Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/In focus
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Do Wikipedia's co-founders understand NPOV?
Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.
Neutral Point of View is one of the Five Pillars of the English Wikipedia. It is also one of our harder policies to grasp.
NPOV and verifiability
[edit]The start of Wikipedia
[edit]The two co-founders share a complicated but diverging relationship with the English Wikipedia, or the greater community at large. Further information on these can be read on the various Wikipedia articles, including History of Wikipedia.
In 2000, Nupedia, considered pre-cursor of Wikipedia, was founded. In 2001, Wikipedia was launched, by founders Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger. In 2002, Sanger left Wikipedia. The various editions and sister projects of Wikipedia, such as German Wikipedia and Wikitionary started from 2001-02 onwards. In 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) was established, as a non-profit organisation. By 2007, Wikipedia became one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world, with 2 million articles. As of 2025, Wikipedia continues being 9th most visited, growing to 7 million articles. The Wikimedia Foundation now employs over 300 staff, and continues to host Wikipedia and all the sister projects.
Officially, the WMF and its Board of Trustees are responsible for Wikipedia and the highest level decisionmaking. However, the community of nearly 300,000 volunteers retains much of the autonomy in terms of the day-to-day running of the project. Broadly, the Foundation now supports fundraising, organisational and technical infrastructure, as well as development of tools and features. The community continues to curate the content, retain editorial control over the website, as well as develop the policies that govern the project. Direct action from WMF are few and far between, often invoked for legal reasons.
Larry Sanger and the right-wing comments
[edit]Since Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, he founded or joined the leadership of several failed competitors, including Citizendium and blockchain based Everipedia. Over the years, he's also joined many right-wing figures in US in attacking Wikipedia, including interviews with Fox News, Tucker Carlson and others. Sanger frequently opines on Wikipedia, with controversial suggestions such as doxxing Wikipedia editors alleged to be antisemitic.
Sanger edits with the username Larry Sanger and has made less than 20 edits to mainspace since 2002, that's fewer than one article edited yearly. Due to having no involvement with the project for 23 years, his opinions are generally derided or disregarded by the community at large. Nevertheless, his comments are frequently picked by mainstream media. See also Washington Post coverage of Sanger from 24 October.
He's also made multiple comments on the Gaza Genocide article. In the interest of giving his views the weightage they deserve, we are not covering his comments.
For more, see prior Signpost coverage and editor comments from 2005, 2010, 2015, 2021, 2023, and 2025.
Jimbo Wales
[edit]Comparatively, Jimbo has been significantly more involved with Wikipedia and sister projects (See WP:JIMBO for more). He joined the WMF Board of Trustees in 2004, and has retained a "Founder" seat there for the last 21 years. Jimbo has continued to be Wikipedia's most prominent spokesperson over the years, with many interviews in mainstream media on behalf of the WMF or the Wikimedia movement at large. He continues to be a central figure during Wikimania, as well as awarding the Wikimedian of the Year awards.
On the English Wikipedia, he had several significant powers, which were never invoked or were gradually decreased over time. Now, most of those powers are handled by the community or ArbCom. Many of these powers were relinquished by Jimbo after community discussion, such as having special dispensation to ban editors, which he gave up in 2022, or adminship itself, which was unbundled from the founder user right in 2023 – see previous Signpost coverage.
Jimbo edits as a volunteer with the username Jimbo Wales. While his volunteer edits on mainspace peaked in 2011, Jimbo's talk page remains highly watched by the community, often operating as a de-facto village pump for discussions earlier. Over time, this has reduced as well.
Context about the "Gaza genocide" article
[edit]The article Gaza genocide was first created by user Crampcomes on 29 December 2023, with the original title being "Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza". It was protected by user Daniel Case on 4 January 2024, who restricted editing to extended confirmed users, admins and bots, as part of the policy on contentious topics such as the Arab-Israeli conflict – which involves a high number of Palestine-Israel articles. The page was then moved to its current title on 3 May 2024, following a lengthy discussion that considered at least three title options, including the one who eventually got chosen through consensus. Apart from this decision, all of the requests filed about the page – including two immediate proposed deletions, an RFD request and four more requested moves – have got rejected, although the article has constantly been discussed and reviewed on its talk page.
The opening paragraph of the article currently reads (excluding sources):
The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war. It encompasses mass killings, deliberate starvation, infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, and preventing births. Other acts include blockading, destroying civilian infrastructure, destroying healthcare facilities, killing healthcare workers and aid-seekers, causing mass forced displacement, committing sexual violence, and destroying educational, religious, and cultural sites. The genocide has been recognised by a United Nations special committee and commission of inquiry, multiple human rights groups, numerous genocide studies and international law scholars, and other experts.
