From the headline, one might assume he directly edited or locked the page when he just commented on the article's discussion page that it should have a more neutral tone.
That understates the situation significantly. Wales posted a long comment under the headline,
Statement from Jimbo Wales: This message is from me, Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia
That's not just another comment; it's an official statement from the most powerful person on Wikipedia.
Wales goes on to say, "As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do."
In other words, an official body is watching and studying what you are doing, and policy actions may follow.
Finally, Wales does not accept any possibility that other points of view besides his own may be valid - not addressing many prior discussions. His belief is an assumed premise, and he demands ('asks') people to take actions on the basis of his beliefs. If you read the discussion, he continues that position.
That doesn't make Wales wrong or right, but he didn't 'just comment ... that it should have a more neutral tone.'.
Jimmy Wales is not asking for a neutral tone. He's asking for a change in the content of the article: specifically, it must no longer state that Israel is committing a genocide.
The "problem" is that almost all of the sources that Wikipedia typically considers reliable now say that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. Wikipedia editors discussed the sources ad nauseam and came to this conclusion.
Jimmy Wales wants them to just reverse that decision, regardless of what high-quality sources say. He's saying that Wikipedia should treat denials by various governments as being of equal reliability as academic journal articles studying the issue. So if Marco Rubio goes in front of a microphone and says, "There's no genocide in Gaza," that should be treated as an equally valid source as a dozen academics who study genocide publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Needless to say, what Jimmy Wales is demanding goes against Wikipedia's policies on sourcing and neutrality. "Both sides" is not always neutral.
I think that goes without saying. The real question is what's the line between neutrality and letting a vocal minority dictate editorial decisions? Especially when the vocal minority has biased incentives towards making those changes.
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
The Gaza page in question is not very good though. To be honest, this is one of the most eggregious pieces of bad information on Wikipedia I have seen yet.
Don't take my word for it, look up the sources yourself. The formality at least is decent, so you can look up the sources most statements in the article itself are based on.
In that context, I think "neutral tone" can quite safely be read as an euphemism.
There is no good solution to solve this dilemma specifically, good to see that Wales still cares.
Go read the Grokipedia article about the Gaza genocide if you want a laugh. The first sentence is 83 words with multiple nested clauses. It's gibberish.
Thank you for sharing that, turns out to be a lot more measured and balanced than the news article makes it out to be. Damn media always fueling the fires rather than spreading understanding and clarify. I think both sides seems to be raising good points, and probably the truth and more balanced view sits in the middle.
I continued reading through the talk page and eventually come across this:
> the United States government is exerting serious political pressure on Wikipedia as a whole to reveal the real life identities of many editors here who disagree with the current military actions of the government of Israel.
I have not heard about this before, what specifically is this about, if it's true?
Reading the discussion, this appears to be an instance of the system working as intended. People are discussing Jimbo's message and weighing his position against the position of previous editors of the article, and they are weighing the merits and adherence to Wikipedia policy of each.
> As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do. It should go without saying that I am writing this in my personal capacity, and I am not speaking on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else!
I've definitely noticed this a lot more lately on Wikipedia where an article will be really quick to label something as "pseudohistory" or "pseudoscience" or likewise in the summary. Sometimes it makes sense, but there are quite a few articles where the difference between "crackpot" theories and acceptable "fringe" areas of study are fairly subjective. Or that someone feels the need to stand up a separate page about "denialism" of a topic where it was largely unnecessary.
And even for actual pseudoscience topics like Flat Earth Theory - the page has so much good information on it. But the summary on the page is terrible and does not even reflect a good summary of the page's own content! Mostly because people feel an unnecessary need to shoehorn in assessments of the myth status of the theory.
This is how the "Wikipedia Row" "Erupted" at Jimmy Wales:
> It is a bad faith read of the community when suggesting that among the most read and debated articles on the community is poorly done. there has been dozens of hours of discussion and rfcs galore to reach this version of the article and im certain there will be more. Consensus is always evolving but this article represents the latest consensus.
Ultimately it's a numbers game, and editors with an anti-Israeli agenda have the numbers. Jimbo's post reads as if he's encouraging chances so that the article adheres to NPOV, but I think he understands that's rather futile, and is really just trying to draw attention so that more readers will be aware of Wikipedia's biases.
