I'm not directly touching this debate with a 20-foot pole. Wikipedia has issues with its insular editor pool for sure, but this minefield isn't the best vehicle for a public discussion of the issue.
>Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles
This is such a bizarre conspiracy theory, maybe it makes more sense with the specifics of how Poland teaches their history, but Poland got straight up invaded, decimated, and occupied by fascists. Like, how are they gonna even try to point fingers at the Jews and Communists as being responsible.....
No comment on the collaborationist narrative, but your comment completely ignores the very obvious fact that Poland was subdivided between said Fascist power AND the Soviet Union, a Communist superpower.
The Wikipedia foundation is one of the most impressive non profit money laundering ops out there. The cost of running Wikipedia vs the foundations actual income is staggering. There's more than enough money and investment income available that they don't need to throw up that annoying "gib us money plz" message they do all of the time.
I've followed this specific issue for a while, and this is a fairly good write up of it. It could be improved by moving beyond the narrative format (albeit supplemented by a few charts) and developing a network analysis of virtual territorial conflict over time.
There's probably an interesting, cautious discussion to be had about this analysis (whatever it is) but a large, open internet forum is probably incapable of having it. Still, I've replaced the title with something less baity (in keeping with the HN guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait").
It would certainly have been more accurate to title the article as 'Intentional distortion of holocaust history on Wikipedia' that to attribute intent to Wikipedia qua entity - though abusive & adversarial editing practices are a sufficiently well-known and documented problem on that platform that Wikipedia's nonprofit governance could reasonably be accused of negligence.
If there's a better i.e. more accurate and neutral title, I'd be happy to use it as long as isn't baity, but making accusations about intentional distortion is too baity (that's why I took that out).
Edit: this is a tangent, but it's also a weak claim since if you say something about someone's intent, they can just say "no it wasn't" and act like they refuted you. I finally learned not to do that about HN comments after experiencing this many times.
Edit 2: I changed the edited title from "Wikipedia editors and the history of the holocaust" to something that's closer to the actual title and better represents it.
The Hungarian wikipedia being overrun by ... how to say this politely? neonazis, yes, that's a polite word, I guess, is a well known fact. I am not at all surprised this happened to the English one as well.
Long ago there has been an analysis of how much better organized the "pro life" crowd was online than the "pro choice" and this is just another facet of the same: alas, it seems those on the right are playing this better.
Oh well. Everyone knows or should know Wikipedia can not be trusted or if they didn't then the Scottish Wikipedia scandal should have taught them this.
Everyone should know, and yet I often see people, in HN comments for example, citing Wikipedia as if it means something. As the great Tycho has said,
“The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.”
An additional factor here is that now chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on Wikipedia as well, in addition to search engines' knowledge graph panels and voice assistants bringing up Wikipedia texts in response to queries.
It does make you wonder sometimes whether technological progress really does make things work better than before ...
On the other hand if I link to example.com, random-website.org, or even a published study, then that's also not a guarantee it's anywhere near accurate.
Blindly trusting Wikipedia would be foolish, but so would blindly trusting anything else, or blindly mistrusting Wikipedia. Gathering reliable and comprehensive information on any topic you're not an expert on is hard, because you lack the background knowledge and expertise to judge the accuracy of something – basic critical thinking/bullshit detection helps, but will only get you so far.
Wikipedia isn't perfect and has its share of issues, but it's not bad either.
> it seems those on the right are playing this better
I'm sure many would disagree with this, personally I find the idea of the right dominating (English) wikipedia laughable.
But that's a pointless discussion. I think the takeaway should be there is no such thing as neutral media - one man's "neutral" perspective is another's far $political_direction. It's similar to "fact checking". Reality outside of the hard sciences (and even then) is subjective. It's much better to communicate the perspective from which reporting is done, or at least to not pretend to be neutral. And interested people necessarily need to seek a broad range of perspectives and not take any one platform as truth, no matter how neutral
There's another discussion here currently, concerning another academic study concluding that Wikipedia has a "moderate yet systematic" liberal citation bias:
Basically I agree. Generally speaking the English Wikipedia skews slightly left. However, Wikipedia is so vast that the direction and intensity of bias can vary from topic to topic even in the English Wikipedia. (For example, I once came across a whole bevy of articles singing the praises of the Kazakh government.) It all depends on who is most interested in the articles and most motivated to edit them.
[I deleted a part of this comment where I incorrectly attempted to correct the OP]
I have no good ideas about how to solve this problem, I’m guessing that the smaller audience a wiki has, the more likely it is that an ideological faction will have influence on the content.
