Two Israeli groups set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to ‘show the other side’ over borders and culture
Two Israeli groups have set up ‘Zionist editing’ courses with aims to alter perceptions about Israel. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
– Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups:
Rachel Shabi in Jerusalem and Jemima Kiss
Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.
Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in “Zionist editing” for Wikipedia, the online reference site.
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My I srael) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.
“We don’t want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm,” says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. “We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day.”
Wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. “We don’t want to give this arena to the other side,” she said. “But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel’s side, with all the correct arguments and explanations.”
Like others involved with this project, Shaked thinks that her government is “not doing a very good job” of explaining Israel to the world.
And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.
Take the page on Israel, for a start: “The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria,” said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.
Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.
Other pages subject to constant re-editing include one titled Goods allowed/banned for import into Gaza – which is now being considered for deletion – and a page on the Palestinian territories.
Then there is the problem of what to call certain neighbourhoods. “Is Ariel a city or a settlement?” asks Shaked of the area currently described by Wikipedia as “an Israeli settlement and a city in the central West Bank.” That question is the subject of several thousand words of heated debate on a Wikipedia discussion thread.
The idea, says Shaked and her colleauges, is not to storm in, cause havoc and get booted out – the Wikipedia editing community is sensitive, consensus-based and it takes time to build trust.
“We learned what not to do: don’t jump into deep waters immediately, don’t be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned,” says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.
Is that Shiloh in the occupied West Bank? “No,” he sighs, patiently. “That’s Shiloh in the Binyamin region across the Green Line, or in territories described as disputed.”
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn’t want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. “Going public in the past has had a bad effect,” she says. “There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground.”
In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.
Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. “It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity,” says Bennett. “The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad.”
The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the “Best Zionist editor”, with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.
Wikipedia wars
There are frequent flare-ups between competing volunteer editors and obsessives who run Wikipedia. As well as conflicts over editing bias and “astroturfing” PR attempts, articles are occasionally edited to catch out journalists; the Independent recently erroneously published that the Big Chill had started life as the Wanky Balls festival. In 2005 the founding editorial director of USA Today, John Seigenthaler, discovered his Wikipedia entry included the claim that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.
Editors can remain anonymous when changing content, but conflicts are passed to Wikipedia’s arbitration committee. Scientology was a regular source of conflict until the committee blocked editing by the movement.
Critics cite the editing problems as proof of a flawed site that can be edited by almost anybody, but its defenders claim the issues are tiny compared with its scale. Wikipedia now has versions in 271 languages and 379 million users a month.
H/t reader squodgy:
If anyone is in any doubt or just cannot believe the devious agenda of the zioyids plans for the elimination of the truth, please read this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
Jews in charge of UC Berkeley destroyed all the science publications in the library
They did it secretly, while announcing nothing, and when the deed was done they announced that “they digitized all the books” and then destroyed them. They kept no records of books destroyed, we just have to trust them that they really did digitize them all, without edits!
Fat chance they did, there is absolutely no excuse for destroying such a large library without informing the public. Their excuse was that everything they destroyed had copies elsewhere, so why store it? That’s a line only a simpleton would accept,IN RESPONSE TO THIS CRIME AGAINST WESTERN CIVILIZATION, IT IS TIME FOR A RE-POST!
The Jews have set a goal of destroying the value of every printed library in Western Civilization
Jim Stone, April 27 2012If you ever visited libraries in the past, back in the 80’s, you would know that at even a modest public library you could find every book you needed to understand all aspects of the sciences. You would have been able to find accurate history, All the information gained from the nuclear tests, the truth about EMP’s and nuclear tsunamis, all the great works of all the great writers, all the musical compositions and scores for all of the great musicians, detailed maps of every square inch of the earth, all of the local laws and codes, all of the electronic theory, all of the formulas for organic chemistry, all of the engineering information for the different types of steel, all the Chiltons manuals for automotive repair, every last topic about astronomy and astrophysics, folks, it does not take a lot of books to cover all those topics and far more, I can’t think of them all, everything even a modest public library which, for example, a small city of 10,000 people would have had even 20 years ago. Or should I say 30? because starting in the mid 80’s our libraries went under attack, to annihilate their value as a reference base for Western Civilization. Their destruction was deliberate.