> Others said that Wales did not have control over Wikipedia, and was only an editor like anyone else, but had been “trying to pull an authority-based argument while promoting a book”.
>“I'm not sure Jimbo's plea needs to be entertained much beyond demonstrating that current consensus is something different than what he thinks it should be,” one user said.
Wikipedia editors do not actually consider Jim to be an authority on the matter. They ask him to substantiate his claim that the "Gaza genocide" article is not "neutral" in voice. They don't really seem to care about what he thinks.
Wikipedia has over 400 active accounts who can turn on article protection. They include such diverse people as current CS professors and someone who wants you to know on their page that soccer is more important than life and death, and a person who's personal page opens with a picture of their feet. In fact, the Jimbo Wales account is not currently an administrator. Jimmy could not have locked the article.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those accounts spend more time and effort espousing wiki editing philosophy than any other topic.
When I look through those Wikipedia talk pages what always strikes me is that it is as if a whole raft of not-so-smart people have finally found something they can be experts on. These then use their own developed lingo and the fact that they have more time and expertise about WP than their usually smarter and better informed subject expert counter party to bludgeon them with all kinds of mumbo-jimbo to the point of abandoning the issue altogether. The really sad thing is that this still produces an encylopedia that is better than anything that you could have paid money for.
The Armenian genocide killed approx 1 million out of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey in an attempt to wipe them out which is kind of where the term genocide originated. I don't think the Armenians attacked the Turks or took hostages or anything like that.
In Gaza maybe 3% of the population has been killed, partly as a side effect to fighting back against Hamas after they attacked and took hostages.
I guess it depends how you define the terms. Maybe we need some new term for trying to wipe out a people as opposed to causing casualties in war against people who attacked you?
I mostly agree with Jimmy's statement [1] which is far more neutral than this article. I have concerns, though. It is difficult to find good sources without a large political bent.
If we look at the following article "Casualties of the Gaza war" [2]. If you read link (108) you see a Guardian article "Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war" [3], which says:
> Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
See how the language in the article itself walks back the strong claim. The argument made is that all persons not in the Israeli military intelligence database are automatically civilians. If there was a similar Israeli database of confirmed non-combatants, and this only contained 17% of the people who have died, would this mean that the remaining 83% were military? Of course not. And this all assumes that these databases are actually accurate.
Then we must ask ourselves, how are the number of deaths in total calculated? How do we know that each death is attributed to Israeli actions? How many deaths are due to direct action and secondary action (i.e. illness, dehydration, starvation)?
When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda. How much of what we currently see is propaganda?
I think we need to think extremely carefully and consider all possibilities.
Often when people talk about bias, they assume it must be bias against their interests. They don't realize that, if there is room for bias, it's just as easily bias in their favor. The article could overstate either side - or both at different times.
> When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda.
That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
It should be said that he is not advocating for a “we need to hear both sides” sort of disingenuous argument common among right wing rhetoric but a sense of balanced intellectual humility (even if I believe the behavior and evidence strongly supports the view that Israel is aiming for something akin to genocide) - whether this is a hill he (Wales) should dying on is also another matter.
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.
But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.
Per Wiki's own article, there are many countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#/media/File:Inte...) that disagree with the genocide distinction. Those countries are not just the US - they are large and small nations from all parts of the world. Is that not the definition of highly contested?
"Highly contested" but not by genocide scholars or international law bodies.
Every genocide is contested by the people doing it and its apologists. Let's imagine someone commented on the holocaust wikipedia page:
> I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Holocaust "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Nazi Germany committed genocide, although that claim is highly contested.
This would rightly trigger a lot of outrage. Yes, it's also accurate to say that it's "highly contested". Honestly this really highlights issues with striving for "neutrality", when there is bias in the people defining what neutrality is.
Exactly. There's another 20th century genocide that is "highly contested" in specific odious circles, but there's no reason to present that opposing viewpoint in an encyclopedic treatment of it, given mounds of evidence of intent and outcomes for both.
Hamas carried out executions of a few dozen ranking members of opposition groups that had been carrying out attacks and aid banditry against civilians, at the behest of and with the funding of the Israeli government. This is not a "genocide"
The money is going into an endowment, not funding random political activities. The point of an endowment is to eventually have enough money to live off of the interest forever (which is tough if the organization like Wikimedia keeps growing).
They actually make more money every year from the interest on their endowment than they do from donations at this point.
