Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has blocked editing access to the site’s Gaza genocide page, saying it fails to meet the company’s “high standards” and “needs immediate attention”.
In a statement on the page’s discussion section on Sunday when all further editing was blocked, Wales said he had been asked in a “high-profile media interview” about the page, which stated in its first line that the genocide was an “ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war”.
Wales said the article breached Wikipedia’s neutral point of view, calling it “particularly egregious”. He added that he was writing the statement in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the site.
According to a note on the page, the page has been locked from editing until Tuesday at 21:47 GMT or “until editing disputes have been resolved”.
Here’s what we know:
What did Wales say?
In his statement on Sunday, Wales said he assumes “good faith of everyone who has worked on this Gaza ‘genocide’ article”.
However, he continued: “At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested. This is a violation of WP:NPOV (Wikipedia Neutral Point of View) and WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV (Wikipedia Attribute Point of View) that requires immediate correction.” He added that this was “non-negotiable”.
“A neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: ‘Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterisation of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide,’” he added.
Several major international bodies, including the United Nations, have asserted that Israel’s assault on Gaza is a genocide. This view has been backed by human rights organisations and scholars.
Wales went on to list recommendations for editors of the page, including a focus on texts and sources, the use of “high-quality” sources from all sides, and separate “factual reporting on conduct and casualties from legal characterisation”.
“By focusing on verifiable sources and neutrality, we can quickly deliver an article that meets our standards for contentious topics,” Wales stated.
Has there been criticism of his position?
Yes. On the discussion page where Wales uploaded his statement, page editors demanded further explanation from the founder over his decision to lock the page and his suggestions.
One editor with the username “Hemiauchenia” called Wales’s statement “patronising” and accused Wales of seeking to unfairly equate the opinion of impartial organisations with those of partial or political ones.
“The question is, why should the opinions of the largely impartial UN and human rights scholars be weighed equally to the obviously partisan opinions of commentators and governments? You are allowed to disagree with the consensus of the Wikipedia community, but it is patronising to scorn the community as being ‘wrong’ for following the opinions of the UN, genocide scholars and major human rights organisations,” the editor wrote.
In response, Wales said an editor’s job “as Wikipedians, is not to take sides in that debate but to carefully and neutrally document it”.
Responding to Wales, editor “Cortador” refuted that Wikipedia had always treated all voices equally.
“Wikipedia has never, ever treated all voices as equal, nor does policy demand we do. If we did, the Earth article would state that Earth’s shape is under debate. But we don’t do that because scholarly consensus is that Earth is roughly spherical. Instead, flat eartherism is presented as what it is: a fringe movement without scientific backing,” the editor wrote.
Another editor going by the username “Darouet” described being “disheartened that you [Wales] frankly describe yourself coming to us under political pressure and asking us to betray scholarship and WP:NPOV. We cannot do that.”
[Al Jazeera]
Who has recognised genocide in Gaza?
In September, a UN inquiry found that Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to a genocide.
Its report said statements made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant demonstrated “circumstantial evidence” that led to their findings of genocidal intent.
However, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the findings as “fake” and in a post on X accused the report’s authors of “serving as Hamas proxies”.
In the same month, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a 500-member body of academics, also passed a resolution that found Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza had fulfilled the definition of genocide set out in the 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
In April, Amnesty International also found that Israel was committing a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza.
In 2023, the government of South Africa launched a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which made an initial ruling in early 2024 that there was enough evidence to show a likelihood of genocide. That case is ongoing.
How bad are conditions in Gaza now?
Israel’s war in Gaza began after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on villages and army outposts in southern Israel, which killed 1,139 people and led to the capture of about 200 people who were taken back to Gaza.
Over the past two years, the war has caused the vast majority of Gaza’s population to be displaced – many multiple times. It has killed nearly 69,000 people and wounded 170,670, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Sunday. Thousands of Palestinians are missing.
Humanitarian group Save the Children reported in September that Israeli attacks had killed at least 20,000 children, amounting to one child killed every hour.
Moreover, citing the enclave’s Health Ministry and the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Save the Children reported that at least 21,000 children have been left permanently disabled as a result of the war.
On the ground, intense Israeli bombardments have levelled the majority of Gaza’s residential areas and public buildings, including nearly all hospitals.
According to estimates from UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, as of September 23, about 83 percent of all structures in Gaza City, the enclave’s largest city, were damaged, including an “estimated 81,159 housing units”.
Moreover, by October 22, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X that there were no longer any fully functioning hospitals in Gaza.
“Only 14 out of 36 are functioning at all,” he wrote, adding that there was a “critical shortage of essential medicines, equipment and health workers”.
Amid the widescale destruction, Israel has continued to block humanitarian aid deliveries into the enclave despite a ceasefire. More than 236 people in Gaza have been killed amid continued Israeli attacks since the ceasefire was agreed on October 10.
Malnutrition in Gaza has reached dire levels with a UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report declaring famine in areas of the enclave in August.
According to the British Red Cross on October 10, about “470,000 people – 22 percent of Gaza’s population – are facing the imminent threat of starvation.”
