After University of Ottawa professor Jan Grabowski and Chapman University professor Shira Klein spent two years investigating the corrupted Holocaust history, they went viral, bringing to attention a larger issue of Wikipedia’s coverage. 

Wikipedia, already self-proclaimed as unreliable due to its open access for users to edit content, has recently proven that even its recounts of significant historical events can be unraveled and rewritten by editors. 

Roughly two years ago, Shira Klein, a Chapman University history professor, made the appalling discovery that — for over a decade — a committed group of Wikipedia editors had been systematically distorting Wikipedia's information on the Holocaust, promoting a skewed version of history that misrepresents the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters antisemitic stereotypes about Jews. 

For nearly 10 years, Klein has taught students how to use scholarly, peer-reviewed sources and integrate them into Wikipedia articles to enhance their reliability. When Klein was helping a student in a Jewish history class integrate the book “Fear,” written by Jan T. Gross, on antisemitism in Poland — published by Princeton's top Ivy League press — into a Wikipedia article, the two hit an unexpected roadblock.

“It actually started with a Chapman student, funnily enough, a student I had in one of my courses. He wanted to write about antisemitism in post-WWII Poland,” Klein told The Panther. “(The student) in doing his Wikipedia edits signaled to the editorial community, like my students always do, and he got a really vigorous backlash (from a Wikipedia editor).” 

According to Klein, the student had received messages from one of the Wikipedia editors who was firmly against them adding information from the Gross book into Wikipedia articles on Polish antisemitism.

“(The student) told me, ‘Dr. Klein, some people don’t want me making these changes,’ and I said, ‘Really? That’s odd because I know it’s a reliable source,’” Klein said. “I went in (to Wikipedia), and I saw an argument concerning the source that I had proposed that he use.” 

That is where the student and Klein discovered that Wikipedia editors had been promoting a history of the Holocaust in Poland that minimized Polish antisemitism, exaggerated the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuated that many Jews conspired with Communists to betray the Poles and blamed the Jews for their own persecution.

According to Klein, this one source opened a door into other Wikipedia articles that had been distorted regarding the Holocaust in Poland — leaving it possible for other Wikipedia articles to have endured similar corruption. 

“It wasn’t just this one source that was being argued over but a whole range of articles and sources,” Klein told The Panther. “The Holocaust is a highly visible topic, so if this is happening in even a highly visible topic, how much more is it happening in topics with even less coverage?”

This led Klein to contact University of Ottawa Professor Jan Grabowski, who not only had extensive expertise on Polish-Jewish history, but had also witnessed many of his students come across Wikipedia articles that contrasted with his class sources. The two professors combined forces, spending over two years uncovering how the editors were able to “rewrite history” and not only get away with it but also prevent others, like Klein’s student, from changing it. 

As the seventh most-used website globally, Klein fears that with the rising usage of ChatGPT — which derives information from Wikipedia — more and more people will be receiving misinformation from technology. 

“I think (Wikipedia) is many people’s first and last stop for information, and sometimes people don’t even go into the Wikipedia articles. They just Google something, and the info box that shows is often from Wikipedia,” Klein said. 

The two professors worked to examine dozens of public-facing Wikipedia articles, as well as hundreds of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages (where editors discuss articles), noticeboards (where they ask questions and request assistance) and arbitration cases (where they take disputes).

Klein and Grabowski compiled their findings in a research article titled “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust,” which went viral in only a matter of weeks, receiving nearly 40,000 views as of May 11. 

Klein and Grabowski do not know the identities of all of the editors behind the misinformation nor their motivations but have uncovered a significant amount of evidence that Wikipedia editors have intentionally formed a biased and antisemitic narrative of the Polish role in the Holocaust. 

“Several reporters have asked me (what motivated this group), and I declined to answer because one thing we made a point of doing was not to psychologize these editors and not to try and get inside their heads,” Klein said. “As historians, we only write about what we can substantiate.”

Klein and Grabowski’s article caught the eye of not just scholars and journalists but of the Wikipedia arbitration committee in charge of resolving disputes over editing on crowd-sourced Wikipedia, according to a Jerusalem Post article.  

As of May 11, the Wikipedia arbitration committee voted on whether to restrict the privileges of editors, ​​topic-ban them or even ban them altogether. 

“The committee has made some good decisions, such as banning two distortionist editors from the topic area, but they have done absolutely nothing about the source misrepresentation we flagged in our article,” Klein wrote in a follow-up email to The Panther. “Frustratingly, I don’t see Wikipedia’s coverage of the Holocaust improving any time soon.”

Correction: A previous version of the article referred to Jews as Jewish individuals and Polish as Poles. Post-WWII Poland was referred to as post-world Poland. The version also stated that the source Klein proposed the student used had opened a door into hundreds of Wikipedia articles. This information, among others, has since been corrected and/or clarified. We regret the error.