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Wikipedia: The free online encyclopedia is used by billions, but serious topics like Israel-Palestine aren't easy to moderate

Wikipedia: The free online encyclopedia is used by billions, but serious topics like Israel-Palestine aren't easy to moderate

David Crowther

As the tragic images of the escalating Israel-Palestine conflict have circulated around the world thousands of people have turned to Wikipedia to read up on the history of the violence. We found, using data from Pageviews, that 6 of the 10 most-visited pages on the online encyclopedia yesterday related to the conflict, with each one racking up hundreds of thousands of visits.

‍Wikipedia's weakness

‍The sensitivity around such a serious topic such as Israel-Palestine emphasises Wikipedia's greatest weakness — that anyone can theoretically edit its content. For relatively low-stakes topics like sports, movies or culture that isn't so much of a problem. Errors are usually caught, and there's little motivation or agenda for Wikipedia's army of volunteer editors to deliberately spread misinformation.

For issues such as Israel-Palestine, the stakes couldn't be higher and bad actors on both sides have strong reasons to misrepresent, change or misreport events — particularly when they are changing so quickly. Wikipedia does a good job of foregrounding when situations are particularly fluid, the top of the page "2021 Israel-Palestine crisis" page reads a disclaimer that says "this article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses, and initial news reports may be unreliable.". That particular page has had 210 edits in the last day alone, made by 55 different editors.

‍10 or 15 years ago, students would be lambasted for using Wikipedia to help them with homework. Today, Wikipedia's status as a non-profit organization with decent transparency over who is editing what (and why) has helped it shake some of that early reputation, but for topics like Israel-Palestine, its process is tested to the limit. Often daily.

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