Famous people are having references to their Jewish roots deleted on Wikipedia, critics claimed this week.

The user-written online encyclopaedia has come under fire after edit trails showed disputes over whether or not to state the Jewish roots of people such as actor Daniel Radcliffe, singer George Michael and Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman.

Claims that George Michael's late mother Lesley was Jewish were deleted and reposted during a discussion on a "talk" page in which the poster, "rv", was accused by a user known as Madder of having "only provided one source to some trashy pop culture website, and a search on Google shows this is the only site that makes this claim."

A posting that Daniel Radcliffe is halachically Jewish, following the JC's revelation three weeks ago prompted the buser Energyfreezer to comment: "Jewish newspapers say that conveniently enough, cite a neutral source first."

Debating whether to refer to Perelman's Jewish roots after the Daily Telegraph reported them, user Newport argued: "Nobody denies that there are good sources that say that he is Jewish (remembering that Judaism is an ethnicity as well as a religion), and nobody has produced a source that he isn't. We don't work by speculating about whether he would want it stated in the article that he is Jewish."

But user Bellbird retorted: "Why should we let monomaniacs decide what is encyclopaedic and what is not?"

As the JC went to press, all three entries had references to the men's Jewish mothers or families. Further debate on how to classify someone as Jewish on the site continues on "talk" pages about lists of British Jews, with archived material dating back to November 2005.

A spokesman for Wikipedia in the UK told the JC: “With Wikipedia anyone can edit, and you have a history of everything anyone says. The important message people need to know is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source as such – it is something a bunch of volunteers try to keep good. We don’t promise its reliability.”

Admitting some people used the site to “push their own views”, he added: “We don’t have an easy solution to that but we do try to clean it up as it goes. For example, with articles on Israel and Palestine, our editors’ sympathies may lie with one or the other but they are trying to be fair and they are trying to write an encyclopaedia.”

I recommend Talk:Grigori Perelman as the silliest Talk discussion I've ever seen on Wikipedia.

Why are they surprised?



It's a microcosm of why so much on Wikipedia is rubbish - people who have little knowledge but strong and weird views. In this case, there were a couple of editors who had the courage and determination to fight for the truth, but so often there aren't.