Wikipedia Bans Gang of 40 Editor for Systematic Narrative Manipulation
The Iskandar323 case reveals how a small group of editors reshaped Wikipedia's coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict—and why one ban isn't enough.
One of the least examined forces shaping global political understanding is neither a government nor a media outlet, but Wikipedia. On issues of war, nationalism, and historical legitimacy, a small number of entrenched editors exercise disproportionate control over how events are framed for hundreds of millions of readers.
One such network, the Gang of 40, has built one of the most powerful narrative operations online. The group has weaponized Wikipedia’s sourcing rules and enforcement processes to reshape coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Among its most prominent figures is Iskandar323. This week, ArbCom—Wikipedia’s highest authority—voted n a unanimous decision to site ban the user, handing down one of the most severe punishments on the site. While the vote is clear, the arbitration proceeding itself has not yet formally closed.
ArbCom did not limit its action to a site ban. It also proposed an indefinite topic ban barring Iskandar323 from:
“any edit related to Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Antisemitism, Palestine, Palestinians, or anything else that is related to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
“Enough is enough,” wrote Aoidh, an ArbCom member and one of Wikipedia’s most powerful administrators. “When you’ve been warned, topic banned, blocked for topic ban violations, let off with time served then topic banned again by Arbcom, warned, blocked, and continue to violate your topic ban another warning or broadened topic ban isn’t going to fix things,” ScottishFinnishRadish, another influential arbitrator, weighed in.
The Pattern
Iskandar323’s edits follow a consistent logic. Jewish history, identity, and antisemitism are treated as provisional—open to dispute and, in many cases, illegitimate. He renames terms, qualifies claims, excises key facts, and repeatedly reopens settled questions.
Islamist movements—notably Hamas—receive opposite treatment. Edits involving Hamas systematically remove facts that complicate the preferred narrative, soften terminology that assigns moral responsibility, and add caveats that deflect blame from designated terror organizations.
Iskandar323’s edits follow a consistent logic. Jewish history, identity, and antisemitism are treated as provisional—open to dispute and illegitimate.
Iran receives even more sustained attention. Across multiple articles, Iskandar323 works to reclassify state violence, downgrade legal characterizations, and strip language that assigns responsibility to Iranian institutions.
Iranian State Violence
Iskandar323’s most direct interventions appear in articles documenting Iranian atrocities. He repeatedly downgrades crimes with established legal definitions into narrow procedural descriptions.
In July 2023, he intervened extensively in the article on the 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners, reversing language that described the killings as extrajudicial. He removed terminology framing them as unlawful acts carried out outside legitimate judicial process, recasting them instead as actions “carried out by the judiciary.” He argued explicitly that this classification was “antithetical” to calling them extrajudicial—despite the fact that victims were executed without due process and in violation of international law, as the article’s own sources document.
In 2024, a Wikipedia user filed a case against Iskandar323 and another editor alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.”
Earlier that year, The Times reported that Wikipedia entries had been altered to downgrade Iranian human rights atrocities, “raising concerns that agents or supporters are using the site to manipulate publicly available information about the hostile regime.” Iskandar323 was not named in that report.
Islamic Terrorism and Hamas
On Islamist terrorism, Iskandar323’s edits shift focus away from perpetrators and toward contesting the category itself. In a May 2023 revision to the “Islamic terrorism” article, Iskandar removed what he labeled “opinion pieces” and restructured the lead around the claim that “Islamic terrorism” is a disputed term that is politically “damaging”—steering readers into a semantic debate before they encounter substance. That same month, he deleted a claim that some Islamist terrorism has a “transnational character.”
His treatment of Hamas is particularly revealing. Across multiple edits, he removed references to the 1988 Hamas charter’s antisemitic and genocidal language, arguing it was outdated or “anachronistic”—even when other editors restored the material with sourcing. He stripped this context repeatedly across different articles, despite its continued relevance in reliable secondary sources and objections from other contributors.
In a particularly noteworthy case, Iskandar edited the article “Allegations of genocide in the October 7 attacks”—an article he lobbied to have deleted—to describe Hamas terrorism as “resistance against Israel.”
Israel and Jews have not been Iskandar’s sole targets. In one representative case, he excised an entire section from the article, “Persecution of Copts,” removing a documented list of persecutions that Coptic Christians faced at the hands of Egyptian Muslims.
Jewish Identity and Antisemitism
Iskandar323’s interventions against Jewish identity operate at the structural level that includes article titles, leads, and narrative emphasis.
In June 2023, Iskandar folded the contents of the article “Hellenistic Judea” to a new article, created by him, called “Hellenistic Palestine.” This imposed a nomenclature (“Palestine”) from a later period onto the Judean period. Iskandar justified the change as a shift to a “common name,” then rewrote the lead to describe the subject as “the history of Palestine (region) or Judea”—relegating Judea to secondary, optional status rather than the historical core. The change was locked in procedurally by moving associated talk pages and preserving redirects, consolidating discussion under the new framing.
The same approach appears in modern contexts. In edits to “Antisemitism in the British Labour Party,” Iskandar323 removed or diluted language foregrounding antisemitism as a defining problem. He rebalanced the article toward procedural disputes, internal party dynamics, and contested interpretations—shifting focus away from the substance of antisemitic conduct itself.
Iskandar323’s site ban marks a rare moment of institutional accountability on Wikipedia. But the mechanisms that enabled years of systematic narrative manipulation remain intact. The editing patterns documented here are not the work of a lone actor but reflect a broader infrastructure of influence that operates largely invisible to the platform’s hundreds of millions of users.
Wikipedia’s power lies in its perceived neutrality. When that neutrality is systematically compromised on the most contested geopolitical issues of our time, the consequences extend far beyond any single article or edit war.
NPOV investigates information influence and narrative manipulation across major digital platforms. This reporting is part of an ongoing examination of coordinated editing networks on Wikipedia and their impact on coverage of geopolitically sensitive subjects.If you found this reporting useful, consider sharing it
What follows is primary-source documentation underlying this reporting.