Wikipedia and Judaism: How Holocaust Denial Became Embedded in the World’s Go-To Source of (Mis)Information

This article is part of a Wikipedia Religious UnReliable Sources series.

While there is no universally accepted legal definition of “Holocaust denial,” the European Parliament website offers a “non-binding working definition” that includes both denial and distortion. This encompasses the gross minimization of victim numbers—contradicting reliable sources—and attempts to blame Jews for their own genocide.

So, how does Wikipedia stack up against this description?

In a Feb 9, 2023, article in The Journal of Holocaust Research, a peer-reviewed bilingual (English and Hebrew) scholarly journal, Jan Grabowski of the Department of History, University of Ottawa, Canada, and Shira Klein of the Department of History, Chapman University, Orange, California, document “systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history” by “a group of committed Wikipedia editors…promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews.”

To put this into perspective, when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, 3.3 million Jews were living in Poland. Only an estimated 380,000 Polish Jews—less than 8 percent—survived the ghettos and the death camps, including the infamous Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Nonetheless, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland “minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo-Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.”

This is particularly significant because they found nearly 270,000 monthly views of this Wikipedia Holocaust page. These editorial decisions are equally apparent in related pages, such as one dedicated to the rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust that receives some 1,700 views per month.

Grabowski and Klein documented that a team of editors imposed a whitewashing narrative in these and related pages “despite the efforts of opposing editors to correct it.” They examine “25 public-facing Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases.” They conducted interviews with editors in the field.

They point out that while this study is essential for correctly conveying the Holocaust to the broad public, it also reveals “the digital mechanisms by which ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias trump reason and historical accuracy” and provides an “in-depth examination of how Wikipedia editors negotiate and manufacture information for the rest of the world to consume.”

Other key points in the study include that:

• Wikipedia is the seventh most visited site online, with 7.3 billion views a month. Its articles show up in over 80 percent of the first page of search engine results and over 50 percent of the top three results;
• Browser searches yield more links to the English-language Wikipedia than to any other website in the world;
• Wikipedia predominates in knowledge panels—the information boxes in Google search results.

They found that key Wikipedia editors responsible for negating the truth of the Holocaust in Poland were Piotrus, Volunteer Marek, GizzyCatBella, Nihil novi, Lembit Staan, Xx236, Poeticbent, MyMoloboaccount, Tatzref, Jacurek and Halibutt. “Combined, these individuals have authored substantial portions of multiple Wikipedia articles, both large (like ‘History of the Jews in Poland,’ where they have authored 67 percent)…”

The study also reveals how these editors manipulated the designation of reliable versus unreliable sources. By contesting what qualifies as “reliable research,” they spent considerable time legitimizing non-academic sources while discrediting trustworthy ones. This strategy made it difficult for uninvolved editors or administrators to distinguish between accurate and false information when resolving conflicts.

They also attempted to “broaden the definition of the Holocaust in such a way as to also include the killings of ethnic Poles by the Germans.” And they “extolled the historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. Chodakiewicz’s 2003 book, After the Holocaust, engaged in copious victim blaming, stating, “violence against Jews stemmed from a variety of Polish responses to at least three distinct phenomena: the actions of Jewish Communists… ; the deeds of Jewish avengers… ; and the efforts of the bulk of the members of the Jewish community, who attempted to reclaim their property…”

They tried to legitimize Ewa Kurek, a Holocaust denier, as a source for Wikipedia. In August 2021, an editor called Nihil novi inserted Kurek into Wikipedia in an article on the Jedwabne pogrom, in which masses of Polish Jews were murdered by Poles on July 10, 1941. “Nihil novi presented Kurek as an expert who both rejected the thesis that Poles killed Jews and challenged the high number of victims.”

Anyone wishing to understand the dark side of Wikipedia would do well to read the entire paper. If these issues can arise in the coverage of this one topic, they raise broader concerns about Wikipedia’s handling of other subjects, including Judaism, religion and potentially many others.

We want to hear from you! If you are a religious leader, a parishioner, or a Wikipedia editor who has come across something in this area, we encourage you to contact us at wrn-info@proton.me. Your insights and expertise are very valuable in ensuring that accurate and comprehensive information is available to the public.