Clearly the system is not working, and this isn't about editor/ideologues taking over the Wikipedia entry for a favorite game or public figure, but an entire nation. I'm Croatian, and while I've never used the site, I could see my kids going there for a school assignment and getting horrible ahistoric nonsense in the their heads.
To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows: It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by default.
I'm not sure if I'm convinced that technology leads to transparency by default. I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there. Of course, when you consider distributed systems in which data for an entity or transaction is spread across many different systems and infrastructures, it would be too expensive to track down and eliminate all traces of the data.
But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
Looks like it's time to fork. And this seems to have already happened:
> Many editors, including some of the dissenting admins, have left Croatian Wikipedia. Those who haven't abandoned Wikipedia altogether are resigned to edit elsewhere, chiefly at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia.
All that's left now is for Wikipedia to drop Croatian.
Tbh that just sounds like the regular Wikipedia editing drama.
"Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda. This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.
Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative expertise/oral history. I had a guitarist Wikipedia editor tell me that a niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that industry. Smh. History lost forever.
I sympathize with your situation. People are fallible arbiters of truth and relevancy. But why was the fact that this editor was a guitarist have relevance? Was that his/her stated profession (and so by implication you're saying they overestimate their ability as an editor in this particular field of science industry ala Dunning-Kruger effect)?
This is putting too much weight and responsibility on Wikipedia and this kind of thought only serves to build up the narcissistic Dunning-Kruger editors/contributors rather than label Wikipedia for what it is: crowd-sourced, with all the drawbacks and caveats thereof.
If there is a piece of history you think is important, capture it someplace else so that it isn't lost forever.
There is a perpetual tension in Wikipedia between being a good, succinct overview to X subject matter versus being a repository for information that X subject matter experts would like to see. Editorial policy on WP errs toward the former, and is quite hostile to the latter, preferring that information especially useful primarily to subject-matter experts be located on dedicated subject-matter wikis hosted by other orgs.
Perhaps there is a need for a wiki-based encyclopedia that allows in-depth articles and information by experts, but WP has decided that it is not it.
>There is no tangible evidence of mass executions [taking place in the Jasenovac concentration camp]
Shame that there are no links in the article pointing to the Croatian wiki articles in questions, the one on Ante Pavelić, for instance, states that the estimated number of victims in Jasenovac is 70 000 - 80 000 people.
"Među ustaškom logorima najpoznatiji je Sabirni logor Jasenovac, gdje je, prema pretpostavkama, stradalo od 70 000 - 80 000 ljudi."
https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87
Steering clear of the underlying, complicated regional politics:
The survivor (victim/perpetrator/some of both/neither) writes history, descendants rewrite it. (How else would we get "Whalers on the Moon?") Yet, the web complicates it as a living organism of impermanence/bit-rot, fiefdom platforms and essentially unaccountable anonymity.
Further complicating reality, bias is as inescapable as the human condition, the unconscious variety being somewhat irreducible; while the integrity of the amateur copywriter (fairness, completeness, quality, accuracy and correctness) is implicitly (if not explicitly) socially-contracted to deliberately aspire to such ideals in each task.
As others have noted, I don't think this is an entirely unique situation. The decentralized nature of Wikipedia's editorship results in these kind of situations with fair frequency.
> Something can be factually true, but where there is a number of facts, choosing the less important ones and omitting the more important ones tends to lead to wrong conclusions. According to sources, Tito was both an autocrat and a dictator, and stating only the milder qualification is an unacceptable act, an act of vandalism.
I think the above quote from the article gets to the root of the problem - when it comes to politics and history (especially on Wikipedia), the game of framing can always be played where something can be made to look either good or bad by the accentuation of certain facts and the omission or downplaying of other facts.
It's the same game you play if you're a 'journalist' with a pre-decided narrative. Let that narrative filter what gets reported, and what gets emphasised, and you don't even have to lie.
Not sure why the parent is gray, except maybe the scare quotes around "journalist". You absolutely can influence the narrative with your choice of which 10 stories to run of the 100 you have.
For those outside Croatia, the drama perfectly reflects the politics of the country. You have the left and right still bickering over WWII events and shaping the "conversation", while the moderate majority is apathetic about the whole thing ("don't use hr wikipedia" in this case, "emigrate" in real life).
Politics is getting extremely polarized in a lot of the western world. In Croatia, we never had non-polarized politics.
This makes me feel weird about the problem. It’s one thing when a very small minority takes control of an open projects. But when it’s simply a reflection of larger social dysfunction ... what then?
You can’t expect an open project to be healthier than the culture that fosters it.
You either restrict it, shut it down, or live with the dysfunction. Or, if you have the time and resource, create tons of red tape and the illusion of openness (i.e. Reddit).
Interesting, I mentioned this a few days ago in an HN comment. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and donate regularly, but it's nearly unusable in my mother tongue.
It’s difficult to tell how pervasive this problem is in the Croatian edition as opposed to others (even this narrative may be “partisan”, but I don’t know how the cited sources lean or who owns those media outlets). In any case, there are some rather blatant examples in the English language version that demonstrate the phenomenon, or at least half-assed solutions to neo-Nazi distortions via special pleading (the article on Copernicus is a nice piece of revisionism; in every historical reference I have ever come across, Copernicus is referred to as a Polish astronomer, but because the editors where either too foolish, cowardly in the face of German nationalism, or count neo-Nazis among their ranks, they decided to remove the national adjective altogether. Most articles do not conform to this practice which is why it’s a piece of special pleading and a pernicious concession. Shame on them.)
