Who Gets to Write History? Wikibiases.org by Shlomit Aharoni Lir

October 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation presented its platform as neutral even as a researcher named Shlomit Aharoni Lir was documenting a coordinated effort to reshape Wikipedia articles on Israel, Zionism, and Jewish history. Her project, WikiBiases.org, tracked changes by a network of roughly 100 editors—including one veteran who had made 25,000 edits over 12 years before being banned for bias. The problem, she argues, is not simply false facts but something more insidious: technically defensible sentences that collectively distort the picture by deciding what gets included, what gets left out, which sources count, and what an article is called.

The Politics of Knowledge

Aharoni Lir, a researcher at the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University, begins from a deceptively simple question: who produces knowledge? We tend to treat facts as neutral, but her work on gender bias showed that women's contributions are systematically undervalued—the same idea carries weight when a man says it but not when a woman does. This is the politics of knowledge: the study of who is considered reliable, who is included in knowledge production, and who is excluded. Even scientific knowledge is shaped by these forces. Medical trials were long done mostly on men, with severe consequences for how women were treated. Knowledge, she insists, always has a political side that must be examined with a

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What you'll learn

1 (01:35) **Introducing the Problem of Knowledge Poisoning** - The host sets up the core question: not whether Wikipedia is biased, but how bias can be embedded in technically correct information, and why that matters for AI and search engines.
2 (03:49) **The Politics of Knowledge: Who Gets to Be an Authority?** - Aharoni Lir explains that knowledge is never neutral, using gender as a parallel to show how who speaks and who is heard is inherently political.
3 (06:30) **From Feminist Critique to a Coordinated Campaign** - Aharoni Lir describes her journey from studying why women leave Wikipedia to discovering a coordinated editing effort against Israel after October 7, 2023.
4 (10:47) **Case Study: The Editor Iskandar 323** - Aharoni Lir profiles a single veteran editor whose 12 years of work reveals the four main vectors of knowledge poisoning on Wikipedia.
5 (14:06) **Rewriting Jewish History in Real Time** - The most severe form of bias is the systematic effort to erase the Jewish connection to the land and reframe Jewish identity.
6 (16:24) **Knowledge Poisoning vs. Misinformation** - Aharoni Lir defines "knowledge poisoning" as taking a trusted source and turning it into a vehicle for biased framing, which hinders people's ability to decide for themselves.
7 (20:58) **Tech for Palestine and Organized Propaganda** - Aharoni Lir reveals how groups like Tech for Palestine coordinate editing on Discord, violating Wikipedia's rules against coordinated editing and turning it into a propaganda tool.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Most of us use Wikipedia without thinking very much about it. A name comes up in conversation, an argument breaks out, or we suddenly need to know what happened in, for example, 1948—and within seconds, Wikipedia offers us a clean, confident answer.

But who decided what that answer would be?

Who chose which facts belonged in the opening paragraph and which could wait until paragraph fifteen? Who determined which sources were authoritative?

My guest on this podcast is Dr. Shlomit Lir, a researcher at the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University who specializes in the politics of knowledge—the often invisible ways power influences what a society accepts as fact.

Dr. Lir’s research began with questions about gender and participation on Wikipedia. She found that although the platform presents itself as open to everyone, not everyone feels equally welcome—or possesses equal influence—inside its editorial culture.

Her latest project, WikiBiases, turns to English Wikipedia’s treatment of Israel, Zionism, Jewish history, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By examining revision histories, changes in terminology, patterns of sourcing, article structure, and the experiences of volunteer editors, she argues that bias rarely arrives as one spectacularly false statement. It develops gradually: a sentence disappears, a source is dismissed, a disputed interpretation moves into the opening paragraph, and a different account of history begins to look settled.

The stakes extend far beyond Wikipedia. Its articles shape search results and influence journalists. They supply information to artificial-intelligence systems. If distorted information passes from Wikipedia into AI-generated material, and that material eventually returns as a source, we may be creating a hall of mirrors in which repetition gradually acquires the authority of truth.

Who gets to write history? Who gets to challenge it? And when thousands of small edits accumulate, at what point does editing become a quiet rewriting of the past?

Host: Renee Garfinkel

Guest: Shlomit Lir

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