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I'm actually glad that most of the other editors on the page are pushing back against him. Just because you created something cool or useful it does not mean your word is gospel!
Unfortunately he does have significant power within the wikimedia foundation (parent of wikipedia). He’s got a permanent seat on the board.
Thankfully wikipedia editors tend to act quite independently of wikimedia. But this sort of weighing opinion acting like they have sway on a controversial topic by Jimmy Wales (especially in the midst of wikipedia getting threats from the federal government), worries me a little that wikipedia may have its editorial independence under threat. (A talk page comment is still relatively minor, thankfully.)
wales says all kinds of things all the time. some good, some bad. but after all he is the libertarian who built wikipedia’s anarchistic processes and editorial independence, so i heavily doubt this’ll have any challenge to that independence
While it may look anarchist on the surface. Wikipedia is very much heirarchical and the power lies in few admins.
As an anarchist myself, and someone who has A LOT of edits on wikipedia, I wouldn’t call wikipedia anarchist. Crowdsourced, sure. Anarchist, no. The editor culture is no where near there.
If by hierarchical you mean the role of social capital, I feel like that's how things would function in an anarchist society and I don't see a better solution. If by hierarchical you mean the WMF, then I agree (hence anarchistic instead of anarchist).
power lies in few admins
I don't think so, unless by "few" you mean a couple hundred.
This is why Wikipedia will remain a trusted source for a generation and Grokipedia will be a trivia question in 5 years. Even as people turn to LLMs for knowledge, the talk page and open history with all the old versions archived will make it a respected source of truth.
~~Grokipedia~~
Nazipedia
I think people who shit on Wikipedia for its limitations and cite that schools don’t let you use it for a report are just helping enable the dismantling of a shared reality in society.
Just because you created something cool or useful it does not mean your word is gospel!
He doesn’t claim that, he’s just chiming in with an opinion.
An opinion prompted by a awkward question in an interview and where he is abusing his position to insist the article needs to change to meet his arbitrary standard of not being considerate of governments that deny genocide.
Yes it is contested by the people who are committing genocide and the countries which support them in doing it.
This is the shit Musk thinks is too left wing.
He keeps saying "this is debated" and "the article fails", but doesn't specific where or how. I think he's just visibly inserting himself into the discussion in order to signal to outsiders that he, personally, disagrees with the genocide claim, no doubt expecting some news coverage of his self-insertion. "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales clashes with editors on Israel genocide claim!" kinda shit. Doing this futile hand-wringing in public using his public account, and responding to half-a-dozen or so comments to make it look like he's engaging, is all that's required for him to be able to look funders and publishers in the eye without being held personally 'accountable' to the genocide deniers he deals with.
Fuck off Jimmy 😴 And shout out to the dedicated editors who are schooling the daft cunt on the rules of his own creation.
I just figured he was trying to save Wikipedia from getting axed by those in power in some countries who are pushing back very hard against anything that has sentences containing both "Israel" and "genocide" in it.
We've hit such staggeringly outrageous levels of "forced propaganda" in the U.S. (people getting fired from their jobs for speaking I'll of a dead guy?) that if I was Jimmy, I'd be worried about the whole thing going away if it catches the eye of the wrong person at the wrong time. I don't agree with what he's doing for whatever reason, but the fact is that while Cloudflare may be able to survive 2.2 whattabytes[sic] per second, Wikipedia will not.
I just figured he was trying to save Wikipedia from getting axed by those in power in some countries who are pushing back very hard against anything that has sentences containing both “Israel” and “genocide” in it.
This is not the case.
But I am pro-Israel. That doesn't mean I'm anti-Palestine. This is not a controversial position. My views actually aren't in any way shocking or unusual. 9:30 AM · Apr 16, 2019
https://x.com/jimmy_wales/status/1118069048493740032
You can search his profile and find the last time he mentioned anything regarding Israel, Palestine or Gaza was 2 years ago, besides a post referring to the ADL discussing how wikipedia banned editors for antisemitism.
What you can find, however, is many, many, many posts over a number of years claiming Jeremy Corbyn was antisemitic and had made the Labour party antisemitic during his tenure as leader, something which happened largely due to Corbyn being pro-Palestinian and was used as a smear campaign against him.
And now out of the blue he declares this article not up to standards, and the only argument he consistently formulates is that some governments disagree and they have to be given equal weight.
Gee whiz, I wonder why.
I don't think it's the place of Wikipedia to put together the UN's opinion and the UK's opinion (to take two examples) and conclude that the UN's can be stated as fact while the UK's can't.
I agree that the UN's is correct, but it makes Wikipedia worse, not better, to ignore disagreement on important subjects.
Do you take the same broad-minded approach to Holocaust denial? Vaccine misinformation? Intelligent design?
I take the same approach, yes: where there is well-established consensus, Wikipedia should state that as fact. Where there is disagreement with the consensus, it should be noted proportionately.
But there is no lack of consensus on the things you mention.
The genocide of Gazans is in the same place: a few ideologically-motivated crazies arguing for the side that is obviously both factually and morally bankrupt.
I agree it's ideologically motivated, but that doesn't affect the fact that there's a lack of consensus. There are serious governments and academics and commentators who disagree.
Probably in time they will see the truth but that's not for Wikipedia to predict.
There are serious governments and academics and commentators who disagree.
No there isn't. All the arguments rely on genocide denial and ignoring repeated, clear statements of intent by Israeli government officials, soldiers, MP's and citizens, whilst clearly having a clear bias towards exaggeration when it concerns claims about acts committed by Palestinians.
