One thing you encounter right-quick in Wikipedia is the incessant refrain that the other guys are winning. For articles relating to any historical conflict, (some) editors from each camp are convinced that objective history, Ranke's "history as it really happened", is being systematically misrepresented by propagandists from the other side. Russians vs. Poles, Sunni vs. Shia, Macedonians vs. Greeks, the list is endless. I alluded to this in the article when I mentioned that Wikipedia often leaves members of both sides in any given dispute dissatisfied.

So the Israeli-Arab conflict is typical. Some editors are convinced that Zionist editors have made Wikipedia into a 24/7/365 hasbarah orgy; others, like the commenter above, are equally convinced that it’s dominated by “the outrageous propaganda and outright fabrications of Islamist and Arabist interests." And then there’s all those in between.

The bottom line, though, is this: the historiography of any ethnic/national conflict will be characterized by a range of conflicting narratives. That’s why it’s so Sisyphean a challenge to write a single “objective history” of a conflict, and why individual historians have resorted to all manner of narrative device in their efforts to do so. The commenter above may be driven batty by the inclusion of “alternative discourses” that he regards as ludicrous, but the day-to-day slog in which Wikipedia editors of various nationalities, ethnicities, and ideological dispositions struggle to compose a single document that accommodates multiple discourses—that describes those discourses without validating them—is part of what makes many Wikipedia articles so useful, so insightful, and so fascinating. It’s a wonderfully novel way of writing the history of conflicts, and—frustrating though the process may be for many editors—it’s producing some excellent content.