(All the more argument that they should be knocking off the massive nags though)
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I think Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow. The model would write the article using all publicly available information. This would enable the article to feature all perspectives on the issue to avoid “lying by omission”. Articles would instead be overviews and about a topic rather than appearing biased to a particular set of talking points and coverage. Summary is much more approachable and benefits people who want to learn all about a topic rather than those who seek confirmation reinforcement. I think the end result of this would be that people would be equally happy/unhappy with Wikipedia because the rules would be applied to every article equally and would be a place to go when users didn’t know what to prompt while apps like Grok/ChatGPT are resources used when people already have a question prepared. I agree with Jimmy’s opinion that Wikipedia is not a place to adjudicate disagreements.
> Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow
This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia.
The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that.
As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique definition they’re loudly committed to, all of which makes the entire debate self obsessed.
Would be cool if Sudan was also on people's minds. The UN is currently giving the 400,000 refugees there 1/3 the calories that Gaza was receiving when it was considered starving Gaza.
jervant|3 months ago
mmooss|3 months ago
Statement from Jimbo Wales: This message is from me, Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia
That's not just another comment; it's an official statement from the most powerful person on Wikipedia.
Wales goes on to say, "As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including “Zionism”. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do."
In other words, an official body is watching and studying what you are doing, and policy actions may follow.
Finally, Wales does not accept any possibility that other points of view besides his own may be valid - not addressing many prior discussions. His belief is an assumed premise, and he demands ('asks') people to take actions on the basis of his beliefs. If you read the discussion, he continues that position.
That doesn't make Wales wrong or right, but he didn't 'just comment ... that it should have a more neutral tone.'.
mcphage|3 months ago
He also said it in a '"high profile media interview about the article'.
puppycodes|3 months ago
This is what makes Wikipedia good.
DiogenesKynikos|3 months ago
The "problem" is that almost all of the sources that Wikipedia typically considers reliable now say that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. Wikipedia editors discussed the sources ad nauseam and came to this conclusion.
Jimmy Wales wants them to just reverse that decision, regardless of what high-quality sources say. He's saying that Wikipedia should treat denials by various governments as being of equal reliability as academic journal articles studying the issue. So if Marco Rubio goes in front of a microphone and says, "There's no genocide in Gaza," that should be treated as an equally valid source as a dozen academics who study genocide publishing peer-reviewed articles.
Needless to say, what Jimmy Wales is demanding goes against Wikipedia's policies on sourcing and neutrality. "Both sides" is not always neutral.
fumeux_fume|3 months ago
undeveloper|3 months ago
thrance|3 months ago
[deleted]
raxxorraxor|3 months ago
Don't take my word for it, look up the sources yourself. The formality at least is decent, so you can look up the sources most statements in the article itself are based on.
In that context, I think "neutral tone" can quite safely be read as an euphemism.
There is no good solution to solve this dilemma specifically, good to see that Wales still cares.
tetrisgm|3 months ago
Wikipedia has been targeted lately as part of a marketing effort for grokipedia.
I recommend taking this as a grain of salt.
Gigachad|3 months ago
shermozle|3 months ago
skilled|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
embedding-shape|3 months ago
I continued reading through the talk page and eventually come across this:
> the United States government is exerting serious political pressure on Wikipedia as a whole to reveal the real life identities of many editors here who disagree with the current military actions of the government of Israel.
I have not heard about this before, what specifically is this about, if it's true?
Centigonal|3 months ago
legitster|3 months ago
I've definitely noticed this a lot more lately on Wikipedia where an article will be really quick to label something as "pseudohistory" or "pseudoscience" or likewise in the summary. Sometimes it makes sense, but there are quite a few articles where the difference between "crackpot" theories and acceptable "fringe" areas of study are fairly subjective. Or that someone feels the need to stand up a separate page about "denialism" of a topic where it was largely unnecessary.
And even for actual pseudoscience topics like Flat Earth Theory - the page has so much good information on it. But the summary on the page is terrible and does not even reflect a good summary of the page's own content! Mostly because people feel an unnecessary need to shoehorn in assessments of the myth status of the theory.
thrance|3 months ago
> It is a bad faith read of the community when suggesting that among the most read and debated articles on the community is poorly done. there has been dozens of hours of discussion and rfcs galore to reach this version of the article and im certain there will be more. Consensus is always evolving but this article represents the latest consensus.