I've checked that page and it seems pretty balanced to me- though I don't know the subject and might be mistaken. As far as I understand, Copernicus was born in a mixed German and Polish speaking area that had joined the Kingdom of Poland only seven years before his birth. He was fluent in both German and Polish. So I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.
> joined the Kingdom of Poland only seven years before his birth.
> I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.
By the same logic, for Thomas Jefferson, born 1743 in a British colony, it would be even more inappropriate to call him American, as that country didn't exist until 1776.
What's true however is that, historically, the ideologies of current nation states didn't exist in 1473, and that some categorizations used today are really ahistorical. Still, people knew which language their ancestors and family spoke, and there is some information about that in Wikipedia regarding Copernicus. That's something that means something even to us today, where we could live in one country and mostly speak one language but still don't deny that our family speaks another, or that we don't speak the language of our ancestors. E.g.
"With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey."
I think I’d be suspicious of articles about a country edited by nationals of that country if Pew Research shows that country as having relatively high national pride. Usually, that manifests in an attempt to avoid shame by altering representations of reality rather than being secure enough to handle reality.
An example of something I encountered was that many articles on India in Wikipedia were written in a manner that is sort of child like, aiming at grandiose claims and conspiracy theories. It was obvious, reading from the outside, that it was nonsense.
Anyway, in general I find a English language Wikipedia pretty good where there is a lot of traffic but it looks like the rarer articles are where random people assert their propaganda.
Wikipedia articles on any controversial topic are bound to be utterly useless, because they tend to attract admins with a strong opinion on the topic who proceed to ensure the article agrees with their POV. If there are admins with different POVs, they don't attempt to reach the consensus, but rather try to ensure the other one is banned or at least topic-banned.
In Argentina we have the other problem: the right media accuses Wikipedia to be hijacked by leftists or peronists, because they don't like that biographies of genocides of our last dictatorship and their civil accomplices (now in politics) being exposed. The Right is the problem of our modern world.
31 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 73.4 ms ] threadBut could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
Copying is so cheap these days that it often becomes intractable to erease it all.
> But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
I often observe that we think that some things should be private but that we do not spend the effort to keep them that way.
> Many editors, including some of the dissenting admins, have left Croatian Wikipedia. Those who haven't abandoned Wikipedia altogether are resigned to edit elsewhere, chiefly at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia.
All that's left now is for Wikipedia to drop Croatian.
"Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda. This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.
This is putting too much weight and responsibility on Wikipedia and this kind of thought only serves to build up the narcissistic Dunning-Kruger editors/contributors rather than label Wikipedia for what it is: crowd-sourced, with all the drawbacks and caveats thereof.
If there is a piece of history you think is important, capture it someplace else so that it isn't lost forever.
Perhaps there is a need for a wiki-based encyclopedia that allows in-depth articles and information by experts, but WP has decided that it is not it.
Shame that there are no links in the article pointing to the Croatian wiki articles in questions, the one on Ante Pavelić, for instance, states that the estimated number of victims in Jasenovac is 70 000 - 80 000 people. "Među ustaškom logorima najpoznatiji je Sabirni logor Jasenovac, gdje je, prema pretpostavkama, stradalo od 70 000 - 80 000 ljudi." https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87
The survivor (victim/perpetrator/some of both/neither) writes history, descendants rewrite it. (How else would we get "Whalers on the Moon?") Yet, the web complicates it as a living organism of impermanence/bit-rot, fiefdom platforms and essentially unaccountable anonymity.
Further complicating reality, bias is as inescapable as the human condition, the unconscious variety being somewhat irreducible; while the integrity of the amateur copywriter (fairness, completeness, quality, accuracy and correctness) is implicitly (if not explicitly) socially-contracted to deliberately aspire to such ideals in each task.
> Something can be factually true, but where there is a number of facts, choosing the less important ones and omitting the more important ones tends to lead to wrong conclusions. According to sources, Tito was both an autocrat and a dictator, and stating only the milder qualification is an unacceptable act, an act of vandalism.
I think the above quote from the article gets to the root of the problem - when it comes to politics and history (especially on Wikipedia), the game of framing can always be played where something can be made to look either good or bad by the accentuation of certain facts and the omission or downplaying of other facts.
* The English wiki says "while his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian [..], Tito has traditionally been seen as a benevolent dictator."
* The German wiki calls Tito a dictatorial head of state.
* In the Italian wiki his is clearly a "dittatore".
* The spanish one does not seem to judge.
* Neither does the french one.
Politics is getting extremely polarized in a lot of the western world. In Croatia, we never had non-polarized politics.
You can’t expect an open project to be healthier than the culture that fosters it.
You either restrict it, shut it down, or live with the dysfunction. Or, if you have the time and resource, create tons of red tape and the illusion of openness (i.e. Reddit).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702939
> I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.
By the same logic, for Thomas Jefferson, born 1743 in a British colony, it would be even more inappropriate to call him American, as that country didn't exist until 1776.
What's true however is that, historically, the ideologies of current nation states didn't exist in 1473, and that some categorizations used today are really ahistorical. Still, people knew which language their ancestors and family spoke, and there is some information about that in Wikipedia regarding Copernicus. That's something that means something even to us today, where we could live in one country and mostly speak one language but still don't deny that our family speaks another, or that we don't speak the language of our ancestors. E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
"With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey."
An example of something I encountered was that many articles on India in Wikipedia were written in a manner that is sort of child like, aiming at grandiose claims and conspiracy theories. It was obvious, reading from the outside, that it was nonsense.
Anyway, in general I find a English language Wikipedia pretty good where there is a lot of traffic but it looks like the rarer articles are where random people assert their propaganda.