Throughout my education, it used to be a running joke that you couldn’t trust Wikipedia. That anyone could edit it, that it was easy to change and fiddle with things, and that it would never be acceptable as a real source. Despite this, I have used Wikipedia without a problem my entire life. It got me through my degree and has provided me with thousands of hours of entertainment smashing the random article button, going deep on everything from the history of the Jewish people to episode summaries for The West Wing to details of the regional train service in the Cote D’Azur. It’s great.

I’ve even dabbled in editing, racking up a few easy edits on non-controversial pages, fixing typos and precise train models, pretty routine stuff. But I’ve noticed a rise in tensions across the site. Pages that I remember being called one thing suddenly change, topics are merged and tweaked and fiddled with pretty much in real-time by an army of editors fighting it out behind the scenes. Nowhere is this more prevalent than Wikipedia pages about Israel. Just this week, an article about the rescue of Israeli hostages was described as a “massacre” by editors. 

To understand what’s going on, you have to understand the type of people who regularly edit Wikipedia. Aside from the self-obsessed who edit pages about themselves, the average Wikipedia editor is a hobbyist, someone who does it purely for the love of the game. Like a local history buff but who has taken it upon themself to keep tabs on the most mundane details of human existence. Ninety-nine per cent are banal nerds, obsessed with accurately chronicling when Eurostar started direct services to Brussels or exactly how many elephants Hannibal crossed the Alps with. That they’re unpaid almost makes them more reliable, since there’s no incentive or glory to be found, just a thirst for making sure the correct information appears where it should.

But as in so many other situations, these otherwise rational people cannot deal with the issue of Israel with any sense of fairness. You see the same thing in all sorts of niches. People that are so certain of their “correct opinions”, with just enough education to have a smug sense that there’s no perspective that they couldn’t be aware of, fall into these traps over and over again.

This is how you get every Wikipedia article vaguely mentioning Israel becoming a catalogue of anti-Zionism. This is how you get Hamas’s October 7 massacres described as a “victory” in the list of battles from 2023 – and how you end up with a hostage rescue being described as a massacre. Wikipedia works when people obey the implicit honour system, in good faith. But when you have bad actors who see the world’s foremost online resource tool as a method of informational warfare, it comes crashing down. These people may be fiddling at the edges in a lot of cases – one word changed here, a stat removed there – but the cumulative effect is huge.

If you imagine all the world’s information as a series of interconnected pipes, Wikipedia is the cistern from which most of it is drawn.

While it is not used by serious academics, anyone with more than a passing interest in anything usually takes at least some information from Wikipedia and, increasingly concerningly, AI is trained on it. When the well is poisoned by these actors, it may not become clear for a while but, slowly and surely, facts will get distorted, the narrative will shift and everything downstream of Wikipedia (ie pretty much everything) will be corrupted as well.

There are many editors fighting these changes but they can only do so much. The risk is not from people who sign up and try to jump into hugely contentious pages the same day. It’s from people who know how to game the system, who know how to make sure their edits stick and who can weaponise the complex tools to make sure those that are against them are labelled vandals or kicked off the pages.

There needs to be more people not blinded by bias editing Wikipedia. We need to realise how important it is to protect the world’s research library and forget just how depressing it is that it’s necessary.