Seems very reasonable to me.
dlubarov|3 months ago
orwin|3 months ago
mrguyorama|3 months ago
From the very article itself:
> Others said that Wales did not have control over Wikipedia, and was only an editor like anyone else, but had been “trying to pull an authority-based argument while promoting a book”.
>“I'm not sure Jimbo's plea needs to be entertained much beyond demonstrating that current consensus is something different than what he thinks it should be,” one user said.
Wikipedia editors do not actually consider Jim to be an authority on the matter. They ask him to substantiate his claim that the "Gaza genocide" article is not "neutral" in voice. They don't really seem to care about what he thinks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
The page is currently only protected until November 4th.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrato...
Wikipedia has over 400 active accounts who can turn on article protection. They include such diverse people as current CS professors and someone who wants you to know on their page that soccer is more important than life and death, and a person who's personal page opens with a picture of their feet. In fact, the Jimbo Wales account is not currently an administrator. Jimmy could not have locked the article.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those accounts spend more time and effort espousing wiki editing philosophy than any other topic.
jacquesm|3 months ago
grammarxcore|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
kurtis_reed|3 months ago
tim333|3 months ago
In Gaza maybe 3% of the population has been killed, partly as a side effect to fighting back against Hamas after they attacked and took hostages.
I guess it depends how you define the terms. Maybe we need some new term for trying to wipe out a people as opposed to causing casualties in war against people who attacked you?
bArray|3 months ago
If we look at the following article "Casualties of the Gaza war" [2]. If you read link (108) you see a Guardian article "Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war" [3], which says:
> Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
See how the language in the article itself walks back the strong claim. The argument made is that all persons not in the Israeli military intelligence database are automatically civilians. If there was a similar Israeli database of confirmed non-combatants, and this only contained 17% of the people who have died, would this mean that the remaining 83% were military? Of course not. And this all assumes that these databases are actually accurate.
Then we must ask ourselves, how are the number of deaths in total calculated? How do we know that each death is attributed to Israeli actions? How many deaths are due to direct action and secondary action (i.e. illness, dehydration, starvation)?
When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda. How much of what we currently see is propaganda?
I think we need to think extremely carefully and consider all possibilities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20250821135825/https://www.thegu...
mmooss|3 months ago
> When we look back at any conflict in history, we see the inflated deaths of civilians, the deflated number of military persons killed - it's propaganda.
That's false. In each event, one side tends to inflate claims like civilian deaths and the other tends to minimize them.
lgvln|3 months ago
ekjhgkejhgk|3 months ago
LOL
2OEH8eoCRo0|3 months ago
incomingpain|3 months ago
[deleted]
jalapenof|3 months ago
[deleted]
ekjhgkejhgk|3 months ago
[deleted]
ekjhgkejhgk|3 months ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape|3 months ago
There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.
But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.
dgrin91|3 months ago
pcthrowaway|3 months ago
Every genocide is contested by the people doing it and its apologists. Let's imagine someone commented on the holocaust wikipedia page:
> I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Holocaust "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Nazi Germany committed genocide, although that claim is highly contested.
This would rightly trigger a lot of outrage. Yes, it's also accurate to say that it's "highly contested". Honestly this really highlights issues with striving for "neutrality", when there is bias in the people defining what neutrality is.
n1b0m|3 months ago
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/jewish-notable...
tantalor|3 months ago
> The Israeli government ... denying that their military operations constitute genocide.
You have to scroll pretty far to find it.
I think Jimbo is saying, NPOV would have that assertion much higher, even in the lede.
viccis|3 months ago
daliusd|3 months ago
trhway|3 months ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape|3 months ago
Did you honestly spend any time at all to see if it was already included in Wikipedia or not before you wrote your comment?
viccis|3 months ago
hiddencost|3 months ago
[deleted]
bsimpson|3 months ago
[deleted]
legitster|3 months ago
They actually make more money every year from the interest on their endowment than they do from donations at this point.
(All the more argument that they should be knocking off the massive nags though)
th0ma5|3 months ago
throw7|3 months ago
angelgonzales|3 months ago
JumpCrisscross|3 months ago
This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia.
The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that.
As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique definition they’re loudly committed to, all of which makes the entire debate self obsessed.
_DeadFred_|3 months ago
computerthings|3 months ago
[deleted]