cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22335522

Wikipedia has officially added “Gaza genocide” to its “List of Genocides” page, marking a major shift in how Israel’s aggression on the besieged enclave is being documented on the world’s largest online encyclopaedia.

The addition, which now appears as the first entry due to the list’s reverse chronological order, comes after months of extensive debate among the platform’s editors. On its “Gaza genocide” page, it states that “Experts, governments, United Nations agencies, and non-governmental organisations have accused Israel of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people during its invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Israel–Hamas war.”

The entry for “List of genocides,” Wikipedia states that “Israel has been accused by experts, governments, UN agencies and non-governmental organisations of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian population during its invasion and bombing of Gaza during the ongoing Israel–Hamas war.” The page goes on to list the death toll in Gaza while mentioning that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians killed are civilians.

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  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    14 days ago

    British Wikipedian, Stuart Marshall, made the final ruling in September, decisively supporting the article’s inclusion. “Based on the strength of the arguments … and it’s not close … I discarded the argument that scholars haven’t reached a conclusion on whether the Gaza genocide is really taking place”, Marshall wrote in his decision. “The matter remains contested, but there’s a metric truckload of scholarly sources linked in this discussion that show a clear predominance of academics who say that it is.”

    Marshall concluded his ruling with the straightforward statement: “We follow the scholars.”

    I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad they did it even if it took a while, but this being their reasoning sounds so ridiculous. Gonna need an academic to tell me that it rained here today. Guess a ton of primary sources don't matter? Gotta have the scholars weigh in first. But who gets allowed to be the scholars, hmm? Who gets the positions at the institutions and the funding and so on. Science and history are not supposed to have a special interest group that warps or buries important truths, but they sure as hell can be captured by such an interest group. Failing to account for that in how you present information is a failure to be scientist or historian. The west's fetishism of neutrality makes even well-intentioned analytical people into blind agents of imperialism. It took them this long to break through it for what is probably the most documented in real-time and proliferated of that documentation genocide in human history.