ADL finds 91 percent of banned editor's Wikipedia edits remain live

The Anti-Defamation League reported that 91 percent of edits made by a banned Wikipedia editor are still live on the platform, despite the account receiving a site ban. Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL's CEO and National Director, stated that the encyclopedia has failed to reverse the changes or implement new policies following the group's initial findings. In its 2026 report, "Damage Done: Wikipedia Leaves Biased Edits Unchecked Despite Editor Bans," the organization detailed that no banned editor's work has been systematically reviewed for correction. The ADL reviewed seven articles, six of which are flagship pages, and found that the problematic content persists. Greenblatt told Fox News Digital that a topic ban is ineffective if the resulting edits are not cleaned up, comparing the situation to leaving graffiti on public buildings after arresting the perpetrator. The account identified as Iskandar323 serves as a primary case study in the report. The ADL documented that this account made 485 edits across six high-traffic English-language articles, including "Israel," "Gaza war," and "Hamas." Of those edits, 225 occurred after the Hamas attacks in October 2023, with 85 made in October alone. Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee found that Iskandar323 engaged in disruptive behavior and non-neutral editing in the Israel-Palestine topic area. The account was banned from the site after continuing to edit these topics despite an earlier topic restriction. According to the ADL, Iskandar323 removed substantial content from the "Hamas" article, moving details about the group's actions to a companion page titled "Criticism of Hamas." The account also deleted approximately 17,000 characters from the "Gaza war" page in November 2023, removing sections on forensic evidence of violence and witness accounts. Two days later, the account removed another 7,400 characters from the same page. The ADL described these actions as intentional changes designed to drive a specific narrative. Pressure from congressional scrutiny and Wikipedia's enforcement actions led to a decrease in visible coordination among the original group of 30 editors identified in 2025. However, the organization noted that coordination may have shifted to subtler techniques rather than stopping entirely. A July 2026 review identified 19 active accounts editing Israel-Palestine-related articles. Eight of these editors were part of the original group but avoided sanctions. The other 11 editors have longer histories on Wikipedia but were newly documented by the ADL. Across 229 overlapping articles, these 11 newly identified editors held the most recent edit on roughly six in 10 pages. The ADL characterized Wikipedia as foundational infrastructure for the broader online ecosystem, noting its prominence in search results and its role as a source for large language models. Greenblatt stated that Wikipedia has lost trust at a time when AI systems rely heavily on its content. The organization recommended that the Wikimedia Foundation strengthen accountability by verifying editor identities and ending anonymous IP-address editing on sensitive pages. It also urged the foundation to create a task force on antisemitic bias modeled after its 2021 intervention against Holocaust revisionism. For search engines and AI developers, the ADL called for greater transparency regarding their reliance on Wikipedia and the development of bias-detection benchmarks. The group also advised policymakers to continue oversight hearings and create a task force to monitor coordinated content manipulation. Fox News Digital reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation for comment but did not receive an immediate response.