“In announcing its special pro-Israel Wikipedia initiative earlier this year, The Israel Group blasted these rules and wrote that because of them, the site “is now the number one global source that actively substantiates the lies and false propaganda being disseminated about Israel.” The group, which in the past published a list of what it termed Wikipedia’s most anti-Israel editors, blasted the volunteer “administrators” who “allowed anti-Israel editors freedom to take over Wikipedia.”
By Omer Benjakob | Haaretz
For almost 20 years, Wikipedia has documented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attempts to keep the peace in the narrative war between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian editors now shape how the online encyclopedia deals with all conflicts.
When the Cuncator made the edit – only the second on Wikipedia’s page about the second intifada – he had no idea that this article, then less than 4 minutes old, would be edited over 4,500 times over the next two decades and viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
It’s spelled “al-Aqsa, not Al-Aqsa,” he wrote, fixing the opening line of the article, which at the time read: “The al-Aqsa, or Second Intifada, is the wave of violence that is still underway between Israel and the Palestinians.”
It was mid-August, 2002, when the article page opened, almost two years after the events it sought to describe had first erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories.