HistoryRewritten

This page explains why HistoryRewritten was built. It is written in the manner of an encyclopedia article and cites its sources, but it is not a Wikipedia article: HistoryRewritten is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia links open the current version of each page.

Why this exists

Last updated: September 3, 2026

HistoryRewritten was built in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks by one person who suspected that English Wikipedia articles on Jewish and Israeli history were being reframed, and who did not trust that suspicion enough to test it by reading diffs with a conclusion already in mind. Between 2024 and 2026 the same question moved from editor talk pages into public view: both of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, said the encyclopedia’s coverage of Israel had departed from its neutral point of view policy; the volunteer community classified the Anti-Defamation League as generally unreliable on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; a bipartisan group of legislators and then the House Oversight Committee opened inquiries into alleged coordinated editing; and Wikipedia’s own Arbitration Committee sanctioned editors on both sides of the topic, including a January 2026 site ban of one of the topic area’s most prolific contributors. This page summarizes those events with citations, and then explains what a measurement tool can honestly add to a dispute that is mostly about intent.

How Wikipedia governs the topic

English Wikipedia has treated the Arab–Israeli conflict as a contentious topic for years. The 2019 Palestine-Israel articles 4 decision combined that designation with an extended-confirmed restriction, which limits editing in the area to accounts at least thirty days old with five hundred edits, and a one-revert-per-day rule.[39] A standing remedy on the topic’s own page states that Wikipedia cannot resolve the underlying real-world conflict and can only aspire to cover it neutrally.[40] The Arbitration Committee is a conduct body: it decides how editors behaved, not whether an article is true, and its decisions say so. That distinction matters for everything below. A topic ban is a finding about behavior; it is not a ruling that an article was biased, and it is not a measurement of anything.

The co-founders’ statements

Jimmy Wales

On 20 June 2024, replying on his user talk page to the community’s classification of the Anti-Defamation League as generally unreliable on the conflict, Wales wrote that liking or disliking a source was “a terrible way” to decide whether it is reliable.[1] In March 2025 the Wikimedia Foundation announced a working group on common standards for neutral-point-of-view policies across language editions;[4] its published membership lists Wales as chair.[5]

The dispute became public in November 2025 over the article Gaza genocide, whose first sentence a September 2025 request for comment had settled in the declarative form rather than an attributed one.[6] Asked about the article by Walter Isaacson on CNN, Wales called it one of the worst Wikipedia entries he had seen in a very long time.[2] On 2 November 2025 he opened a section titled “Statement from Jimbo Wales” on the article’s talk page, writing that the lead asserted in Wikipedia’s voice that Israel is committing genocide although the claim is highly contested, which he described as a violation of the neutral-point-of-view policy; he said he was writing in his personal capacity, mentioned the working group, and named Zionism among the topics it had studied.[3] Editors replied at length; one accused him of asking the project to abandon scholarship under political pressure, and Wales answered that outside pressure was irrelevant in either direction and that the article took a side in an ongoing controversy.[3] The Foundation’s spokesperson described him as one of hundreds of thousands of editors expressing a personal view.[7]

Wales has been equally direct about what he does not support. In a New York Times interview published in October 2025 he said the idea that bias is a fit subject for a congressional investigation was “frankly absurd”, and that Wikipedia should keep its values rather than answer to the mob of the moment.[8]

Larry Sanger

Sanger co-founded Wikipedia with Wales and left the project in 2002.[9] His criticism of the site’s neutrality predates the current dispute and was not originally about Israel: a May 2020 essay argued that the neutrality policy was no longer in effect, using the Obama, Trump, abortion and Jesus articles as examples.[10] In September 2025 he published “Nine Theses on Wikipedia”, a reform proposal calling for competing articles, the abolition of source blacklists, and a revival of the original neutrality policy; the document does not mention Israel or antisemitism.[11] On 4 November 2025 he posted his own statement in the Gaza genocide discussion, agreeing with Wales that the title and lead took a side, and arguing that neutrality did not require rejecting the genocide accusation but did require attributing it.[12] In a January 2026 essay he referred to “antisemitism within Wikipedia” and urged readers concerned about it to become involved in the project.[13] He had earlier written that he was glad Congress was investigating paid biased editing on Wikipedia.[14]

