2 Responses for "The Wikipedia wars, cont’d"

1. Maskil May 16th, 2008 at 2:17 am

   I’m not sure why CAMERA is being simply dismissed as a “hawkish pro-Israel group”. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

   – clip –

   Founded in 1982, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East. CAMERA fosters rigorous reporting, while educating news consumers about Middle East issues and the role of the media. Because public opinion ultimately shapes public policy, distorted

   news coverage

   that misleads the public can

   be detrimental to sound policymaking. A non-partisan organization, CAMERA

   takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

   – clip –

   Far from attempting “to warp articles in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia”, I believe they are simply attempting to correct the anti-Israel bias that has become a subtext in many articles concerning the Middle East.

   They have also not been underhand about their efforts to recruit editors to correct the bias; those efforts were highlighted in an article on their home page:

   CAMERA: How and Why to Edit Wikipedia
   http://www.camera.org/index.as.....ticle=1485

   It is also worth mentioning that Joel Leyden of the Israel News Agency has been documenting the anti-Israel bias of many Wikipedia editors on his site for years.

   Use Google with the following search term to view the relevant articles; the search engine on the INA site gives no results.

   wikipedia site:http://www.israelnewsagency.com/

   Israel News Agency Terrorism IDF Internet
   http://www.israelnewsagency.com/

2. cabal-ist May 18th, 2008 at 9:13 am

   This piece is pretty eye-opening, but not for the reasons Gershom would have hoped. It takes a lot of chutzpa to accuse someone of some misdeed, while in fact being guilty of that same misdeed. In this case, Gershom accuses CAMERA of duplicity, but his entire piece is full of misleading and flat out false info.

   He alleges that a specific article by Ini says Carter “was the only U.S. administration” to deem settlements illegal. Did Gershom hope that readers wouldn’t actually click through? Because I did, and what Ini actually writes is that

   “As to Bowen’s claim that settlements are illegal under ‘everyone’s interpretation of international law’ except for Israel’s, this hyperbole is demonstrably false. Non-Israeli experts in international law, including Julius Stone and former U.S. Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow, have argued that Israel’s settlements are legal. Moreover, successive American governments (with the exception of the Carter administration) have not declared that Israel’s settlements are illegal under international law, and Reagan explicitly asserted that they are “not illegal.” The BBC is not expected to subscribe to this view, but it is expected to avoid reporting as fact simplistic and inaccurate hyperbole about the legality of settlements.”

   Regardless of what one thinks of settlements, or of their legality, this sounds pretty fair and reasonable to me. And as a writer, Gershom should certainly know that “successive” does not mean the same as “all.” Ini wrote that successive administrations have not declared settlements to be illegal. That seems to be true. But Gershom deceives readers by pretending he wrote “all” administrations.

   This raises questions about Gershom’s truthfulness. Then there are questions about his research and analysis. He writes that “the obvious question” is whether the Electronic Intifada docs are authentic. Actually, that’s just ONE of the obvious questions. Another question that should have been obvious would be: Are they revealing the whole discussion? Or are they leaving out things that contradict the message they, as anti-Israel activists, want to impress upon people. As my byline here suggests, I was signed up to the forum Gershom criticizes. And since I had access, I know that EI didn’t publish the entire back and forth between members. So what? So his statement that “they” wanted to rename the article “2006 Lebanon War” as “2006 Israel-Hezbollah War” (gasp!) is specious. Some participants in the discussion suggested that the article should have one name, while others noted that they thought a different name would be appropriate. So again, readers are misled by Gershom. This cuts to another problem with the piece — his portrayal of this as a supposed conspiracy, and so on. I, and seemingly most others in the group, felt Wikipedia gets it wrong a lot, and we were interested in discussion this. If as conspirators we were shlemiels, that’s probably because we weren’t conspirators. We were interested in discussion. (Gershom, I’m meeting a friend of mine later for dinner, and we’ll be talking about Wikipedia. Perhaps you should come by with your spy-microphone and note pad. It should make a fascinating story.)

   And that’s not all. Gershom pretend that CAMERA cited your appearance on the Washington Post’s op-ed pages as ‘proof’ of the paper’s bias. Again, I clicked his link, and again, he’s being disingenuous (and self-aggrandizing). Their ‘proof’ wasn’t that Gershom was on the page. It was about the total makeup of pro- vs. anti- Israel commentators over time.

   There’s more. He insists that CAMERA was duplicitous because Ini suggested volunteers pick a name not connected to them. Pretty sneaky. Oh wait… “You are recommended to choose a username that is not connected to you.” That quote’s not from Ini, it’s from Wikipedia.

   Also bizarre from a logical and moral standpoint is that he tries to pin the words of individual participants in the discussion on everybody in the discussion, and on CAMERA as a whole.

   But it’s the flawed — or absence of — logic supporting the crux of this piece that’s most telling. Gershom basically is saying that because CAMERA asked volunteers to edit Wikipedia FOR ACCURACY, while insisting that these volunteers strictly edit according to Wikipedia policies, this naturally means that “CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media,” that CAMERA is “hawkish,” and that they are “hard-line.” It’s a non sequitur. It’s bad writing. And mostly, it’s either unsophisticated thinking or simply disingenuous.