diff<\/a> (from the word difference) can be retrieved and compared against the current article. Page moves, edits to revisions since deleted, and edits whose diff could not be resolved were set aside.<\/p>\nEach assessable edit was compared against the live article in August 2026. An edit counts as persisting when the change it made is still present: text the account added is still in the article, or text it removed is still absent. Across the six articles, 362 of 398 assessable edits persist, roughly 91%. Persistence is reported per article as well as in aggregate because it varies between them.<\/p>\n
An analysis published in May 2026 by Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies examined the same account by a different method. The two studies measure survival differently and report different aggregate rates. They are reported here as separate findings, not combined into one.<\/p>\n
The two-window comparison<\/p>\n
This analysis compares two equal windows of six months, one ending and one beginning at the March 18, 2025, publication of \u201cEditing for Hate,\u201d across the 30 accounts identified in the research behind that report. Four measures were computed for each window: total article-namespace edits to Israel- and Palestine-related pages; tandem edits, meaning two or more documented accounts editing the same article within one hour of each other; group messaging, meaning user-talk messages exchanged between documented accounts; and average daily edits by the five most prolific accounts.<\/p>\n
Total editing fell 27%. Tandem editing fell 88% and group messaging fell 95%.<\/p>\n
The 27% fall in total editing reflects a smaller group, not less activity by its members. Several accounts were banned in early 2025, and others stopped editing, so the group lost roughly a third of its members; those who remained were editing slightly more than before. Tandem editing and group messaging fell much further, by 88% and 95%, more than a smaller group can explain.<\/p>\n
The continued-activity pull<\/p>\n
Figure 2 rests on a separate pull covering four accounts from the original 30 that were never sanctioned, from March 2025 to July 2026. Roughly 26,000 edits were retrieved. Of these, 2,442 were in the article namespace, matched a topic rule and fell inside the window; 1,145 of those were classified as maintenance and excluded, leaving 1,297 substantive edits.<\/p>\n
Topic and maintenance classification were applied mechanically by keyword matching, against the page title and the editor\u2019s own edit summary respectively. The expressions are recorded in the figure codebook alongside an edit-level file recording every classification decision, so any subset can be re-coded by hand. Talk-page edits are excluded. The two classifiers err in opposite directions: the topic filter misses some relevant edits, while the maintenance filter counts some vaguely described maintenance edits as substantive. The plotted totals are therefore approximate, and the edit-level file allows either error to be checked.<\/p>\n
The convergence survey<\/p>\n
Findings 3 and 4 rest on a forensic review of editing records conducted for this report, captured on July 9, 2026.<\/p>\n
The article set was not chosen in advance. For each surveyed account, the 500 most recent article-namespace edits were retrieved, and any page edited by two or more surveyed accounts entered the dataset as a shared article. The map of overlap therefore emerged from the accounts\u2019 own histories.<\/p>\n
The surveyed cohort is 19 accounts: eight editors referenced in \u201cEditing for Hate\u201d who were never sanctioned and remain active, and 11 accounts not previously documented by ADL. Two accounts present when the dataset was first built were under topic bans at the time of the survey and were removed. Because a shared article is defined by the presence of two or more surveyed accounts, that test was re-applied after the removal; ten articles then carried edits from only one remaining account and fell out. The final dataset is 229 shared articles and 565 editor-article records, each traceable to a dated, public revision ID.<\/p>\n
Each of the 229 articles was hand-coded for topic. An article is core when its subject is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or its history directly; adjacent when the subject is Israel, Jewish history, or the wider region without being about the conflict; and unrelated otherwise. 167 of the 229 are core.<\/p>\n
The October 7 page histories<\/p>\n
For the case study in Finding 4, CTS retrieved the complete revision histories of four pages and their discussion pages: \u201cOctober 7 attacks,\u201d \u201cSexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 attacks,\u201d \u201cScreams Without Words\u201d and \u201cScreams Before Silence.\u201d That is 9,576 revisions, 4,597 to the articles and 4,979 to the discussion pages. Contributor rankings cited in that section are counts of edits to the named page across its full history, not within a window.<\/p>\n
Definitions<\/p>\n