Sanger’s own standing on the site changed in June 2026. After he proposed a “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity” and publicized the live discussion to his followers, an administrators’ noticeboard thread closed with a community ban for off-wiki canvassing; the closing statement also recorded concern about calls for outing.[15] Whatever one makes of that outcome, it means that neither founder’s intervention changed the article: as of September 2026 the first sentence of Gaza genocide reads as the 2025 request for comment left it.[6]

The ADL reliability decision

Wikipedia maintains a community-curated list of perennial sources with a reliability rating for each. In April 2024 editors opened a three-part request for comment on the Anti-Defamation League, covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, antisemitism, and the ADL’s hate-symbols database; participation was limited to extended-confirmed accounts.[16] On 20 and 21 June 2024 uninvolved closers found a “clear consensus” that the ADL is generally unreliable regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, extended that finding to the intersection of antisemitism and the conflict, and found that the ADL “can roughly be taken as reliable on the topic of antisemitism when Israel and Zionism are not concerned”, with the hate-symbols database reliable for straightforward facts about a symbol but not for more complex details.[16]

Three points of precision are often lost in retellings. First, the ADL was not deprecated; Wikipedia’s four-step scale runs from generally reliable through additional considerations and generally unreliable to deprecated, and the outcome was the third step, for one topic. Second, the 2020 consensus that the ADL is generally reliable in general was not overturned, and the current list still records it as reliable outside the conflict, particularly on hate groups and extremism, while asking that its labeling of people and organizations as antisemitic be attributed.[17] Third, the preliminary noticeboard thread that led to the request for comment was opened in March 2024 by the editor Iskandar323,[18] whose later sanctions are described below.

The ADL’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, called the decision “flat out wrong” on MSNBC.[19] More than forty Jewish organizations wrote to the Foundation’s board asking it to investigate and reconsider; the Foundation replied that neither its board nor its staff makes content decisions, and published a statement that it does not intervene in community decisions about the classification of a source and that the ADL remains generally reliable on Wikipedia outside the Israel–Palestine topic.[20][21] In January 2025, when the Arbitration Committee sanctioned editors in the topic area, the ADL welcomed the decision and named Iskandar323 among five topic-banned editors it said had been part of a bad-faith campaign against its credibility, adding that several of that campaign’s “chief instigators” were among those sanctioned.[22] Wikipedia’s own article on the ADL covers the episode (read it on Wikipedia).

The “Gang of 40” and the congressional inquiries

The phrase “Gang of 40” belongs to the journalist Ashley Rindsberg. In October 2024 Pirate Wires published his investigation alleging that about forty editors were, in its words, hijacking Wikipedia and pushing pro-Palestinian propaganda,[23][24] working in pairs or trios across roughly 850,000 edits to nearly 10,000 articles, with examples drawn from the Zionism, Jews, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Iran articles and a more general claim that criticism of Hamas had been muted.[24] Rindsberg has described the group as “what I call the gang of 40”.[25] Wikipedia’s editors, for their part, rated Pirate Wires itself generally unreliable in a 2025 discussion, citing a blending of news and opinion.[26]

The claim of coordination was taken up in a different form by the ADL, whose March 2025 report “Editing for Hate” identified thirty editors as acting in concert by measuring the minimum time between their edits on pages related to Israel, Jews or Palestinians, and reported that the group had made more than a million edits to over ten thousand such articles and was many times more active in group communication than comparison groups.[27] The Foundation said its preliminary review found conclusions not supported by the report’s own data and that it was conducting a fuller analysis;[28] the historian Shira Klein, whose research the report cited, wrote in The Forward that critics of this kind seek to police public discourse about Israel rather than address antisemitism, while her co-author Jan Grabowski replied that the report was accurate.[29]

On 30 April 2025, twenty-three members of Congress from both parties, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Don Bacon, wrote to Foundation chief executive Maryana Iskander citing the ADL report and asking about safeguards.[30][31] On 27 August 2025 the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, and subcommittee chairwoman Nancy Mace wrote to Iskander requesting six categories of records from January 2023 onward, including Arbitration Committee records and “identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs)” for editors sanctioned by the committee.[32] The letter cited the ADL report and a separate Atlantic Council report on pro-Kremlin manipulation; it does not cite Pirate Wires and does not use the phrase “Gang of 40”.[32] The committee’s press release framed the inquiry as concerning “potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information”.[33]

