A fierce “edit war” has broken out on Wikipedia over a page dedicated to a deadly Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp near Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on the morning of June 8.
The bloody attack – apparently to free four Israeli prisoners held there – killed nearly 300 displaced people and injured more than 700, overwhelming the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Now, the Israeli attack has become the focus of a heated editing dispute on Wikipedia, which has been forced to restrict editing access to the page dedicated to the incident.
This is what we know about the creation of the Wikipedia page and the growing online war it sparked:
Who created the Wikipedia page on Nuseirat and why?
The Israeli attack on Nuseirat made global headlines due to the release of four Israeli captives – Noa Argamani, 25; Almog Meir January 21; Andrei Kozlov, 27; and Shlomi Ziv, 40 – who was taken by Hamas from a music festival during the October 7 attacks in southern Israel. To explain what happened during the operation and rescue, a Wikipedia editor known only by the username “Galamore” created an article dedicated to the incident.
Wikipedia allows editors to remain anonymous, with their names and countries of origin hidden. However, it does not guarantee that a publisher’s identity cannot be discovered by means beyond their control.
After its creation, the article was edited 627 times by 103 users in just one week. This is an unusually high number of changes made to a single article on Wikipedia. By comparison, the Wikipedia page on the October 7 Hamas attacks was edited 1,705 times by 368 people over eight months.
As is common practice when an “edit war” breaks out, Wikipedia administrators quickly blocked the page, allowing access to only a select few editors. For anyone else trying to access the page to make changes to it, a warning appears stating “only extended confirmed users and administrators can edit it.”
A registered editor becomes an “extended verified user” when their account has existed for 30 days and has made at least 500 edits.
The creator of the article Galamore has been registered as a Wikipedia editor since December 25, 2023 and has made 1,186 edits to different Wikipedia articles, mainly those with profiles of Israeli personalities, including football player Yehezkel Chazom, board game designer Ephraim Hertzano and master chess board Moshe Aba Blass. According to Wikipedia, making more than 1,000 edits places an editor in the top 0.1% of Wikipedia editors in terms of number of edits.
What is an ‘edit war’?
An edit war happens when two or more editors persistently change each other’s contributions to an article, causing a repetitive cycle of rollbacks. This is also known as “vandalism” by Wikipedia users and includes “deliberately disruptive or malicious editing” of any page. This may include deleting content or altering it so that it is intentionally biased, defamatory, offensive or degrading.
According to Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, pages must be written from a neutral point of view “without editorial bias.” It operates a suite of monitoring tools that can alert you if an edit war appears to have occurred.
Wikipedia users can also add a “dispute tag” to a page, indicating that the neutrality of an article has been questioned. This could spark a wider discussion among Wikipedia staff about how to resolve the controversial topic and place the page in “protected mode” – restricting editing access to certain editors only – until the issue is resolved.
How did the dispute over the Wikipedia article on Nuseirat unfold?
These are some of the main changes made to the article in the first 50 hours. All times are GMT:
- June 8, 11:17 am: The Wikipedia page titled “Operation Nuseirat” is launched by Galamore. The article names the recovered captives and mentions that the Gaza Ministry of Health reported that “dozens of people were killed.”
- June 8, 12pm: Galamore renames the page “Nuseirat Rescue Operation 2024” and adds: “After dozens of deaths and injuries among Hamas, the operation was called by Hamas the ‘Nuseirat Massacre’.”
- June 8, 2:22 pm: An unknown user identified only by an IP address changes this line to “the operation was dubbed the ‘Nuseirat Massacre’”. This user also adds “biased language” as a comment explaining why the edit was made.
- June 8, 3:40 pm: User “JDiala” amends the article to state that the death toll reached at least 210 Palestinians and cites “Palestinian health officials” as the source. JDiala registered as an editor on Wikipedia on July 29, 2013, and has made 1,957 edits since then. The user profile features a Palestinian flag and a quote from Amira Hass, a columnist for the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
- June 8, 4:51 pm: A user named “Favonian” adds “protection” to the page to limit edits, citing “controversial topic” as the reason, effectively blocking the page.