That's just repeating the claim that they're ideologically motivated.
Western governments, sans the US, are serious governments.
That’s just repeating the claim that they’re ideologically motivated.
Because they are, as well as materially motivated.
Western governments, sans the US, are serious governments.
As opposed to every government that is non-western, which are by definition non-serious???
What denotes serious vs non-serious government worthy of weight? Why would you not merely look at the evidence, and make determinations independent of the will of any particular government? Why would being "serious" mean they're not materially or ideologically motivated? Why would the US under Biden be more serious when Biden repeated the false claim of beheaded babies? Why would Starmer, who declared Israel had the right to withhold power and water, be any more serious? Why would any of these countries that have smeared Palestinian advocates as anti-semites and introduced laws to crack down on even peaceful protests be "serious" and worth weighing in their view of what constitutes genocide as if they are neutral observers, not guilty co-conspirators?
Because they are, as well as materially motivated.
So if you're just repeating the claim, there is no point. Say something new?
What denotes serious vs non-serious government worthy of weight?
So the statements of the Israeli government would not have much weight in this, as they have obvious incentive to lie. The government of Russia should not have much weight, because it wants to whitewash its war crimes in Ukraine. The government of the US should not have much weight, because it has been eviscerated of everyone of any intellectual capacity.
as if they are neutral observers
They are not neutral observers, but (some of them) make serious statements and are capable of responding to facts even when it concerns an ally. We don't see that with the US. We do see it with the UK, so even though it is not neutral, it forms part of the lack of consensus.
Going on the basis of consensus means that sometimes Wikipedia will not state as fact something that is a fact. And that's fine. It's better than the alternative.
So if you’re just repeating the claim, there is no point. Say something new?
So if you're not going to say anything of substance, there is no point. Say something that doesn't waste peoples time?
So the statements of the Israeli government would not have much weight in this, as they have obvious incentive to lie. The government of Russia should not have much weight, because it wants to whitewash its war crimes in Ukraine. The government of the US should not have much weight, because it has been eviscerated of everyone of any intellectual capacity.
Good to know we've dealt with all 3 governments.
They are not neutral observers, but (some of them) make serious statements and are capable of responding to facts even when it concerns an ally. We don’t see that with the US. We do see it with the UK, so even though it is not neutral, it forms part of the lack of consensus.
Going on the basis of consensus means that sometimes Wikipedia will not state as fact something that is a fact. And that’s fine. It’s better than the alternative.
Somehow you've managed to be both inane and absurd. We can't state facts because there's no consensus, there's no consensus because there are material and idealogical incentives to deny facts, so therefore liars and and co-conspirators get to pre-empt statements of fact, and this is better than the alternative to stating facts, because it might offend those who want to deny them. And the basis of this allowance of self censorship for alignment with the guilty is that some are "serious", and they are "serious" entirely because they are "capable of responding to facts even when it concerns an ally". This is despite the UK (a "serious" country) being directly complicit, having hidden its own legal advice on the sale of arms to Israel, having been in near lockstep with the US on policy, having declared Israel "does have that right" to deny power and water to Palestinians as collective punishment, having cracked down on domestic protests and made Palestine Action a proscribed organisation for mere trespassing and maybe criminal damage (of spraying paint on a plane), I could go on.
Good to know we’ve dealt with all 3 governments.
If you are not able to extrapolate, I'm not going to give an opinion on all ~200 governments in the world, or any significant fraction of them.
and this is better than the alternative to stating facts, because it might offend those who want to deny them.
Fundamental error. Wales and the wikipedia ethos is not about "not offending" people; it's about creating a resource that can be trusted by as many people as possible.
If you are not able to extrapolate, I’m not going to give an opinion on all ~200 governments in the world, or any significant fraction of them.
Only that there's apparently enough "serious" ones to be OK to deny genocide in an encyclopedia.
Fundamental error. Wales and the wikipedia ethos is not about “not offending” people; it’s about creating a resource that can be trusted by as many people as possible.
And how you get trust is by denying inconvenient facts that are only controversial to morons and complicit governments and politicians according to you, because they're "serious" in your stupid, shallow and meaningless criteria. Moron.
I've never said Wikipedia should deny the genocide in Gaza and you know it.
You are not a serious commenter; goodbye.
You just defended claiming objections should be taken seriously from "serious" (lmao) countries in the specific context of someone trying to get the article rewritten to downplay claims of genocide by invoking the claims of interested governments that are the ones doing the downplaying for their own cynical reasons.
You're an idiot who can't follow the topic and context of conversation. Goodbye.
Is it really contested per commonly accepted definitions of genocide? I thought it was just a controversial truth to state in public media.
Yeah, it seems the same as saying the 2020 US presidential election results are contested... which is technically true, but it'd be misleading to frame it that way.
It is contested. Not here on most lemmy sites or even Reddit. One typically gets banned for even mentioning a subtle deviation from the hive mind, so it's understandable that you wouldn't know.
It is not at all contested per common definitions of genocide, which was the question.
Lawyers call it genocide. Historians call it genocide. International bodies that specialise in discussing genocide all call it genocide.
The only people who disagree are the Israeli government and their supporters. So, Jimmy Wales' position is partisan bullshit.
Not like this, Wikipedia.
Why is every respectable institution of the day falling all over themselves to commit suicide on this fucking hill
The article used to begin with that, but it was changed.
NATOpedia moment.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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