‘It’s not close’ – Israel committing genocide concludes Wikipedia ending editorial debate
Wikipedia has officially added “Gaza genocide” to its “List of Genocides” page, marking a major shift in how Israel’s aggression on the besieged enclave is being documented on the world’s largest online encyclopaedia.
The addition, which now appears as the first entry due to the list’s reverse chronological order, comes after months of extensive debate among the platform’s editors. On its “Gaza genocide” page, it states that “Experts, governments, United Nations agencies, and non-governmental organisations have accused Israel of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people during its invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Israel–Hamas war.”
The entry for “List of genocides,” Wikipedia states that “Israel has been accused by experts, governments, UN agencies and non-governmental organisations of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian population during its invasion and bombing of Gaza during the ongoing Israel–Hamas war.” The page goes on to list the death toll in Gaza while mentioning that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians killed are civilians.
The decision to include the Gaza genocide in the list followed Wikipedia’s formal Request for Comment process, which began in July. Editors supporting the inclusion argued that it met the page’s criteria of events “classified by significant scholarship” as genocide. They also pointed out that the Gaza situation had stronger scholarly consensus than some existing entries on the list, such as the Darfur and Rohingya genocides.
British Wikipedian, Stuart Marshall, made the final ruling in September, decisively supporting the article’s inclusion. “Based on the strength of the arguments … and it’s not close … I discarded the argument that scholars haven’t reached a conclusion on whether the Gaza genocide is really taking place”, Marshall wrote in his decision. “The matter remains contested, but there’s a metric truckload of scholarly sources linked in this discussion that show a clear predominance of academics who say that it is.”
Marshall concluded his ruling with the straightforward statement: “We follow the scholars.”
According to Wikipedia, events qualify as a genocide if they have been classified as such by “significant scholarship.”
Wikipedia’s decision comes amid wider discussions about source reliability, particularly regarding Israel and Palestine. In a related move, the platform’s editors recently voted to declare the Anti-Defamation League “generally unreliable” on the subject, adding it to their list of banned and partially banned sources.
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