- June 8, 5:05 pm: User “Dynamo128” posts on a talk page linked to the article, writing “to the people who keep deleting my edits,… you better calm down for now.”
- June 8, 6:54 pm: A second Wikipedia page chronicling the attack on Nuseirat is launched by user “Dylanvt”, called “Nuseirat Refugee Camp Massacre” and addresses the Palestinian casualty statistics in the first sentence. This page got 37,029 views, almost half of the first page, which has 78,862.
- June 9, 02:43: A user named Daniel Case adds “protection” to the second page of Nuseirat, also limiting who can edit it.
- June 9, 04:48: A now-defunct account owned by a user named “Owenglyndur” adds: “After the operation, Hamas threatened the remaining hostages,” citing The Times of Israel.
- June 10, 2:16 pm: Dylanvt, the creator of the “Nuseirat Refugee Camp Massacre” page, posts on the “Nuseirat Rescue Operation 2024” talk page that the mention of major civilian casualties has been removed “from the header twice. Why? Are the removers disputing this fact?” adding that the Israeli army “is claiming around 100 casualties, according to sources. Isn’t that enough to be ‘massive’?”
- June 10, 9:24 pm: “There is some evidence that the [Israeli military] were responsible for the civilian casualties? This was in Hamas-controlled territory,” user “KronosAlight” wrote as part of the response to Dylanvt’s thread.
The article sparked anger among many X users, who were particularly upset that when searching for the keywords “Nuseirat Massacre” on Google, only the Wikipedia article that included the words “rescue operation” in its title appeared on the page. of main results.
Wow. Google and Wikipedia, when you search for Nuseirat Massacre. #Gaza pic.twitter.com/ajB5c9opj8
-Emily F. (@My_Clever_Name) June 10, 2024
But when these users tried to edit the article themselves, they said they were unable to do so because Wikipedia restricted editing access to the page. This provoked more anger.
“This page is protected to prevent vandalism”….wow…so Wikipedia is also helping to push the Zionist agenda. This was the Nuseirat massacre! More than 250 people were murdered in an attempt to free 4 people. pic.twitter.com/R2NplilMS2
-1Creek (@1creeknation) June 11, 2024
Why did Wikipedia freeze the Nuseirat page?
While most Wikipedia pages are open for any registered user to edit, an exception is made for certain articles that are locked or “protected” to prevent “disruptive editing on controversial pages,” the Wikipedia home page explains. When pages are locked, the new settings limit and decrease the number of edits made to pages.
There are several blocking levels. Both Nuseirat pages have been “completely blocked,” meaning only verified Wikipedia users and administrators can access them.
Editors trying to access any of the pages are being redirected to the talk page.
Have there been edit wars on Wikipedia before?
- High-profile politicians linked to legal scandals or other controversies are popular targets for content “vandalism” on Wikipedia. In 2018, for example, Pakistani politician Maryam Nawaz’s Wikipedia page was blocked or “protected” after several vandalism attempts. Nawaz currently serves as the chief minister of Punjab. She is also the daughter of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. She was sentenced to seven years in prison in a corruption case, but was later acquitted by an Islamabad court in September 2022.
- Former US President George W Bush has one of the most edited pages on Wikipedia, with 48,105 edits. He ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and many critics have disputed his administration’s alleged evidence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The issue was a topic of contention for many Wikipedia editors.
- The Wikipedia page on the COVID-19 pandemic has become a focus for tens of thousands of edits, with some entries covering conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. Speculation surrounding the virus born from bats or a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, has become infectious. Wikipedia has managed to address the problem of misinformation about the spread of the virus on its platform, however, with projects like Wiki Project Medicine, a community of doctors and scientists, working to correct misinformation.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
