Israeli journalist Omer Benjakob reports inHaaretz(paywalled in bothHebrew andEnglish) thatPrime Minister of IsraelBenjamin Netanyahu and his "hate cabinet" are trying to avoid responsibility, playing a "blame game", leaving military leaders to take the hit for theIsraeli Intelligence failure that allowed thesurprise attack led byHamas on 7 October.
Hebrew Wikipedia has had its own battles and edit wars in this conflict. Benjakob cites theprolonged dispute between userYa’akov and other Wikipedians on theHebrew-language article aboutYoram Cohen, who served as the Director of national internal security serviceShin Bet from 2011 to 2016.
Ya’akov is one of the editors accused of "pushing conservative political views," by "promoting the view of Netanyahu and his entourage", that Israeli security chiefs are the only ones to blame for the IDF’s failure to prevent the 7 October attack. Hebrew Wikipedia editorDavid Shai, whocreated thearticle about Hamas's attack within an hour of its start, says "there’s enough blame and turpitude to go around."
On a side note, Benjakob has already written about Wikipedia forHaaretz andother media before, and his articles and essayshave been frequently covered in theSignpost throughout the years.
–S andO
It’s no surprise thatThe Books of Jacob, first published in 2014 byOlga Tokarczuk, has helped make the story ofPolish Jewish religious leaderJacob Frank popular, while also helping the Polish writer and activist win both aNike Award (in 2015) and aNobel Prize in Literature (in 2018). However, the book might also have played an important role in expanding Wikipedia, as revealed inan interview (in Italian) with online newspaperIl Post.
In the interview, which had been arrangedvia e-mail by Ludovica Lugli, Tokarczuk citedthe article about Frank onPolish Wikipedia as an example of how much the tales of theself-proclaimed messiah had been ignored in Poland before the book’s release, remembering how the page used to be just "an article limited to a single phrase" (a slightly incorrect statement, actually). According to the writer, none of the three religious groups involved –Orthodox Jews,Catholic Christians and the direct descendants of Frank’s disciples – had any interest in keeping the leader’s memory alive, to the point she discovered his story by pure chance, back in 2007, and it took her years to connect all the dots: "I didn’t expect to do such an enormous job", she stated.
Tokarczuk is also a familiar face within the Polish Wiki-community itself, having already collaborated withWikimedia Polska in 2020 foran edit-a-thon focused on the articles of Nobel Prize-winning writers and artists on pl.wiki; even in this context, her statements againstanti-semitism and homophobia can’t go unnoticed, consideringthe threats she has received by members of the Polish far-right in recent years, as well as thehugely controversial case involving World War II and the history of Jews in Poland, which theSignpost has broken down inprevious issues. We also covered Tokarczuk's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which you can seehere. –O
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Vice,Daily Dot, andthe Administrators' noticeboard coverthe first edit marking Henry Kissinger's death on Wednesday, November 29. The edit was made byAsticky, twelve minutes afterKissinger Associates announced the death viaa press release. Soon Asticky's user page was filled with congratulations and a few barnstars. Administrators on their noticeboard questioned the taste of some of those posts, and in general discouraged"grave dancing".
Two days later, whenCNBC announced the death of retired U.S. Supreme Court JusticeSandra Day O'Connor at 9:57 am Eastern Time, four edits were made by anonymous IP editors in the subsequent five minutes. The first IP editor made two edits in that minute. The second IP editor appears to have been a congressional staffer who made their second edit after another two minutes.The Signpost predicts that the mainstream press will soon report this edit race as well. –S
