Arguing Over One Line in a Biography

If you look at the beginning of the Wikipedia article about Isaac Bashevis Singer, then you read this as the first line:

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער‎; November 11, 1903^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]} – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American writer who wrote and published exclusively in Yiddish.^[8][9][10]

^{Apparently the terms Polish born and Jewish-American writer have been the subject of fierce wars by people trying to edit the page for their own purposes.}

According to this article, a Jerusalem based scholar and a Polish-born Australian engineering student went to war on this. A short time ago

 the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on Singer described him as a “Polish American writer in Yiddish.” The word “Jewish” appeared lower, in the body of the text. 

Check now and you’ll see a different first line: Singer is “a Polish-born Jewish-American writer.” But the process of editing these few words was long and complicated, offering lessons on the pitfalls and continued promise of decentralized knowledge in the era of disinformation, with some possible insights about Polish ultranationalism. 

The story of how a set of Wikipedia warriors made Isaac Bashevis Singer Jewish again starts a few years ago with a keyboard battle between two strong-willed strangers on the internet. 

On one side: Wikipedia novice David Stromberg, 40, an Israel-born, U.S.-raised literary scholar and writer who lives in Jerusalem and whose research on Singer appears in academic journals.

“I’ve been in this battle since 2019, have gotten really obsessed with it,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “You ask yourself, ‘how could this be happening?’” 

On the other side: seasoned Wikipedian Oliver Szydlowski, 22, a Polish college student enrolled in a construction management program at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

“Wikipedia is a battleground, and you do tend to argue with a lot of people,” Szydlowski told JTA. “What I’m trying to do is to improve every single article as much as possible.”

Szydlowski has also edited quite a few wikipedia articles, some about Polish history and language as well as other entries that might not be obvious entries for someone to discuss Polish nationalism including precast concrete, brick gothic, Billy Wilder, and Louis B. Mayer.

You can view a record of Szydlowski's activity here.

I would suggest that if you want to spend time on the life of Isaac Bashevis Singer, rather than editing a small part of an online biography your time would be spent reading one or more of his stories. For example, "The Cafeteria." It was published in the New Yorker in 1968. They offered this summary:

The author often ate in a Broadway cafeteria where he would meet other Polish and Russian immigrants. In the fifties, Esther became part of their group. Although she had been in a Russian prison camp and now had taken a menial job to support her cripple father, she was cheerful and outgoing. She and the author became good friends, but each time he saw her, she looked more disenchanted; her father died, she was often ill, and she worried about her sanity. Several years after their first meeting, she called the author and came to his apartment to tell him that she had seen Hitler, surrounded by Nazis in the Broadway cafeteria the night it burned down. The author tried to reassure her that she had had a vision, but he was convinced that she was mad. One night he saw her in the subway, looking happy and prosperous, on the arm of an ancient man he had thought was long dead. He was upset by seeing her with the old man, and reappraised her story of seeing Hitler, realizing that if, as Kant argues, time and space are only forms of perception, then she might really have seen Hitler. The next day he learned that she had killed herself some time before he saw her in the subway.

PBS also made a television version of the story.