldn't be given much weight. It also doesn't address the other core issue: How does Wikipedia handle controversial issues?
I think Wales is full of it - he's giving orders in an official capacity and threatening them with action if they don't comply, and he's brazenly lying about it - a demonstration of power and a threat. Still, I think your comment is more inflammatory than helpful because it doesn't address the core issues, it just throws a rock.
I'm pointing out the absurdity of saying an article lacks "balance", or claiming "neutrality" lies somewhere between "there is a genocide" and "there is no genocide"
If Jimmy Wales believes there are compelling claims that Israel is not committing genocide, then rather than expressing this as necessary for a NPOV (neutral point of view) he should just admit that this is bias on his part. This doesn't address the consensus among people who actually study genocide that Israel is committing genocide. The UN has announced that Israel has committed genocide. Doctors without Borders, Oxfam, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide scholars have called it genocide.
Siding with the experts is standard for Wikipedia's editorial standards; if it wasn't, the Holocaust article would also seek "neutrality" by using much less decisive language about the validity of that genocide.
> he just commented on the article's discussion page that it should have a more neutral tone
He also said it in a '"high profile media interview about the article'.
Seems pretty important to require a neutral tone regardless of how egregious the acts are described in the entry.
This is what makes Wikipedia good.
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.
I think that goes without saying. The real question is what's the line between neutrality and letting a vocal minority dictate editorial decisions? Especially when the vocal minority has biased incentives towards making those changes.
> 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?”
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.
This is very likely character assassination.
Wikipedia has been targeted lately as part of a marketing effort for grokipedia.
I recommend taking this as a grain of salt.
Also feel like Wikipedia was never the go to platform for unfolding situations.
Almost built against serving that specific need, and trying to avoid it as much as they can, one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Let_the_dust_settle
I know this issue is top-of-mind in the public discourse now, but the issue of Israel/Palestine has been ongoing for decades at this point.
The broader conflict yes but not the current programme.
Go read the Grokipedia article about the Gaza genocide if you want a laugh. The first sentence is 83 words with multiple nested clauses. It's gibberish.
I agree. Wikipedia is not for debate though. It’s good at settled facts.
This was not linked in the article, so here is what Jimmy wrote in the talk page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
Thank you for sharing that, turns out to be a lot more measured and balanced than the news article makes it out to be. Damn media always fueling the fires rather than spreading understanding and clarify. I think both sides seems to be raising good points, and probably the truth and more balanced view sits in the middle.
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?
It's a congressional inquiry, the claim is that the editors are biased against Israel. https://www.commondreams.org/news/house-gop-investigates-wik...
Another thing to reaize is ...
In war the first casualty is truth.
I always think of what was claimed to happened in video "collateral murder"
Where US killed several people , because a reporters telephoto lens was mistaked of a rocket launcher, when viewed from a few KM away - OR so we are told.
Ascertaining the truth isn't made easier when one side massacres journalists and forbids free domestic reporting.
RE ".... claim is that the editors are biased against Israel..." We ALL have Bias's
> the editors are biased against Israel
But so what? Is that unlawful in the US somehow today? That sounds absolutely bananas to be honest, aren't people supposed to have "true" freedom of speech, including being allowed to be biased against or for Israel?
What is really absolutely bananas is to continue to believe that United States has true freedom of speech. There are so many limitations and exceptions that the USA scores worse than Europe where they don't have such a thing enshrined in their constitution (in so far as they have a constitution to begin with):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
Of course, you could be pedantic and say 'but freedom of expression isn't freedom of speech' but that would be precisely the kind of thing that continues to perpetrate the myth. A theoretical freedom on some narrow issue does not do much in competition with a much broader actual freedom. And that's the 2024 version, your guess about what the 2025 edition of that index looks like, I'm thinking not nearly as good for the USA. Blackmailing universities for starters.
It's not nationally illegal, and yes I would I agree that this seems in clear violation of freedom of speech. There have been some similar laws passed at the state level like this one in Texas https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant... that have somehow held up in the courts
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Is a metalaw restricting the laws Congress can set.
Freedom of speech seems to be commonly regarded as having a far wider scope than it actually does. IANAL.
From a textualist standpoint you're right, but in practice the Supreme Court has expanded the First Amendment to prohibit government actions (besides just lawmaking) that would deter speech.
Yes, but please understand that the government of USA has a bias in favor of Israel that it needs to uphold. Why do you hate America and Freedom(TM)?
Here are more details on this: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...
