Yesterday the site Pirate Wires published an interesting story about an unknown group of Wikipedia editors who have worked, seemingly in coordination, to rewrite and revise articles about Hamas, Israel and the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the article points out, this matters because Google gives Wikipedia articles automatic top billing on any search related to these topics. As a result, the desire to shape what these articles say has become extremely contentious.

Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream...

One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.

Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.

The group of articles related to these topics are known in Wikipedia speak as PIA articles for Palestine Israel Articles. Just a handful of editors have made tens of thousands of changes to these articles over the past several years.

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period...

All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

Of course anyone can edit a Wikipedia article but the real success for this group came in the way they would swarm the editors on a given page and keep pounding for changes until the lone editor standing up to them finally gave up. This is exactly what happened on a page about Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. Al Husseini had a well known collaboration with Hitler which this group of editors worked to downplay and delete.

In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent.

This is PR by a thousand misleading edits. And so far it seems to be working. When not scrubbing pages about Hamas or Iran these same editors are inventing new pages about Israel's alleged history.

In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism.

Efforts to call out this systemic rewriting of Wikepedia have been made but the group of editors simply move a lot faster than the understaffed Arbitration Committee designed to prevent abuses like this.

One thing that would solve this is to remove what is driving these editors to cheat and lie in the first place. Google could simply refuse to grant these articles top search billing. This would probably be an easy change to make but would require a lot more common sense then I think Google usually demonstrates.