ADL says Wikipedia left banned editor's biased Israel-related edits uncorrected

Right · 2The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published a report on Thursday 15 October 2026, titled "Damage Done: Wikipedia Leaves Biased Edits Unchecked Despite Editor Bans". It says Wikipedia has not systematically reviewed or corrected the work of editors it has banned. 1 2 Right · 2The report follows the ADL's March 2025 investigation "Editing for Hate", which described a coordinated campaign by about 30 editors to add anti-Israel bias and antisemitic narratives. According to the ADL, that group was more active than comparable groups "by a factor of at least two". 1 2 Right · 1After the 2025 report, Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee topic-banned six editors and site-banned three, according to the ADL. The ADL says it did not systematically review or correct any of their work. 1

Right · 2The ADL's case study is the account Iskandar323, which it says was site-banned for continuing to edit Israel-Palestine topics while under a topic ban. It says 91% of that editor's edits remain live on the pages reviewed. Fox News describes the sample as seven articles, six of them flagship pages, while the Jerusalem Post refers to six flagship articles including Hamas, Gaza war, Zionism and October 7 attacks. 2 1 Right · 2The ADL says the account made 485 edits across six high-traffic articles, 225 of them after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks. Days after the attacks, it says, the account moved material on Hamas's antisemitism, use of human shields, child combatants and human rights abuses to a less-read page, "Criticism of Hamas". In November 2023 it removed about 17,000 characters from the "Gaza war" article, including forensic evidence of violence on 7 October, and then about 7,400 more. 2 1 Right · 1Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee examined Iskandar323's conduct in public proceedings and found it "engaged in disruptive behavior in the PIA topic area, including consistently non-neutral editing", according to Fox News's account of the ADL report. 2

Right · 1The ADL says visible coordination among the original group fell sharply after the 2025 report and the scrutiny that followed. Public user-talk messaging between group members fell 95.41% (501 to 23), same-page tandem editing fell 87.91% (6,218 to 752), and total edits fell 26.65% (182,440 to 133,817). The Jerusalem Post lists the scrutiny as a US House Oversight Committee investigation, a bipartisan letter from 23 members of Congress, and inquiries from the Department of Justice and the Senate Commerce Committee. 1 Right · 2The ADL says the problematic editing has continued through "quieter, subtler techniques", and that fewer visible signs of coordination do not necessarily mean it has stopped. A July 2026 review identified 19 active accounts, eight from the original group that were never sanctioned and 11 newly identified ones. The ADL describes tactics including frequent reverts, hedging factual claims with qualifiers, and gradually rewriting sections so that no single edit draws administrators' attention. 2 1 Right · 1Across 229 articles touched by these accounts, the newly identified editors hold the latest revision on roughly six in ten (144 of 229) and on 95 of 142 pages edited by both cohorts. The Jerusalem Post adds that one newly identified account made 543 edits to the Zionism article. It also says flagged editors accounted for 832 of 9,576 revisions on articles about October 7 sexual violence and their discussion pages. 1

Right · 2ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Fox News Digital: "Almost nothing has changed." He compared the situation to arresting someone who sprayed graffiti on public buildings without cleaning up the graffiti, and called Wikipedia "a weapon". In the Jerusalem Post he said "Banning individual editors was never going to be enough" and that the Wikimedia Foundation should audit the work. Daniel Kelley, senior director of the ADL Center for Technology and Society, called it "a systematic issue with how Wikimedia allows their platform to operate". 2 1 Right · 2The ADL argues that Wikipedia's influence extends beyond the site, because search engines and large language models rely on it. It recommends that the Wikimedia Foundation privately verify the identities of editors on contentious topics, end anonymous IP-address editing, set up a task force on antisemitic bias, and audit heavily edited articles. It also asks search and AI companies for more transparency about their use of Wikipedia, and asks policymakers for continued oversight hearings. 2 1