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 never thought I'd see the day where the same government that says "Freedom of Speech is important" would go around doxxing people on the internet. I always thought it'd eventually happen, but not during my lifetime.
Reading the discussion, this appears to be an instance of the system working as intended. People are discussing Jimbo's message and weighing his position against the position of previous editors of the article, and they are weighing the merits and adherence to Wikipedia policy of each.
> 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. It should go without saying that I am writing this in my personal capacity, and I am not speaking on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else!
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.
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.
Seems very reasonable to me.
Ultimately it's a numbers game, and editors with an anti-Israeli agenda have the numbers. Jimbo's post reads as if he's encouraging chances so that the article adheres to NPOV, but I think he understands that's rather futile, and is really just trying to draw attention so that more readers will be aware of Wikipedia's biases.
While obviously you're right that in practice "it's a numbers game", it shouldn't be. That's the point.
"erupts". They have a rowdy argumented discussion, no ad hominem that i found? To me it look like a very civil discussion on the internet.
Jimmy Wales does what?
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.
When I look through those Wikipedia talk pages what always strikes me is that it is as if a whole raft of not-so-smart people have finally found something they can be experts on. These then use their own developed lingo and the fact that they have more time and expertise about WP than their usually smarter and better informed subject expert counter party to bludgeon them with all kinds of mumbo-jimbo to the point of abandoning the issue altogether. The really sad thing is that this still produces an encylopedia that is better than anything that you could have paid money for.
I think it has been discussed a few times that Wikipedia is a place where various kinds of zealots, fanatics, and obsessives can go and play a variant of the game of Diplomacy. This tends to drive away normal people who have subject matter knowledge, but are not interested in investing their time in long political campaigns over Wikipedia rules and power struggles.
It seems this happens in many places where the opportunity presents itself. StackOverflow seems to suffer from a similar (not identical) issue.
Surprisingly I don’t see Wales commenting on the Armenian Genocide talk page. I don’t see the difference between the two. What am I missing?
There are vast differences
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?
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.
[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...
Often when people talk about bias, they assume it must be bias against their interests. They don't realize that, if there is room for bias, it's just as easily bias in their favor. The article could overstate either side - or both at different times.
> 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.
> Often when people talk about bias, they assume it must be bias against their interests. They don't realize that, if there is room for bias, it's just as easily bias in their favor. The article could overstate either side - or both at different times.
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%...
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.
> 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?”
LOL
People are dense. If there aren't any high quality sources on mRNA turbo cancer then you don't need to lower your standards to include it.
Yeah but in this case what's a high quality source for "Israel isn't actually commiting genocide"? Israeli government representatives? Why are they high quality, because they went to prestigious universities and have real power? Not trolling, serious question.
There are a number of them mentioned on Wikipedia itself [1]. I hesitate to use Wikipedia as a source given all the anti-Israel bias lately, but that particular section seems okay-ish for now and I'm not aware of a better list.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_and_legal_responses_t...
Sounds like Wikipedia is turning into reddit.
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.
> Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow
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.
I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocides against the genocide article then a more uniform interpretation of genocide across the entire site would be possible. I think the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency, to cover every viewpoint in a topic with rationale and to do so truthfully with associated references.
An issue not brought up is that LLMs are not deterministic enough to follow rules -- it would be nice if we had a perfect robot that could do all these things and then determine rules for it to follow. But it only took prompt tampering with Grok for it to start talking about mechahitler, and I'm pretty sure at least that wasn't entirely planned. Inconsistency is almost to be expected from LLMs.
> if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site
These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not.
> If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article
It would be worthless. Also, futile. You think when the world’s governments can’t agree on what genocide is, a random editorial decision at Wikipedia will control?
> the goal for Wikipedia is to avoid inconsistency
It’s a goal, but certainly not the goal. Truth isn’t a mathematical schema, particularly when it comes to social constructs like genocide.
I don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea. I think it’s a worthwhile and valuable idea. Rules-derived articles with logical dependencies could hold a mirror to our own biases. I think truth should be logically derived and I don’t want people to be hostile to the outcomes since we’re approaching a future where technology will be able to do this.
> don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea
It’s useless and futile to this problem.
It could be useful. But as a compliment to Wikipedia. And not in adjudicating something like the definition of genocide.
> should be logically derived
Not really an option for social constructs, which rely on consensus more than logical consistency. You could create LLMs that logically derive an answer from a definition. But that is a semantic punt with extra steps (unless the LLM controls martial forces).
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.