The Foundation said it welcomed the opportunity to respond, and in October 2025 published a general statement that editors are not required to use real names and may contribute under pseudonyms to limit the risk of harassment, doxing or retaliation.[34] Six weeks after the deadline, the committee said document production had not been satisfied while the Foundation said it had responded and remained in contact.[35] Senator Ted Cruz sent a separate letter in October 2025 about ideological bias more broadly.[36] Critics of the inquiry, including Techdirt and Slate, argued that a demand for editors’ IP addresses amounted to doxing and that the exercise looked less like oversight than targeting.[37][38]

Arbitration sanctions, 2024–2026

Sanctions in the topic area have fallen on editors described in press coverage as being on both sides. In January 2024 the committee banned two editors and topic-banned a third for canvassing and proxy editing promoting a pro-Israel point of view; in December 2024 it banned and restricted editors for editing after off-wiki canvassing requests, evidence it connected the following April to a pro-Palestinian Discord server.[43] The fifth Palestine-Israel case, opened in November 2024 and closed on 23 January 2025, indefinitely topic-banned eight editors, made extended-confirmed protection the default for every article strictly within the conflict, and created a “balanced editing restriction”.[41] The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the eight as six from the pro-Palestinian camp and two from the pro-Israel camp, and noted that the bans were not meant to reflect any judgment on questions of content.[42]

The Iskandar323 ban

The account Iskandar323 (sometimes misspelled “Iskander323” online) had edited since 2014 and had made roughly fifty thousand edits.[47] In the 2025 case the committee found that the account had “engaged in disruptive behavior in the PIA topic area, including consistently non-neutral editing”, and imposed an indefinite topic ban from the Palestine-Israel conflict by a vote of twelve to one.[41] On 23 January 2026, in a set of motions titled “2026 Review of the PIA topic area”, the committee found by thirteen votes to none that the account had violated that topic ban, and enacted by seven votes to five the remedy “Iskandar323 is indefinitely banned from the English Wikipedia”, appealable after twelve months.[44][45] An administrator applied the block the same morning with the reason “Banned by the Arbitration Committee per motion”.[48] Under Wikipedia’s banning policy, a site ban forbids any edit anywhere on the project.

A second finding adopted the same day, that the account had engaged in “consistently non-neutral editing around the history of Judaism”, passed only seven to five and was rescinded on 18 February 2026 as procedurally flawed, because motions are reserved for cases whose facts are substantially undisputed; the site ban itself was not rescinded and the account remained blocked as of September 2026, and one arbitrator who abstained on the rescission wrote that he still believed the ban was correct on the totality of the evidence.[46][47] Press accounts differ on the vote, some describing it as unanimous; the committee’s record shows seven to five on the ban and thirteen to none on the underlying violation.[45]

The description of the account’s editing as “a systematic pattern of knowledge poisoning” is not the committee’s. It comes from a May 2026 analysis by the researcher Shlomit Lir, published by the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, which examined the account’s article-space edits and argued that the pattern worked through reframing, omission of context and wording changes rather than the insertion of false information.[49] Coverage of that analysis reported the ban and its seven-to-five vote alongside a separate April 2026 site ban of another editor in an unrelated case.[50] Readers should hold the two apart: the arbitration record establishes a topic-ban violation and a site ban; the characterization of intent is one analyst’s.

What has been measured

Most of the dispute above is about intent, which no log records. What the logs do record is activity. The main article on the war was placed under indefinite extended-confirmed protection within hours of its creation on 7 October 2023,[52][51] and by September 2026 it carried more than twenty thousand edits by some fifteen hundred editors;[51] the Foundation reported in December 2023 that nearly a thousand volunteers had contributed to it.[53] The Zionism article, the example this site most often uses, had about 12,500 edits in its history and was likewise protected.[54] The ADL’s report is the most detailed attempt to count coordination, and it is contested on method.[27][29] Peer-reviewed work on Wikipedia’s political slant exists but predates and does not address this topic: a 2012 study of about 28,000 articles on United States politics found an early Democratic lean that faded as new articles entered,[55] and a 2019 study found that ideologically mixed editor teams produced higher-quality articles than homogeneous ones.[56] No peer-reviewed study of the English edition’s Israel–Palestine coverage after 7 October 2023 had been published when this page was written.

