In my experience, Wikipedia has a pervasive cultural of false balance, and it does not surprise me at all that this attitude extends to the founder of the site. Despite their many policies dictating otherwise, in my experience adjudicators often end up weighing authoritative academic sources equally with outdated or lower quality references. Looking through the talk page, it sounds like there was already an extensive RFC for the wording of the lede. Policy was already applied correctly in this case - the system worked as it was supposed to - and it's incredibly inappropriate for Wales to pull rank, reopen discussion when there has been no notable change in circumstance, and advocate for this exact kind of behaviour.
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Amid the backlash, Wales insisted that he was not saying “that it is not genocide, my argument is that it is not the job of Wikipedia to adjudicate the issue”.
Incredibly reasonable position, but some people really really really hate wikipedia
Especially now that Musk launched his "version".
There's going to be even more social media accounts that want one of the internets best resources dismantled.
Welp, there's goes the last fucking unenshittified decent thing in the internet.
ITS A FUCKING GENOCIDE
Don't jump to conclusions. Jimmy's "intervention" has been largely rejected by the Wikipedia community, and it wasn't much of an intervention to begin with.
If you want a good laugh, go to the article and switch the Hebrew then translate it back to English with your browser. That version is probably what Jimmy wants the page to look like.
Actual link to his "intervention", which isn't even in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_from_Jimbo_Wales
i think the headline is factually incorrect. jimbo specifically said he was doing this as a private editor and not on behalf of the wikimedia foundation.
also most people told him to cite sources or stfu. (which he promptly didnt do either)
I think that's a distinction without a diffrence, considering he's the founder and public figurehead of the organization. That comes with certain restrictions, like needing to accept that you'd need to use an unrelated psuedonym if you really want to do independent work where your reputation would effect things.
It's kind of astounding how many semi-public figures fail to understand this.
I really like this comment
Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”
At face value, his response was tepid at best. Since I live in the US and have spent my adult life learning about all the genocide I was taught was something else, I don’t really buy into the “you’re giving undue weight to the UN and genocide scholars when you need to be giving the genocide committers due weight.”

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