Wikis are unsuitable for anything contentious. Wikis are the solution to the problem of crowdsourcing objective facts, what makes them great is that anyone can add a few (even very obscure) ones; on anything contentious there are way too many, not too few, people wanting to write about them, making the wiki a solution to a nonexistent problem. This news story is yet another example of this.

… and hardly anything is more contentious than Israel/Palestine, which is why wikis work least well for articles on that.

Israel Palestine isn’t contentious when discussing the fact that Israel is genocidal. It is universally agreed by genocide scholars and frankly anyone who has seen what Israel is doing to Palestinians (if one believes Palestinians are people that is).

The only thing that is contentious is that Israel and its supporters don’t like it when people state facts about them.

There’s a problem when pro-Palestinian editors start adding terms like “apartheid regime” and “settler colonialism“ which don’t have a formal academic definition. Then the other side can fairly claim they’re pushing personal opinions.

It’s tough to maintain academic detachment when writing about an ongoing genocide.

Apartheid does have a definition, though.