Wikipedia’s top adjudicating body, Arbitration Committee, has banned six editors who engaged in coordinated editing of thousands of articles in the Palestine Israel Articles (PIA) topic area. The editors were among 40 or so identified in my wide-ranging Pirate Wires investigation — “How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative” — from October, which focused on how the group worked to shift the narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The bans were issued as a result of an Arbcom investigation launched after that investigation documented the extent to which PIA had been co-opted by this group.

The six super-editors — Nishidani, Nableezy, Makeandtoss, Levivich, Iskander323, Selfstudier — have all received indefinite topic bans, which means they are prohibited from editing PIA articles for at least 12 months, at which point they can appeal to have the topic ban dropped. Another editor, Zero000, who has a higher Admin status on the site, received a warning.

The arbitrators involved in the proceedings, informally known as PI5, found that the editors had engaged in disruptive behavior and editing that violated key Wikipedia policies. “Editors have to focus on building an encyclopedia, and a pattern of editing that puts ideological interests above the project's interests harms both the encyclopedia and the collaborative environment,” noted one arbitrator, theleekycauldron, in their vote to support an indefinite topic ban against Iskander323, one of the most prolific and damaging of the group of 40 editors.

Due to the widespread nature of both the investigation and the severity of their consequences, the PI5 proceedings represent a marked departure from standard Wikipedia practice. “While we haven't engaged in such drastic measures before, I think the time is now,” arbitrator CaptainEek commented in their vote for a proposed policy change that would set a higher bar for editors to contribute to any article touching on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

My October report on systemic issues facing the PIA topic area uncovered far-reaching patterns of collusive editing based on ideological lines. Around 850,000 combined edits were made to nearly 10,000 articles by the group of 40. The report also documented the extensiveness and intensity of the group’s activities, with the volume of Iskander323 and Selfstudier’s edits in PIA topic area alone putting them in the top 99.975% percent of editors on the site by number of total edits.

The analysis also found that these editors often dedicated upwards of 90% of their editing to PIA, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, immediately after Hamas’ deadly invasion of Israel. Other members of the cohort reached similar levels of intensity, with some dedicating 100% of edits to PIA in recent months.

Often seemingly innocuous, these edits cumulatively worked towards clear ideological goals, like erasing the Jewish people’s historic ties to the land of Israel, deleting dozens of mentions of Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis, and en masse scrubbing of human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Far from remaining siloed on Wikipedia, this kind of narrative engineering almost instantly percolates onto Google, where 70 to 80 percent of topic searches return a Wikipedia article as the number one result. LLMs are also being widely trained on Wikipedia data.

One of the biggest factors in Arbcom’s recent decisions, however, was the extent to which the group has continuously engaged in coordinated editing. My October reporting found that Nableezy and Iskander323 co-edited articles in nearly 1,500 instances. Zero000 and Nableezy co-edited over 1,750 articles. Nishidani and Nableezy co-edited 1,219 times. Sometimes these were seemingly trivial. But occasionally, individual edits had a material impact on historical perception.

For example, I reported how in one particularly noteworthy example, Nishidani and Zero0000 successfully collaborated to remove a photo of Amin Al-Husseini, one of the most important figures in the Palestinian national movement, touring a Nazi concentration camp from the article about him.

Behind the scenes, these editors waged a different kind of warfare, engaging aggressively to shut down discussions and even working to have editors who objected to their edits banned from editing certain articles. This pattern was noted by some arbitrators in the proceedings. “Nableezy’s personal attacks in edit summaries and talk pages make this warranted. Collaborative editing cannot happen when editors publish hostile comments about other editors,” wrote arbitrator Z1720.

Arbitrators also honed in on the bureaucratic maneuvering that some of the banned editors employed to not only cover their own violative activities but neutralize other editors they saw as adversarial.

“I can't figure out what else to do about an editor who is productive 90% of the time, but then turns around and participates in a tag-team edit war while selectively complaining about other people tag-team edit warring and trying to get them sanctioned for it," theleekycauldron wrote about Levivich, a veteran editor who was topic banned. “Levivich is a very skilled content editor, but if they then use that to selectively boost sources that agree with their position…keeping them here [in PIA] becomes untenable.”

My October report also detailed how a separate group, run from an 8,000-member Discord called Tech For Palestine, was engaged in widespread edit canvassing, largely led by a user named Ïvana, who received a total site ban in a separate proceeding in December that resulted from a unanimous vote by the 15 arbitrators.

Two editors considered to be on the pro-Israel side — including one, Billedmammal, who created a chart demonstrating the intensity of the pro-Palestine group’s PIA editing — also received bans for disruptive editing and other offenses.

Wikipedia has recently been subject to intense scrutiny on account of issues like the ones detailed above. My previous reporting on the topic has shown that while Wikipedia faces a multi-pronged crisis — which, as I detailed last fall in a lengthy Pirate Wires investigation, includes similar issues in the American politics space — Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which owns and is tasked with overseeing the site has been heavily involved with far-left activist foundations, like the Tides Foundation.

WMF has also devoted enormous amounts of its resources to instituting DEI policies as part of its Wikimedia Movement Strategy, which has transformed Wikipedia’s mission from knowledge sharing into a vastly expanded mission rooted in influencing global policies.

In the October piece, I reported that many of the issues arising on Wikipedia stem from the 15-person Arbitration Committee’s inability to monitor and enforce policies across nearly 7 million Wikipedia articles. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” Captain Eek wrote in an earlier proceeding. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”

In this case, Arbcom seems to have taken the lesson from the Gordian tale and cut the knot. Whether that’s enough to remedy the issues in PIA remains to be seen. What’s clear, however, is that as entrenched and serious as these issues are, they are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

— Ashley Rindsberg