Wikipedia apparently not biased enough toward Israel

John Caruso at the Distant Ocean:

Since I've written an entire series of posts explaining why Wikipedia is all but useless when it comes to political topics, and especially Israel, I found this amusing indeed:

This week in Jerusalem, two Israeli groups hoping to smite their online enemies, both domestic and foreign, began a course in the "Zionist editing" of Wikipedia entries.

At the opening seminar, attended by about 80 activists, one of the organizers, Naftali Bennett, said that the aim of the course is to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflects the worldview of Zionist groups. For example, he said, "if someone searches [for] 'the Gaza flotilla,' we want to be there; to influence what is written there, how it’s written and to ensure that it is balanced and Zionist in nature."

Hilarious, sure, but at the same time I always appreciate it when people are able to generate oxymoronic phrases like "balanced and Zionist in nature" without the slightest awareness of the contradiction. And I particularly liked this bit...:

Another of the course’s organizers, Ayelet Shaked of the My Israel movement, told Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news organization based in the West Bank, that the use of the word "occupied" in Wikipedia entries discussing Palestinian territory conquered by Israel in 1967 was just the kind of problem she hoped a new team of editors could help fix.

...since as I've written before, the only mention of "occupied" or any variant thereof in the Wikipedia page for Jerusalem used to be "The land currently occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is considered one of the top candidates for Golgotha and thus has been a Christian pilgrimage site for the past two thousand years." That was in 2007, and in looking at it now the situation is still knee-slappingly comical (though nanoscopically better). Go "fix" that "problem", you lying zealots!

The prize for the person who incorporates the most Zionist changes in Wikipedia entries is apparently a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel. But that's not all; I've heard rumors that the prole who makes the most doubleplusgood efforts to rectify WikiError may even get a guided tour of the Ministry of Truth!