EXCLUSIVE REPORT

A Comparative Analysis of Wikipedia's Israeli and Palestinian Biases

General Overview

For more than a decade, individuals and groups on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have claimed that Wikipedia and its dominant editors and administrators are biased against them. Who is right?

• To quantify the level of anti-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias on Wikipedia, The Israel Group conducted the first-of-its-kind study, analyzing 50 articles in the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian topic areas that totaled 355,419 words. 

• The Wikipedia articles fell into the following categories: History, Living Person, Deceased Person, Organization, Concept, Location. 

• The Israel Group analyzed every sentence in the body of each article and categorized the sentences as one of the following: Anti-Israel, Anti-Palestinian, Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestinian, Neutral

CASE RESULTS

After categorizing all sentences and then adding up the word totals in each article, totals could then be added up for the entire collection:

The results are clear: 

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• Anti-Israel count is more than twice the anti-Palestinian. 

• Pro-Palestinian content is almost 6,000 words more than pro-Israel—making it more than 30% higher. 

The report shows the 50 articles’ word counts and percentages in each category. Five of the most anti-Israel pages highlighted in the report are: 
 

Articles

Negative Content %

1. Israeli settler violence

88.58%

2. Mass civilian casualties of Israeli bombing, shelling and rocket attacks on the Gaza Strip

84.59%

3. Jewish Israeli stone-throwing

83.37%

4. Israeli occupation of the West Bank

77.19%

5. Israel and the apartheid analogy

64.55%

The large quantity of anti-Israel content can be compared to the sparse pro-Israel sentiments:

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• Thirteen articles featured zero pro-Israel content

• Eleven articles featured between 0.8 and 0.18% pro-Israel content

• Ten articles featured between 1% and 4.83% pro-Israel content

• Seven articles featured between 5% and 10% pro-Israel content

• Only nine articles featured more than 10% pro-Israel content

The most anti-Palestinian pages by percentage include:

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• Racism in the Palestinian Territories (63.76%), Palestinian Political Violence (48.3%), and Hamas (44.7%)

• The most pro-Palestinian pages tend to include Palestinian activists whose biographies receive plenty of praise, such as: Hanan Ashrawi (50.19%), Nafez Assaily (40.55%) and Edward Said (35.06%).

Full

Report

Detailed

Overview

The Subtle Nuance of Wikipedia’s Anti-Israel Editing and Bias

Comparing and Contrasting the Wikipedia article “Israeli Settler Violence” with the article “Palestinian Political Violence”

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It is costly battling the behemoth and heavily-funded Wikipedia. Presently, The Israel Group is the only nonprofit publicly and privately working to stop Wikipedia’s anti-Israel bias.

This takes funding. We will only have success with your support!