World Jewish Congress report finds ‘extensive, systemic bias’ on Arabic Wikipedia

The World Jewish Congress released a report on Tuesday highlighting “extensive and systemic bias” in the Arabic Wikipedia in various Israel-related articles.

Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the Institute for Technology and Human Rights at WJC, stated that “one of the world’s most trusted knowledge platforms is being systematically manipulated to promote extremist narratives.”

“When terrorist propaganda and hate-driven narratives are allowed to masquerade as neutral information, the consequences extend far beyond Wikipedia itself,” she said. “These distortions shape public understanding and views of Jews and Israelis across the Arabic-speaking world.” (JNS sought comment from the Wikimedia Foundation.)

The report states that it examined nine articles in the Arabic Wikipedia and found that the online encyclopedia “consistently employs politically charged terminology that adopts the framing of militant groups while delegitimizing Israeli perspectives.” Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are referred to as “resistance” in Arabic Wikipedia entries, and terrorists for each group are referred to as “martyrs,” while Israel is referred to as the “Zionist entity,” per the report.

Arabic Wikipedia entries also refer to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 as a “military operation” against “occupation forces” and the United Nations documenting rapes and sexual assault as being “Israeli propaganda,” per the report.

The report also found a disproportionate use of terror-affiliated sources and state-run sources from governments that are antagonistic to the United States and its allies. It found more than 45,000 links to Qatari state media, more than 6,300 to Russian state media and more than 3,000 to Turkish state media. It also found around 2,500 links to Hezbollah-affiliated media outlets and more than 2,000 to websites affiliated with Hamas.

Administrators in the Arabic Wikipedia maintain the biased nature of the article, the report states, citing an example of an administrator banning an editor who attempted to put in evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence. It also states that the Arabic Wikipedia currently lacks an Arbitration Committee—the site’s binding dispute resolution panel of editors—as the English Wikipedia does, and instead has only a temporary committee that does not discuss its deliberations in a public forum.

The report lists a series of recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation, including barring any glorification or whitewashing of terrorism. It also calls on lawmakers to investigate the foundation and require more transparency from Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia has long presented itself as humanity’s shared knowledge repository,” Barak-Cheney stated. “Ensuring that this knowledge remains factual is particularly critical as emerging AI platforms increasingly rely on multilingual information sources to formulate responses to user queries.”