The UN OCHA reported that, as of December 2025, at least 70,100 Palestinian people have been killed and about 171,000 have been injured in the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; for context, the Israel Defense Forces said that over 470 soldiers have been killed and over 2,980 have been injured in military operations in Gaza, with at least two deceased hostages still set to be returned by Hamas. The latest ceasefire and a 20-point peace plan, led by US President Donald Trump in negotiations with other Arab and Muslim countries, came into effect on 10 October; however, Amnesty International – one of the human rights groups who have accused Israel of committing a genocide – recently reported that "at least 347 people, including 136 children, have been killed in Israeli attacks" in Gaza since the ceasefire was signed. Moreover, according to UNICEF figures, more that 9,000 children were treated for acute malnutrition in October 2025 alone, with almost 2,000 children being severely malnourished.
As noted on the Wikipedia entry and an article by Matt Novak for Gizmodo, many experts and legal scholars have recognized the actions committed by the Israel military in Gaza as a genocide. However, the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly dismissed any accusations of genocide , claiming that its military actions sought to destroy Hamas, in retaliation to the October 7 attacks, and free Israeli hostages. Other people, such as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pointed at the high death toll among Palestinian civilians and Israel's frequent total blockade of humanitarian aid headed to Gaza as evidence of war crimes, but did not consider those acts as a genocide.
Jimbo's comments on the article
[edit]As previously reported by the Signpost, during the last few months Wales has taken part in a lengthy series of interviews to promote his latest book, The Seven Rules of Trust, which was co-written with Dan Gardner and published by Crown Currency and Bloomsbury on October 28, 2025. In the book, Wales explains how the trust-based model of Wikipedia could serve as an antidote to political polarization in the US and the rest of the world, unpacking his view through seven rules, which serve as subheadings for each of the first seven chapters.
On November 2, Wales started a new discussion on the talk page of the article on the "Gaza genocide", writing the following statement:
I believe that Wikipedia is at its best when we can have reasonable discussion rooted in a commitment to write articles that reflect a neutral point of view. I believe that's especially important on highly difficult or contentious topics.
I was asked point-blank in a high profile media interview about this article, and I answered with transparency and honesty: this article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention.
As many of you will know, I have been leading an NPOV working group and studying the issue of neutrality in Wikipedia across many articles and topic areas including "Zionism". While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do. It should go without saying that I am writing this in my personal capacity, and I am not speaking on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else!
I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Gaza "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia's voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested. This is a violation of WP:NPOV and WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV that requires immediate correction. Remember: "This policy is non-negotiable, and the principles upon which it is based cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, nor by editor consensus."
Further down the message, Wales called users to make the article more neutral than he thought it was, by proposing new formulations, asking to respect principles such as WP:AGF, WP:UNDUE, WP:RS and WP:NOR and clarify the scope of the article by "[separating] factual reporting on conduct and casualties from legal characterization".
User Bluethricecreamman was the first user to reply to Wales' message, writing:
It is a bad faith read of the community when suggesting that among the most read and debated articles on the community is poorly done. [There] has been dozens of hours of discussion and RfCs galore to reach this version of the article and [I'm] certain there will be more. Consensus is always evolving but this article represents the latest consensus.
The Wikipedia co-founder was criticized by many other users in the following days, and stayed active in the thread. Notably enough, in response to a comment by user Hemiauchenia, who asked him why the encyclopedia should equally weigh "the opinions of the largely impartial UN and human rights scholars" to the "obviously partisan opinions of commentators and governments", Wales wrote:
Because that's what neutrality demands. We have major governments, analysts, NGOs etc, debating the issue. Our job, as Wikipedians, is not to take sides in that debate, but to carefully and neutrally document it.
An article by The Verge included more insight into the controversy, clarifying that the "high profile media interview" Wales likely referred to was recorded for a recent episode of CNN International Amanpour & Company (aired on November 3). In the occasion, Walter Isaacson asked Wales about the "Gaza genocide" article, and he replied by calling the page "one of the worst Wikipedia entries I've seen in a very long time" and saying it did not "live up to our standards of neutrality". The Verge also hosted an official statement by WMF spokeperson Lauren Dickinson, who said that Wales had "discussed multiple Wikipedia articles and topics, expressing his own perspectives and reflections", as "one of hundreds of thousands of editors, all striving to present information, including on contentious topics, in line with Wikipedia's policies".
Several other media went on to report on the controversy, including The National (link), Gizmodo (link), the New York Post (link), The Jerusalem Post (link) and Al Jazeera (link). Initially, some of them had erroneously reported that Wales himself had locked the "Gaza genocide" article, but Dickinson later confirmed to The Verge that it was not the case. The page was actually full protected from editing by anyone other than administrators by user ScottishFinnishRadish on October 28, days before the start of the aforementioned discussion.
ANI threads
[edit]Further media coverage
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