The first thing that came to mind for me was making all of the other non-English wikis read-only machine translations of the English version since it has the most eyeballs on it. The problem with that is, then you miss out on things that are notable (by Wikipedia standards) in other languages that don’t have sources in English, which isn’t fair to non-English speaking countries that have their own notable culture and history.
Enforcing an NPOV across all of the wikis across many different languages (or even just the English wiki) seems like an intractable problem. And that’s without opening the ‘what is a neutral point of view’ can of worms.
Could you name a few prominent Hungarian Wikipedia articles that you feel are problematic?
I don't speak Hungarian, but DeepL and Google Translate do a reasonable job and I'd be interested in looking into it.
Yes, I'm aware of Hungarians' choice of prime minister and would expect to see that preference reflected in the Hungarian Wikipedia. I just didn't think it was as far out as the Croatian one. If it is – well, people did care about the Croatian one eventually. There are a number of places where it's possible to flag concerns (Wikimedia-l mailing list, Meta-Wiki, Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia Weekly, etc.)
There's "Detailed report about a Hungarian expedition" and if you click on the first article, https://web.archive.org/web/20080605115547/http://www.mno.hu... it literally starts with "There are no such people as Magyarabs". Second sentence "The black Hungarians straight out of a romantic grand novel do not exist."
The whole thing started when in the 30s a couple Egyptians decided to bilk a Hungarian noble wandering around there and got rewarmed by a hustler in the sixties who spent two semesters in Cairo then sold himself as an expert back in Hungary in all matters Egyptian and got a posh job for himself at the public radio as such. His Egyptian dictionary was so shit it never got printed, though. Him sharing a name with one of the most famous archeologists didn't hurt his prospects, of course.
Then in the 90s said rag dug up the whole thing again for nationalistic reasons and now people consider it fact despite the expedition that was sent to find them found nothing. Quite obviously. And, by now, people consider it fact mostly because of Wikipedia...
As for subtlety and for why all your translations are completely pointless can be not found in the Holocaust article https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsid%C3%B3_holokauszt_Magyaror... which, while does paint a picture of cruelty from the Hungarians, almost completely lacks the work of Krisztián Ungváry -- and it's quite important work. It was he who have found in the records that Hungarians sent many more trainloads of Jews than the Germans asked for, so much so the Germans told them to slow down. And now look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriszti%C3%A1n_Ungv%C3%A1ry and tell me, do you see any mention of him being an important Holocaust researcher despite even the Hungarian holocaust article uses him as a source once and uses another article of his as "additional information". (And of course he is only quoted on the forced labor battalions not on the Holocaust itself in Hungary.) Perhaps most importantly, where is
https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861738-007 from this page, not to mention several non-scholarly articles?
Want more? Check the article on the Hungarian conquest: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honfoglal%C3%A1s and search for the word "genetika". It's genetics in Hungarian. Archaeogenetics has been painting a very interesting and rather different picture compared to the traditions and there is not. a single. mention. of. this. Absolutely nothing! This research has been ongoing since 2008, it's not like it's too new. It also forgets to mention the heavy source criticism work being done in a similar time frame -- of course it does because it would show the entire thing is a gigantic "maybe". By now we know what we actually know solidly is extremely little. And yes, all this is heavily debated right now among historians but shouldn't this debate be at least mentioned? The sources listed have books from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, it's hardly a surprise their accuracy is not the greatest....
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Wass to https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wass_Albert . The English one at least talks at length of why he was sentenced to death as a war criminal and what happened later but in the Hungarian one? Almost all of that is missing. Needless to say, the current regime and even further right elements valorize him.
Well, considering that currently in Poland it's literally illegal to even suggest Poles have commited any crimes linked with the holocaust, this doesn't surprise me in the slightest. One of the most shameful things about this country for me personally.
No, it is not illegal, who told you that? There are Polish historians working on documenting everything that happened during the World War II, no one restricts them in any way.
When Poland made it a criminal offence this year to accuse it of complicity in Nazi war crimes, there was an outcry in Europe, Israel and the US.
Anyone found guilty could face up to three years in jail.
Five months later, the right-wing prime minister has moved to change the law to decriminalise the offence, describing it as a "correction".
An amendment to the Holocaust law was quickly backed by the lower house of parliament and now moves to the Senate.
The law had been intended to "defend the good name of Poland" but from now on it would be a civil, not a criminal offence, the head of prime minister's office, Michal Dworczyk, told public radio.
