ADL and bias on Wikipedia [The Forward]2025-06-24

In June 2024, contributors to the English Wikipedia debated whether the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) should be considered a reliable source regarding (a) the Israel-Palestine conflict, (b) antisemitism broadly, and (c) hate symbols. It was a long, contentious, complicated discussion, with outcomes roughly "no," "sometimes," and "yes," respectively.

The decision was met with praise, astonishment, criticism, and outrage from journalists, pundits, and the ADL's CEO. In The Forward, Rob Eshman wrote an opinion piece encouraging the institution to take it as feedback to "do better." It had more nuance than most of the press about the decision, and I talked with Eshman for his follow-up piece: ‘Does anybody question the NAACP?’: The ADL head thinks Wikipedia is biased. Is he right?

I always appreciate when journalists make an effort to get Wikipedia right, and in general I think Eshman did a good job here. The only reason I'm turning this into a post instead of just linking to the story is because there are a couple of minor misquotes. Sounded like the editor was going to get to these edits, but they may have gotten lost in a shuffle and I don't feel strongly enough to nag. These aren't things that the general public will care about, after all, but I'm putting them here because some Wikipedians might. :)

  • I don't think I said that the outcome is proof the process has validity. I'm rather critical of the type of discussion that generalizes about entire sources (see below) -- even if broken into three parts -- because it removes the opportunity for context and nuance to play a role in disputes. That's something we could all use more of when talking about Israel and Palestine.
  • "'Frankly that’s where advocacy organizations like the SPLC and the ADL should be,' said McGrady, who as the user Rhododendrites deemed the ADL as reliable on antisemitism. 'They've both done...'" →→→ "McGrady, who as the user Rhododendrites participated in the discussion, argues that advocacy organizations like the SPLC and ADL generally belong in a more context-dependent middleground classification called 'additional considerations apply'. 'They've both done...".
  • The second-to-last paragraph is a quote.

Additional $0.02 about the situation:
Wikipedia has not always labeled entire sources as "generally reliable" or "generally unreliable." It's a relatively new phenomenon – one of many compromises the editor community has made to conserve volunteer time and energy, partly catalyzed by the awareness in the late 2010s that people/companies were turning to Wikipedia as a sort of "antidote for misinformation." The number of Wikipedia volunteers has remained largely the same over the years, even as it's grown in both size and influence. The initial idea was to formalize a decision for extreme cases, making it so a volunteer could point to a documented verdict rather than explain to yet another new user why InfoWars doesn't meet the reliable sourcing criteria. But it quickly turned into a popular genre of discussion used not just in extreme cases but in fact very complicated cases. The ADL decision is a great example – it concerns a conflict where we need more and not fewer opportunities for context and nuance, and resulted in a long, complicated summary which betrays that it perhaps wasn't a good candidate for this sort of discussion in the first place.