Substantive edit:\u00a0an edit that changes article content, as distinct from a maintenance edit repairing a link, adjusting a category, fixing a typo or applying a template.<\/p>\n
Shared article:\u00a0a page edited by two or more of the 19 surveyed accounts.<\/p>\n
Recent:\u00a0an edit made within the 12 months before the July 9, 2026 capture.<\/p>\n
Last word:\u00a0holding the most recent edit to an article among the surveyed accounts. It is not a claim that no other editor has touched the page since.<\/p>\n
Both-cohort article:\u00a0a shared article edited by at least one account from each group. There are 142.<\/p>\n
Handoff:\u00a0a both-cohort article where every original-cohort account\u2019s most recent edit is more than 12 months old while a newly identified account has edited within 12 months. There are 17. The reverse pattern occurs once.<\/p>\n
Wikivoice:\u00a0text written in the encyclopedia\u2019s own factual voice, as distinct from text attributed to a named source.<\/p>\n
Original cohort and newly identified:\u00a0the original cohort is the eight accounts from the research behind \u201cEditing for Hate\u201d that also appear in the 2026 survey. Newly identified means new to ADL\u2019s documentation, not new to Wikipedia; several of these accounts have edited for years, one since 2012.<\/p>\n
Verification of named accounts<\/p>\n
Named accounts carry the highest risk of error in a report of this kind. Sanction status was checked against the public block log and the relevant arbitration decisions for each. Every diff cited in the text was opened and read against the live article rather than relied on from a summary or a byte count.<\/p>\n
Accounts whose activity could not be verified to that standard, or whose editing on inspection proved predominantly maintenance work, were dropped from the profiles even where they remain in the aggregate counts. One surveyed account exercised Wikipedia\u2019s courtesy-vanishing option during the reporting period; its edits remain in the public page histories under a renamed-user handle and remain in the dataset.<\/p>\n
LimitationsShared editing is not proof of coordination. Active editors in a contested topic area will overlap on the most contested articles. The overlap map describes where the surveyed accounts are active. It is not evidence that they act in concert.The survey is a snapshot of July 9, 2026. Accounts active then may since have stopped; accounts dormant then may since have resumed.The 500-edit cap compresses high-volume accounts. An account making thousands of edits a year is observed over a shorter span than a less active one, so recency measures are not directly comparable between accounts of very different volumes.Keyword classification errs in both directions. Topic-area articles whose titles carry none of the listed terms are missed, which undercounts, and maintenance edits described vaguely are counted as substantive, which overcounts.A decline in visible coordination is not necessarily a decline in coordination. Talk-page messaging is by definition the observable form. Its near-disappearance is consistent with editors having stopped coordinating and equally consistent with their having moved to channels that leave no public record.Persistence measures survival, not correctness. That an edit still stands says nothing about whether it was a good edit. The finding is that the encyclopedia has not revisited this work.Sanction records are incomplete by design. A topic ban is a conduct restriction and leaves no block-log entry, so an absent entry cannot establish that an account was never restricted. Counts of sanctioned editors here are minimums.The two windows were built to comparable but not identical specifications. The comparison re-runs a dataset constructed for the earlier report; cross-validation confirms the same direction and comparable magnitudes, not identical construction.<\/p>\n
This report documents editing behavior and its effect on article text. It does not assert that any surveyed account is acting on instruction, is coordinating off the platform, or is anything other than a volunteer editor, and it makes no claim about the identity, nationality, employment or affiliation of any account. It does not claim that any individual edit is illegitimate under Wikipedia\u2019s rules. Many of the edits examined here are defensible under those rules, and several cite genuine policies correctly. The finding is the pattern the edits form and the state in which they have left the articles.<\/p>\n
The analysis scripts, per-edit output files, and codebooks underlying each figure exist in full, including a record-level file for every dataset above in which each edit, its classification, and the reason for any exclusion can be inspected. These materials, the list of 229 shared articles, and the provenance manifests for each pull are available to researchers on request.<\/p>\n
Appendix\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Methodology This report draws on five datasets, each built from Wikipedia\u2019s public records and each answering a different…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-647597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}