I am an inquisitive type who would actually USE the libraries in the past. And it was never any problem to get detailed information, I can’t even begin to tell you what types of things I would look for, for example, when developing a new type of bug killer lamp (it worked great) I was able to find the exact light spectrums of the various mercury vapor lamps. I could set out to find a fact, and everything I ever set out to look for would ALWAYS be at ANY library. I know I am unique in the type of things I would look for and therefore can serve as the library canary, giving the signal of DOOM. I knew the libraries were turning to garbage, but could not figure out why. That is, until my experience with the Jewish community. And now, even in cities with populations of a million plus, I can’t find jack. I can’t get a single question answered. Only the most basics of basic are there, the libraries have been stripped of real value and replaced with fluff.
Fluff like 94,000 feminist books, books about gaydom, alternative religion, new age B.S, 93 trillion ridiculous “self help” books, aisle after aisle of fiction and fantasy and virtually NOTHING of value with regard to what was once the fabric of Western Civilization. Any book with any science at all has the science buried under volumes of convoluted text, obviously intended to confuse. What once could be found within a few minutes now takes hours or days, if it can be found at all, or at least before frustration drives me out the door. Now, information which was once free to the public has been quarantined, for access only to the discrete few willing to pay thousands for that information via college text books, and I have seen enough of those to know that even THEY are now intentionally convoluted and watered down.
It was intentional
The Jews made it a huge point – the value of having your own HARD PRINTED LIBRARY. And even poor Jews have enormous hard bound libraries in their homes. Jews will spend enormous piles of money on hard printed works, because they know that hard print cannot be changed via an online “update” and the only solid record of fact is a printed book. And while building their own private libraries, they set out to destroy the public libraries accessible to any non Jews. They got into all the library staffs, and made the decisions of which books got thrown, and which books got kept. If you go to any public library, you will discover that somewhere in each library there will be a Jew making the decisions of what will be in that library. Go to the dumpster out back, I have done this as part of my investigations of the Jews following leaving them, and even in little old bakersfield, I witnessed an enormous number of great books going out through the dumpster, with absolutely nothing of value replacing them inside the library. When I was in Vancouver, after leaving the Jewish community, I visited the library there and found a lot of the old good books still in place, only to discover that key pages were consistently ripped out of many of the best ones. And it was not vandals or geeks, because vandals don’t care about technical writings and geeks know what a copier is, and also have a lot of respect for written works. I of course had the advantage of knowing Jews were doing this to our libraries, and checked the dumpsters and pulled key works to see what new atrocity had been committed on a fairly regular basis.The internet has changed
Once upon a time you could go to Alta Vista, type in any scientific fact you wanted to know, and BOOM, it would be on your screen. It was like a library on steroids. But after Google that changed. Google buries all truthfully technical information behind a pay wall, and even Alta Vista now does as well. So unless you plan to spend hundreds or thousands buying technical writings in the hopes that one nugget will be there (chances are it will not) the internet has now been rendered totally useless as a scientific reference tool. So they FIRST destroyed the libraries, and then destroyed the web, and if you think Wikipedia is great you have a lot of learning to do.Via the destruction of our information base, the Jews have made an enormous step towards gaining our rightful future
It’s no secret our schools have been destroyed. It’s no secret that our kids are now graduating with honors, while not being able to think or even knowing the basics. We are about to be made irrelevant as a civilization. There is still a key pool of 50 plus year old engineers who got real educations, who are designing CPU’s and whatever else was at the pinnacle of our society. As far as technical advancement, there are enough of these people from America’s great past still in the system to hide the damage that has been done. They won’t be there forever, and when they are gone we will suffer a collapse more enormous than the world has ever witnessed. And rising from the ashes of that collapse will be the Jews, with all of our works carefully preserved within their homes and private libraries, and with their children carefully educated with OUR advanced knowledge they will rise to the top. Our civilization, with it’s great technical reference base destroyed and children intentionally sabotaged, will slip into irrelevance.This is being done at many universities now, see this
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