Over at Tablet, Ashley Rindsberg has a terrifying piece on the manipulation of Wikipedia by anti-Israel radicals.

The article notes:

I shed light on these organized efforts in an October 2024 investigative report. Specifically, I identified a network of more than three dozen editors—whom I dubbed the “Gang of 40”—who systematically pushed the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives on Wikipedia. These editors have made 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 articles related to Israel, effectively reshaping the entire topic area. Last month, the group scored its latest and perhaps most brazen victory when a Wikipedia administrator issued a final rejection to an appeal on an extraordinary 12-month freeze these editors had pushed to place on the lead section of the “Zionism” article, thus prohibiting any changes to their edits during that period.

This was after the entry on Zionism was manipulated to push left-wing academic narratives casting it as a colonial project. The opening of the Wikipedia description reads:

Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonization of Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism and central to Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.

It’s bad enough that Wikipedia pages are often the first or among the first hits when somebody searches for a term. But now they are being used to train the various AI models like Chat GPT or Gemini. And while Rindsberg’s piece focuses on Wikipedia’s distortion of the Israel issue, this of course could be done on other important topics. In a society when people are reading less and less, many will take their learning no further than information that can be garnered from AI or the first few paragraphs of a Wikipedia entry.

Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are investigating efforts to manipulate Wikipedia, so we will see what else they unearth.