feature
Jewish school children pose for a portrait in the 1930s in Wizna, near Jedwabne,
Poland. New research revealed that members of the Polish community killed
their Jewish neighbors on July 10, 1941 during World War ll despite previous
claims that Nazi Germans were entirely responsible. Polish President Aleksander
Kwasniewski apologized for the massacre of hundreds of Jews by their neighbors
on July 10, 2001 during ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the murders.

W IKIPEDIA ’ S ‘S UPREME C OURT ’
Asaf Elia-Shalev | JTA
W hen a pair of professors
last month published a
paper accusing a group
of Wikipedia editors from Poland of
revising articles to distort the history
of the Holocaust, their research
went viral.

Most academic articles are seen
by dozens or hundreds of people at
best. One published in The Journal
of Holocaust Research hit more than
27,000 pageviews within weeks.

The paper’s reach was fueled by
its analysis, unprecedented in the
academic literature on Wikipedia, and
its fi nding that a dedicated group has
for some 15 years manipulated a source
16 MARCH 9, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
of information used by millions in ways
that lay blame for the Holocaust on
Jews and absolve Poland of almost
any responsibility for its record
of antisemitism.

The paper caught the eye of not
just scholars and journalists but of
the people in charge of resolving
disputes over editing on crowd-
sourced Wikipedia, the seventh-most
popular website on the internet and
one that is seen as the last bastion
of shared truth in an ever-fracturing
online environment.

Typically, disputes among Wikipedia
editors are
resolved through
community consensus mechanisms,
but occasionally those mechanisms
fail and allegations are brought to
Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, a
panel of elected editors known as
Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.

“Wikipedia is not exactly democratic
but anarchistic in a way that actively
discourages any sort of an authority
coming to solve a dispute,” said Joe
Roe, a veteran Wikipedia editor who
served on the committee in 2019 and
2020. “The Arbitration Committee is a
very limited exception.”
In this case, something especially
unusual happened. The Arbitration
Committee, or ArbCom, decided
to look into the allegations without
receiving a formal request to do so. No
one could recall the committee taking
such a step in its nearly two decades
of existence.

“A myopic decision here could
result in untold numbers of people
being fed a distorted view of Jewish/
WWII history, which could have very
real consequences given the recent
amplifi cation of violently antisemitic
rhetoric by mainstream public fi gures,”
wrote a user named SamX in a public
post about the case. “ArbCom needs
to get this right.”
The article that triggered the opening
of the case was published under the
title, “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion
of the History of the Holocaust.” It
accused 11 current and former editors
of intentional distortions to numerous
articles relating to the Holocaust in
Poland. The paper referred to the
editors by their usernames but also
provided their real names if they had
publicly identifi ed themselves on
Wikipedia message boards.

Photo Laski Diff usion/Getty Images
TACKLES ALLEGED CONSPIRACY TO
DISTORT ARTICLES ON H OLOCAUST