Responses and disputes

Wikipedia’s own articles on Wikipedia and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, antisemitism on Wikipedia, ideological bias on Wikipedia and the reliability of Wikipedia cover the same ground from inside the project.

Why a measurement tool

Every claim above is either about what an editor intended or about what an article should say. HistoryRewritten cannot measure intent and does not judge content. It measures something narrower that the record does contain: whether an article’s editing after a date you choose is unusual relative to that article’s own history. The score is deterministic and model-free, built from monthly edit rates, text churn, revert-like edits, talk-page activity and aggregate editor concentration, each compared with the article’s own thirty-six-month baseline using robust statistics, with every intermediate value returned so the arithmetic can be checked by hand. It is direction-blind: it cannot tell a pro-Israel rewrite from an anti-Israel one, and it was built so that control articles have to come back typical for the method to mean anything.

It partly told its maker he was wrong. Against 7 October 2023, Zionism scored high, but Theodor Herzl, the Balfour Declaration and Israel came back typical, as did the controls, and the article on OpenAI scored high against the release of ChatGPT with no politics in sight. Ukraine scores near zero against the 2022 invasion because the method looks for a sustained shift in an article’s median month rather than a burst, a limitation documented on the methodology page. The event index shows the whole distribution, controls included, with no ranking.

Activity is not proof of bias or misconduct. A high score means an article’s editing pace changed unusually after a date. New sources, cleanup, disputes and plain attention all produce that signal. The evidence view shows exactly what changed between two pinned revisions, with links to Wikipedia’s own diffs, so that the conclusion stays yours.

HistoryRewritten never shows who edited an article: the product returns aggregate editor statistics only. This page names one account because its sanction is a matter of public arbitration record, cited above; the tool itself contains no usernames, no identity inference and no dossiers, by design.

