Wikipedia’s War Against Biblical Archaeology
As if you needed another reason not to use Wikipedia.
This week, X was abuzz with the story of a number of artifacts from ancient Israel being redefined as “Canaanite” on Wikipedia. This included changing the well-established terminology for the language “Paleo-Hebrew” to instead read “Canaanite”—even for explicitly Hebrew inscriptions referring to Jewish individuals from the end of the Iron Age. This redefinition included artifacts related to Eliakim, son of Hilkiah; the Shema, servant of Jeroboam seal; the Nathan-Melech seal; and the Shelomit seal (discovered during our own excavations with the late Dr. Eilat Mazar in Jerusalem’s City of David).
Reportedly this “redefinition” was the work of a Wikipedia “mega-editor” by the username Onceinawhile, responsible for 33,000 edits on over 9,000 unique pages, with a special editorial interest and emphasis on the topics of Palestine, Israel, Jewish history, Archaeology, Arab world and Judaism.
Thankfully, it appears that at least some of this vandalism has now been reverted. But it’s only the latest in the long keyboard war on the open-source, volunteer-edited online encyclopedia that is Wikipedia—a website that, while admittedly a byword for factual unreliability, is still one of the most-frequented websites in the world (eighth in the U.S.), and certainly the most-frequented online encyclopedic source—English Wikipedia alone containing over 7.1 million articles, with an increase of 500 per day.
And it’s only the latest brouhaha involving anti-Jewish gatekeeping editors like Onceinawhile, ImTheIP and Zero0000, whose online activities over the years have been monitored by whistleblowers like investigative journalist David Collier and WikiBias. This ilk of activist administrators and mega-editors often make more subliminal, less-obvious changes in content, in order insert more abrasive rhetoric against Jews, while at the same time watering down language on historical pages relating to Arab extremism. Take user Levivich—chillingly, the second-biggest contributor to the “Holocaust” page—a pro-Hamas member of the so-called “Gang of 40” dedicated to pushing “the most extreme anti-Zionist narratives.” Or, take the following example, coming to light as I write: Wikipedia’s “List of Palestinians” from the pre-Mandate period, including such individuals as King Herod and Jesus himself.
Par for the Course
But this is only the tip of the iceberg in the problematic platform that is Wikipedia—one of the reasons why its cofounder, Larry Sanger, is now one of the biggest activists against it—or at least, the current iteration of this beast that he helped create (alongside Jimmy Wales). In a real sense, Wikipedia is not about truth—it’s about gatekeeping.
This is clearly seen in our field—that of biblical archaeology.
Egyptologist Dr. David Falk—who has research interest in relation to the Exodus—summed it up on a livestream on his channel, Ancient Egypt and the Bible, last year. Answering the question, “What is your opinion on how Wikipedia handles the Bible?”, he replied:
The Wikipedia page for the Exodus basically says it’s all myth. A consortium of 40 scholars got together and wanted to change the page on the Exodus …. I basically told the consortium—because they asked me for technical support—I told them at the time, “good luck getting a Wikipedia page changed that has been locked down by its editors.”
What you have in Wikipedia is squatter’s knowledge. Whoever gets there first has control of the discourse. And it can quite literally be an eighth-grader. … For example, the guy who was the editor of the Exodus page was essentially an activist for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
I’ve had my own struggles with attempting to edit errors—even simple factual errors, not on debated interpretations of discoveries. One such was on the page of the aforementioned Eilat Mazar, which contained a basic error about her employment association, which I attempted to fix following communication from her. The edit was summarily reverted and the page locked.
Promoting Biblical Archaeology—of a Certain Kind
But there’s more to this trend because Wikipedia does promote biblical archaeology of a certain kind—the decidedly minimalist variety.
Probably the most famous archaeologist associated with the more minimalist school in Israel (and abroad) is Prof. Israel Finkelstein. This is no criticism of him here—actually, he regards himself a Zionist—but what one immediately notices is the attention given to his interpretations on Wikipedia, compared to other biblical archaeologists (those still living and not)—including even more prominent individuals in the field.
Several years ago I compared word counts of the biography pages for several such prominent conservative/maximalist biblical archaeologists and Egyptologists. Comparing those numbers today, these include:
- Prof. W. F. Albright: 1,300 words
- Prof. Yigael Yadin: 1,100 words
- Dr. Eilat Mazar: 1,100 words
- Prof. Kenneth Kitchen: 700 words
- Prof. Amihai Mazar: 300 words
- Prof. Yosef Garfinkel: 300 words
And for Prof. Israel Finkelstein? Over 5,400 words.
Actually, when I originally compiled these numbers in 2022, Professor Finkelstein’s page was fronted with a form banner warning of “multiple issues,” including that “the article resembles a curriculum vitae in some sections,” “written like a résumé.” This banner has long since been removed.
It’s hard to hold out much hope for Wikipedia. Others (including Sanger) are holding out for the promise of Elon Musk’s ai-generated “Grokipedia.” For now at least, in many ways it feels like the best that can be expected is managed decline in this battle against the erasure and rewriting of Jewish history on such platforms. “In hundreds of articles, in hundreds of thousands of edits, in close-knit bands of editors who dominate relevant articles and lock them to corrections—the whole [Wikipedia] project is utterly compromised,” wrote journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, senior analyst for The Times of Israel, in a February 13 post on X.
Still, as another user on X aptly put it, responding to the “Canaanite” fiasco: “Wikipedia pages can be edited. History cannot. Thousands of years of Jewish history and artifacts remain in this land.”