Wikipedia
Continued from page 17
“I have not engaged in any ‘Holocaust
distortion,’ on Wikipedia or anywhere
else. I am not a ‘right-wing Polish
nationalist,’” said Volunteer Marek
in a public comment on a Wikipedia
message board that was endorsed by
at least one other alleged distorter. “I
am not part of some nefarious ‘Polish
conspiracy’ on Wikipedia which seeks
to manipulate content. All of these
accusations are ridiculous and absurd.

They are particularly disgusting and
vile since they go against everything I
believe in.”
In the debate about how to handle
the case, dozens of arbitrators and
ordinary Wikipedia editors — all
volunteers — spoke of the situation
on a Wikipedia message board as
something close to an existential
crisis for Wikipedia. Not only was the
website accused of being used to
spread antisemitic propaganda, but it
was also alleged to be vulnerable to
large-scale manipulation by a small
group of bad-faith actors.

There is little confi dence in the
community that a solution is within
reach. By its own rules, the committee
isn’t supposed to decide on disputed
information. It’s more of a disciplinary
body that evaluates the behavior of
Wikipedia editors and can ultimately
decide whether to restrict their editing
privileges or ban them outright.

But fi guring out if the accused editors
have indeed evaded safeguards and
undermined Wikipedia’s integrity would
seem to require that the arbitrators
become experts on the history of the
Holocaust in Poland.

The decision to take up the case
serves to acknowledge that the
committee failed to solve the problem
when it last considered complaints
about editing related to the Holocaust
in Poland about two years ago. That
was during Roe’s tenure and he says
the committee was distracted by
another dispute at the time.

“It can’t be escalated further than it
already has in our mechanisms,” Roe
said. “The best we can do is what’s
currently happening now — just put it
through those mechanisms again, and
hope that something better will come
out on the other side.”
In explaining why the committee
must nevertheless take on the case,
an arbitrator who goes by Wugapodes
commented that the only other choice
is to kick the can down the road.

“This will not be an easy issue
to resolve, but the committee was
not convened to solve easy issues,”
Wugapodes wrote, pointing out
that the timing is right given the
attention and involvement of outside
experts and editors. “We can leverage
these resources now or wait for this
decade-long problem to get still
worse.” By a vote of nine to one on Feb. 13,
the committee decided to open the
case. The proceedings, which start
with an evidence-gathering phase, are
expected to last up to six weeks, after
which they can decide to ban and
restrict off ending editors.

Beyond that, an unorthodox last resort
option is also available. Wikipedia’s
so-called Supreme Court could ask for
help from an even higher authority: the
Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofi t that
owns the encyclopedia. The foundation
intervened in 2021 in what some see as
a similar scenario of a far-right takeover
on the Croatian-language Wikipedia,
hiring an outside expert to disentangle
the web of obfuscation and banning a
set of editors.

Roe said that his tenure on the
committee in 2019 and 2020, which
featured related complaints about the
editing of articles on the Holocaust in
Poland, helped lead him to believe that
Wikipedia should embrace change, at
least when it comes to controversial
political topics.

“I would like to see these diffi cult and
politically charged content problems
be referred to a new body made up
of external experts, and that we don’t
insist on doing everything internally
among the community volunteers,”
Roe said.

But he acknowledged that such a
scenario is unlikely to result from the
Poland dispute.

“It’s not a popular view and it kind
of goes against the general idea of
Wikipedia,” he said. ■
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