See also

References

  1. ↑ User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 251 — “The ADL is ‘generally unreliable’”. English Wikipedia, talk-page discussion, .
  2. ↑ Amanpour, 3 November 2025 — transcript, segment 1. CNN, interview transcript, .
  3. ↑ Talk:Gaza genocide/Archive 22 — “Statement from Jimbo Wales”. English Wikipedia, talk-page statement, .
  4. ↑ Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view. Wikimedia Foundation (Diff), .
  5. ↑ Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2025–2026 — Common global standards for NPOV policies. Wikimedia Foundation (Meta-Wiki), .
  6. ↑ Talk:Gaza genocide/Archive 12 — RfC on the first sentence (closure). English Wikipedia, RfC closure, .
  7. ↑ In the media: Wales, the “Gaza genocide” article, and the press. The Signpost, .
  8. ↑ The Interview: The Culture Wars Came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales Is Staying the Course (transcript). The New York Times (third-party transcript), .
  9. ↑ Larry Sanger. English Wikipedia, .
  10. ↑ Wikipedia Is Badly Biased. larrysanger.org, essay, .
  11. ↑ Nine Theses on Wikipedia. larrysanger.org, .
  12. ↑ Talk:Gaza genocide/Archive 22 — “Statement from Larry Sanger”. English Wikipedia, talk-page statement, .
  13. ↑ How to Solve the Problem of Wikipedia. RealClearPolitics, via Yahoo News, essay, .
  14. ↑ On the cybersecurity subcommittee’s Wikipedia investigation. larrysanger.org, .
  15. ↑ Administrators’ noticeboard/Incidents — Possible off-wiki canvassing by User:Larry Sanger (closure). English Wikipedia, community discussion, .
  16. ↑ Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 439 — “RFC: The Anti-Defamation League” (closing statement). English Wikipedia, RfC closure, .
  17. ↑ Reliable sources/Perennial sources — Anti-Defamation League. English Wikipedia, .
  18. ↑ Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 434 — “Is it time to re-evaluate the ADL?”. English Wikipedia, .
  19. ↑ ‘Morning Joe’: ADL Chief Slams Wikipedia Reliability Downgrade as ‘Flat Out Wrong’. TheWrap, .
  20. ↑ Wikipedia’s operator rebuffs Jewish groups’ call to override editors on ADL trustworthiness. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, .
  21. ↑ Wikimedia Foundation statement on volunteer processes on reliable sources. Wikimedia Foundation, .
  22. ↑ Numerous Anti-Israel Wikipedia Editors, Including Instigators Who Targeted ADL, Banned Following Investigation. Anti-Defamation League, press release, .
  23. ↑ ‘Wikipedia editors colluded to delegitimize Israel’. Jewish News Syndicate, .
  24. ↑ Wikipedia’s Quiet Revolution: How a Coordinated Group of Editors Reshaped the Israeli-Palestinian Narrative. The Algemeiner, .
  25. ↑ Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth (transcript). HonestReporting, .
  26. ↑ Reliable sources/Perennial sources — Pirate Wires. English Wikipedia, .
  27. ↑ Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality. Anti-Defamation League, report, .
  28. ↑ Wikipedia launches review after report alleges anti-Israel editorial manipulation. Jewish News (UK), .
  29. ↑ In the media: the ADL report, Shira Klein, and Jan Grabowski. The Signpost, .
  30. ↑ Letter to Maryana Iskander (Reps. Wasserman Schultz, Bacon and 21 others). Office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, letter, .
  31. ↑ Lawmakers press Wikipedia to clarify and enforce editorial oversight to prevent anti-Israel bias. Jewish Insider, .
  32. ↑ Letter from Chairman James Comer and Chairwoman Nancy Mace to Maryana Iskander. U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, letter, .
  33. ↑ Comer and Mace Investigate Efforts to Manipulate Information on Wikipedia. U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, press release, .
  34. ↑ Wikimedia Foundation responds to questions about how Wikipedia works. Wikimedia Foundation, .
  35. ↑ Six weeks after deadline, House panel still awaits bias, Jew-hatred materials from Wikipedia parent. Jewish News Syndicate, .
  36. ↑ Letter from Chairman Ted Cruz to Maryana Iskander. U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, letter, .
  37. ↑ House Republicans Want To Doxx Wikipedia Editors Over Bogus ‘Bias’ Complaints. Techdirt, .
  38. ↑ Why Right-Wing Outlets Attacked Wikipedia After Charlie Kirk’s Shooting. Slate, .
  39. ↑ Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 4. English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, decision, .
  40. ↑ Contentious topics/Arab–Israeli conflict. English Wikipedia, .
  41. ↑ Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5. English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, decision, .
  42. ↑ Edit wars over Israel spur rare ban of 8 Wikipedia editors — from both sides. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, .
  43. ↑ Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard/Archive 14 — motions of January and December 2024. English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, .
  44. ↑ Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard/Archive 15 — “Arbitration motions regarding ARBPIA5 topic bans” and “Arbitration motion regarding Iskandar323”. English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, .
  45. ↑ Arbitration/Requests/Motions — 2026 Review of the PIA topic area (revision 1334283996). English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, motions, .
  46. ↑ Arbitration/Requests/Case (revision 1338984890) — “Motion: Rescinding the POV pushing motion”. English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, motion, .
  47. ↑ MediaWiki API: list=users — Iskandar323 (registration, edit count, block status). English Wikipedia, API query, .
  48. ↑ Block log for User:Iskandar323. English Wikipedia, log, .
  49. ↑ The Lone Editor as a Source of Knowledge Bias Concerning Israel on English Wikipedia: The Case of Iskandar323. Institute for National Security Studies (Shlomit Lir), analysis, .
  50. ↑ Wikipedia banning two anti-Israel editors a ‘significant step,’ expert says. Jewish News Syndicate, .
  51. ↑ Gaza war — page information. English Wikipedia, .
  52. ↑ Protection log — “October 2023 Gaza−Israel conflict”. English Wikipedia, log, .
  53. ↑ Wikimedia Foundation updates on the crisis in Gaza and Israel. Wikimedia Foundation (Diff), .
  54. ↑ Zionism — page information. English Wikipedia, .
  55. ↑ Is Wikipedia Biased?. American Economic Review (Greenstein & Zhu), paper, .
  56. ↑ The wisdom of polarized crowds. Nature Human Behaviour (Shi, Teplitskiy, Duede & Evans); arXiv preprint, paper, .

Statements attributed to people or organizations above are their claims, reported with a source, not findings of this site. Corrections are welcome as GitHub issues.