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



feature
JTA illustration
An academic paper found that a dedicated group has for some 15 years manipulated Wikipedia in ways that lay blame
for the Holocaust on Jews and absolve Poland of almost any responsibility for its record of antisemitism.

“Due to this group’s zealous
handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the
Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish
antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’
role in saving Jews, insinuate that
most Jews supported Communism
and conspired with Communists to
betray Poles, blame Jews for their
own persecution, and infl ate Jewish
collaboration with the Nazis,”
wrote co-authors Jan Grabowski, a
historian at the University of Ottawa,
and Shira Klein of the history
department at Chapman University in
Orange, California.

Normally, mistakes on Wikipedia,
whether intentional or not, can be
quickly fi xed by experienced editors
who deploy a set of rules regarding
sourcing and style. But in this case, the
alleged distortionists know Wikipedia’s
mechanisms well enough to at least
appear to follow the rules and are
willing to spend time arguing with
other editors who step in to intervene.

It becomes harder to get to the
truth because they work to discredit
established historians and prop up
fringe voices to create the semblance
of a real-world debate over historical
events, according to the article.

In one of the dozens of examples
documented in the study, the alleged
distortionists have tried to pass the
self-published work of an antisemitic
Polish writer named Ewa Kurek as a
reliable source. Kurek has said that
COVID-19 is a cover for an attempt
by Jews to take over Europe and that
Jews enjoyed life in Nazi ghettos. An
editor named Volunteer Marek argued
in a backstage conversation among
editors that Kurek should be cited
as any “mainstream scholar” would
be. And another editor, working on
an article about a 1941 massacre
of Jews in Poland, added Kurek’s
claim that minimized the number of
Jewish victims and exonerated Polish
perpetrators. One thing the research didn’t discuss
is what motivates these editors to
invest so much time and eff ort into
distorting Wikipedia. Klein said the
omission was deliberate.

“We’ve been very careful not
to make any assumptions on what
drives them or what their politics
are,” Klein said. “Instead, we’ve tried
to focus just on what they’ve done,
which is in the written record. And
as we say in the article, we don’t see
any evidence of them being tied to a
government or being in the service of
anyone else.”
Klein’s disclaimer obliquely points to
a larger challenge around the historical
record of the Holocaust in Poland. A
central tenet of the country’s ruling
Law and Justice party is defending the
image of ethnic Poles and imposing
nationalist narratives on the past,
especially the period of World War II.

While history shows that many Poles
participated in the persecution of
Jews, Poland’s nationalist right insists
on portraying Poles only as victims
or heroes.

In 2018, the Polish government
passed what’s known as the Polish
Holocaust Law, which makes it illegal
to slander the Polish nation or blame
the country for Nazi crimes. In practice,
the law has served to censor scholars
and chill debate.

Grabowski, Klein’s co-author on the
paper, has for years sparred with the
nationalist right over Poland’s historical
memory. He sued a Polish group that
accused him of publishing lies about
While history
shows that
many Poles
participated in
the persecution
of Jews, Poland’s
nationalist right insists on
portraying Poles
only as victims
or heroes.

Polish history in 2018, and in 2021 was
ordered by a Polish court to apologize
for his research before an appeals
court ultimately overturned the order.

Domestically, Poland’s
ultra- nationalists have largely won the war
over the public discourse, which has
freed them to focus on the global scene,
where English-language Wikipedia is
regarded as a major battlefront.

In this atmosphere, even something
as basic as the background of Yiddish
novelist and Nobel prize laureate
Isaac Bashevis Singer can become
fodder for debate. For years, Singer
was at the center of a fi ght between
two editors over whether Singer was
best described in the fi rst line of his
Wikipedia article as a Jewish or Polish
author. The eventual compromise
— “Polish-born Jewish American” —
lasted for almost two years until Feb.

23 when someone again dropped
the “Jewish.”
The Wikipedia editors now being
accused of distorting articles to further
nationalist narratives have rejected the
allegations against them.

See Wikipedia, page 18
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 17