Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the crowdsourced online encyclopedia Wikipedia and its coverage of Jewish topics.
Wikipedia
The Latest
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News New research documents show Wikipedia distorts the Holocaust
Historians have found that the English-language version of the online encyclopedia often quotes dubious sources that serve a false narrative, which glorifies the help Poles gave to Jews during the Shoah and minimizes their part in their extermination
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Culture Wikipedia fixed its swastika problem fast. Why can’t anyone else?
Hate speech is notoriously hard to police online, and nearly every major social media platform has been criticized in the recent past for allowing disinformation and hate to proliferate on their platforms. Wikipedia, meanwhile, got a hacker’s swastikas off of its site in under five minutes. On Monday morning, a Wikipedia template was vandalized, impacting…
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News ADL may have violated Wikipedia rules — editing its own entries
The Anti-Defamation League has paused a project in which its staff members edited Wikipedia using pseudonyms after coming under fire from Wikipedia editors for potentially violating rules regarding conflicts of interest. The ADL launched an effort last spring to train some of its employees to contribute to Wikipedia articles but it wasn’t until late last…
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Fast Forward Google Lists ‘Nazism’ As Ideology Of California Republican Party After Wikipedia Prank
With less than one week to go before the California primary, Google listed “Nazism” as the ideology of California’s Republican Party, Vice News reported. On Thursday morning, under “ideology” the search engine listed the words “Nazism”, “Conservatism,” “Market liberalism,” “Fiscal conservatism” and “Green conservatism” when California Republican Party was searched. One white supremacist candidate running…
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Life At Edit-A-Thon, Expanding Wikipedia’s Offerings on Jewish Women
If the names Asnat Barazani, Devorà Ascarelli, and Clarice Baright don’t ring a bell for you, you’re not alone. The Center for Jewish History is setting out to change that. Barazani, a 17th-century scholar in Kurdistan, Ascarelli, a 16th-centrury poet who may have been the first Jewish women to ever have her work published, and…
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The Schmooze Jimmy Wales Talks Wikipedia and Neutrality in Israel
(JTA) — The article’s first iteration — published amid the bloody second intifada, or Palestinian uprising — called it a “security fence” and focused on Israeli support. Within a half-hour, another editor added a sentence about a United Nations condemnation. Later that day, the phrase “apartheid wall” appeared, using the Palestinians’ preferred term. Following thousands of…
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Breaking News Wikipedia Chief Jimmy Wales Wins $1M Dan David Prize
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will receive the Dan David Prize and $1 million for his contribution to the information revolution. Tel Aviv University on Tuesday announced the recipients of the international prize, which annually makes three awards for outstanding achievement in the categories of past, present and future time dimensions. Each award in a category…
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The Schmooze A Wikipedia for Jews
There’s a new craze among religious students in Israel. As regular folk get in on the act of shaping the world’s knowledge by writing, editing and improving articles on Wikipedia, religious students are busily working on their own Jewish Wikipedia-like project. The Responsa Project, run by Bar Ilan University, is digitizing tens of thousands of…
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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Culture They were a kosher bakery success story — 80 years later, people are still trying to make a buck off their babka
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Culture ‘A Complete Unknown’ proves that one thing about Bob Dylan will certainly endure
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Film & TV Why ‘The Brutalist’ resonated so deeply with me
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News 18 notable Jews who died in 2024
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Fast Forward Department of Ed resolves Title VI antisemitism complaints against 5 U of California campuses, U of Cincinnati
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Theater While Yiddish lives, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ghost stories may flourish
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Yiddish World Frankie’s Menorah (a Yiddish Hanukkah story)
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