Draft:The Holocaust in Wikipedia

The Holocaust in Wikipedia's coverage has contributed to public knowledge of the Nazi-era genocide, while also subjected to academic analysis and criticism as a source of information and bias.

Holocaust education and research using Wikipedia

Scholars have also used Wikipedia data in sundry ways to research The Holocaust, educate the public, and better understand bias in Holocaust-related discourse. The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure used Wikidata to improve its coverage on Nazi-era ghettos and camps.

Nationalist, ethnic, and anti-Jewish bias in Holocaust coverage

While Wikipedia is a significant site for Holocaust information, scholars and Jewish community groups have paid close attention to signs of anti-Jewish and other bias in articles about the Holocaust.

In 2015, Eva Pfanzelter published a qualitative analysis that found "racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist or denialist remarks" in 9 of the top 60 threads about The Holocaust article. For example, some Wikipedians argued that Jews should not be allowed to edit the article and that research sources should be rejected if written by Jews. Another 7 threads alleged bias by other editors. Wikipedia responded by deleting various edits and blocking some editors. Pfanzelter stated that the discussions were "rarely neutral" and that "serious scholars would dismiss" its Good Article peer review, which had argued that the wording, such as murder and genocide, "betrays a bias towards the belief that the Holocaust was a bad thing." Since the article's readership was declining, the author speculated that Neo-Nazi and other extremist activists may have shifted attention from Wikipedia to other social networks, such as Facebook.

In a detailed case study, Daniel Wolniewicz-Slomka analyzed the framing of three Holocaust 2014 articles in the English, Hebrew, and Polish Wikipedias, without explicitly labeling any differences as biased against Jews or Poles. For the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp article, it was found that the Polish version emphasized responsibility of German Nazis, not Poles, and it omits the category of collaborators, e.g., the Kapo. The Hebrew article mentions Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Polish heroics, while the Polish article omits the former. Only the Polish article brings up the problem of Holocaust denial. For the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, the language versions diverge more. While all three identify Poles as the perpetrators, the Polish article further notes that Poles had strong antisemitic feelings. German incitement is covered more in English Wikipedia. (Third were the Righteous Among the Nations articles.) Overall, the author found that the framing was less tied, than anticipated, to the concurrent dispute between Poles and Israeli Jews over of the Holocaust. Indeed, the Polish Wikipedia was more critical of Poles than the nationalistic sense of Poles as "noble victims."

Relying partly on the Wolniewicz-Slomka methodology, Mykola Makhortykh compared editor interpretations of the Babi Yar massacres in the English, Russian, and Ukrainian Wikipedias. The Russian and Ukrainian articles paid roughly half (48, 41, 82%) as much attention as the English Wikipedia to the atrocities committed. The Russian and Ukrainian versions also emphasized the trauma on (surviving) non-Jews and as an attack on the Ukrainian people overall. The Ukrainian Wikipedia here places less emphasis on Jewish suffering, which Makhortykh says is marginalized in favor of Ukrainian national victimhood. This version also saw, in the Talk pages, effort to deny Ukrainian responsibility. All three Wikipedias has contributors who sought to deny the Holocaust. Overall, the research found that these massacres were presented in Wikipedia to favor a national viewpoint (e.g., blaming Ukrainians in the Russian text) and to disparage the memory of the Holocaust (e.g., by stressing Ukrainian suffering in their language Wikipedia). In a similar analysis of the 1941 Lviv pogroms, Makhortykh found that the Russian Wikipedia, unlike articles in 7 other languages, avoided discussion of anti-Jewish violence partly to marginalize the Holocaust in Russia.

In an explicitly critical vein, in 2023 Grabowski and Klein have described Wikipedia editors as intentionally introducing skewed views and distortions in the encyclopedia's history of the Holocaust. In response, the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee opened a case to investigate and evaluate the actions of editors in the affected articles. Ultimately, the Committee banned two editors from the topic areas, although Klein criticized the proposed remedies as "[lacking] depth and consequence".