The English Wikipedia is the English language edition of the Wikipedia. English is the first language in which Wikipedia was written. It was started on 15 January 2001. It is the largest encyclopedia in the world, and the largest version of Wikipedia since April 2019.[1] It has 6,938,257 articles as of 11 January 2025.[2] In October 2015, the total volume of the compressed texts of the English Wikipedia's articles added up to 23.2 gigabytes.[source?]
Wikipedia sites in other languages have imitated some of its technical and organizational features. It has a newsletter called The Signpost. As the English Wikipedia is very popular, there can be many people editing the Wikipedia in one minute. This made recent changes less effective for understanding changes. Instead, editors can select and watch for changes in particular articles, using the Watchlist feature of MediaWiki.[source?]
Both Watchlist and Recent changes can be filtered to show particular kinds of edits, such as edits from IP addresses or edits with signs of vandalism. Some editors use special software to detect and fix vandalism.[3][4]
Controversies
Some believe that the English Wikipedia shows significant bias and unfairness.[5] Editors of reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned Wikipedia's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[6]
Gender bias
An example of bias is that around 90% of Wikipedia editors are male, mostly White.[7] Others think that Wikipedia is more useful than other encyclopedias because it is large and can be updated quickly.[source?]
The English language Wikipedia page from 18 January 2012, illustrating its international blackout in opposition to SOPA and PIPA.
In 2010, the logo of the English Wikipedia like most Wikipedia's was slightly changed. However, some Wikipedias, like the Simple English Wikipedia, still kept the old logo.
The English Wikipedia, as one of the most visited websites worldwide,[8] has been criticized for repeated occurrences of on-site antisemitism.[9][10]
Whitewashing of Nazi war criminals
The English Wikipedia was criticized for condoning the systematic whitewashing of Nazi war criminals in thousands of WWII-related articles.[11] For instance, Arthur Nebe, a senior SS official who invented mobile gas chambers to kill Jews, was portrayed as a savior of Jews based on distortion of a cited source that actually said the opposite,[11] while false claims of Nazi war criminals "opposing" Hitler were made.[11] SS units responsible for the Holocaust were either depicted as brave fighters or described in passive voice to make their atrocities look normal.[11]
Those who corrected the false content had also faced persistent harassment from pro-Nazi users, some of whom were found to have repeatedly cited materials from Holocaust-denying sources (e.g. Journal of Historical Review, Nation Europa and Franz Kurowski[11]), misrepresented them as academic consensus and gamed the rules to prevent the removal of such content.[11] Such violations continued for years with limited administrative intervention,[11]mainstreaming Nazi sympathy among young readers of the English Wikipedia and hurting efforts to preserve the Holocaust's historical truth.[11] German military historian Jens Westemeier commented on the issue,[11]
The English Wikipedia pages are far more sympathetic towards the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS than the German ones [. ...] Wikipedia and Amazon are the worst distributors of pro-Nazi perspectives and the ["clean"] Wehrmacht myth.
Holocaust distortion
In 2023, Holocaust historians Prof. Jan Grabowski and Dr. Shira Klein published a 57-page article titled Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust[12] in The Journal of Holocaust Research wherein they reported to have found widespread distortion of Poland's Holocaust history on the English Wikipedia,[10][12] which involved the exaggeration[10][12] of Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers, invention of Jewish "atrocities" against Poles, downplaying of Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blaming Jews for their own suffering in the Holocaust.[10][12]
Prof. Grabowski and Dr. Klein also criticized English Wikipedia's administrators and the Wikimedia Foundation's lack of will to handle,[10][12] leaving the site vulnerable to disinformation:
Wikipedia’s administrators have largely failed to uphold Wikipedia’s policies [. ...] unable to deal with the issue of persistent distortion [...] Wikipedia’s articles [...] have become a hub of misinformation and antisemitic canards.
As a historian, I was aware [...] of various distortions [...] of the Holocaust on Wikipedia. What I found shocking, was the sheer scale [...] and the small number of individuals needed to distort the history of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity.
Distortion of Jewish history
In 2024, independent journalist investigations uncovered a large-scale off-site canvassing campaign to rewrite Jewish history and reshape the narrative surrounding the Israel–Palestine conflict, which involved 40 accounts having made at least 2,000,000 edits to over 10,000 Jewish-related articles.[13]
The off-site canvassing campaign was coordinated by an 8,000-member Tech for Palestine Discord channel,[13] where the organizers provided the participants in-depth training (e.g. strategy planning sessions, group audio "office hour" chats)[13] on getting used to Wikipedia's site operation,[13] assigning participants (in groups of 2~3) to edit hundreds of articles in rotation,[13] and gaming the rules to block others from correcting them.[13]
Reported examples of their revisionist[14] edits include[13]
Removal of mentions of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel in Jewish-related articles
Removal of mentions of Hamas' 1988 charter which involved the incitement to mass murder of Jews
Removal of mentions of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler[15][16] in Holocaust-related articles
Redefinition of Jews as an "ethnoreligious group and cultural community" from "ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant" in Jewish-related articles
On 12 December 2024, English Wikipedia's arbitration committee announced that two editors[17] had been banned indefinitely for off-site canvassing[13][17] and "encouraging other users to game the extended confirmed restriction and engage in disruptive editing."[17] Another three editors have also been slapped with sanctions for similar reasons.[17]
↑Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Wikipedia". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on June 19, 2015. Retrieved October 31, 2014.
"One Woman's Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia". Wired. September 7, 2021. Retrieved January 9, 2025. Ksenia Coffman's fellow editors have called her a vandal and a McCarthyist. She just wants them to stop glorifying fascists—and start citing better sources.
"Full official record: What the mufti said to Hitler". The Times of Israel. October 21, 2015. Retrieved December 13, 2024. The Arabs were Germany's natural friends, Haj Amin al-Husseini told the Nazi leader in 1941, because they had the same enemies — namely the English, the Jews and the Communists