The legal act that regulates it[0] says (only relevant parts)
"""
Article 1: This act regulates
1) recording, collecting, developing, maintaining, making available and publishing documents of the state security authorities, obtained and collected from July 22, 1944 to July 31, 1990, as well as Third Reich and USSR security authorities, regarding:
a) crimes committed against persons of Polish nationality or Polish citizens of other nationalities in the period from November 8, 1917 to July 31, 1990:
- Nazi crimes,
- communist crimes,
- crimes of Ukrainian nationalists and members of Ukrainian formations collaborating with the German Third Reich,
- other crimes constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes,
[...]
Article 55: Whoever publicly and contrary to facts denies the crimes referred to in Article 1, point 1, shall be subject to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years. The sentence shall be made public.
"""
(art and research is exempt from this law)
So it is illegal to deny Holocaust or to attribute the responsibility for it to Poland or the Polish nation or to say that the death camps linked to Holocaust were Polish or operated by Poland.
It is legal to suggest or just simply say (as it is documented by the Institute of National Remembrance - a Polish state research institute) that there were individual Polish citizens that collaborated with Nazis and took part in committing Nazi crimes.
I'm Polish as well, although I don't see how it makes a difference.
The problem is with this bit:
"Article 55: Whoever publicly and contrary to facts denies the crimes referred to in Article 1, point 1, shall be subject to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years. The sentence shall be made public"
It just says "contrary to fact". And as many experts have already pointed out, it allows the prosecutors to define what the "fact" is. Not historians. Today you can freely say that Poles have killed 400 Jews in Jedwabne and yeah maybe you won't get arrested. Tomorrow? With the way the current political system is going? I wouldn't be so sure.
38 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 95.0 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/N...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
(The first contains links to others.)
Similar points were raised by Haaretz a few years ago:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-04/ty-article-ma...
This is such a bizarre conspiracy theory, maybe it makes more sense with the specifics of how Poland teaches their history, but Poland got straight up invaded, decimated, and occupied by fascists. Like, how are they gonna even try to point fingers at the Jews and Communists as being responsible.....
Jumping off points for this sort of work include:
Automated sockpuppet detection on Wikipedia: https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Identifying paid content on Wikipedia: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10289863
Detecting Wikipedia vandalism w/spatio-temporal analysis of revision data: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA514680.pdf
If you comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and especially this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Flames and ideological battle are not welcome—nay, not even on this topic.
Edit: this is a tangent, but it's also a weak claim since if you say something about someone's intent, they can just say "no it wasn't" and act like they refuted you. I finally learned not to do that about HN comments after experiencing this many times.
Edit 2: I changed the edited title from "Wikipedia editors and the history of the holocaust" to something that's closer to the actual title and better represents it.
Long ago there has been an analysis of how much better organized the "pro life" crowd was online than the "pro choice" and this is just another facet of the same: alas, it seems those on the right are playing this better.
Oh well. Everyone knows or should know Wikipedia can not be trusted or if they didn't then the Scottish Wikipedia scandal should have taught them this.
“The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.”
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-pow...
It does make you wonder sometimes whether technological progress really does make things work better than before ...
Blindly trusting Wikipedia would be foolish, but so would blindly trusting anything else, or blindly mistrusting Wikipedia. Gathering reliable and comprehensive information on any topic you're not an expert on is hard, because you lack the background knowledge and expertise to judge the accuracy of something – basic critical thinking/bullshit detection helps, but will only get you so far.
Wikipedia isn't perfect and has its share of issues, but it's not bad either.
I'm sure many would disagree with this, personally I find the idea of the right dominating (English) wikipedia laughable.
But that's a pointless discussion. I think the takeaway should be there is no such thing as neutral media - one man's "neutral" perspective is another's far $political_direction. It's similar to "fact checking". Reality outside of the hard sciences (and even then) is subjective. It's much better to communicate the perspective from which reporting is done, or at least to not pretend to be neutral. And interested people necessarily need to seek a broad range of perspectives and not take any one platform as truth, no matter how neutral
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34744696
Basically I agree. Generally speaking the English Wikipedia skews slightly left. However, Wikipedia is so vast that the direction and intensity of bias can vary from topic to topic even in the English Wikipedia. (For example, I once came across a whole bevy of articles singing the praises of the Kazakh government.) It all depends on who is most interested in the articles and most motivated to edit them.
I have no good ideas about how to solve this problem, I’m guessing that the smaller audience a wiki has, the more likely it is that an ideological faction will have influence on the content.
The first thing that came to mind for me was making all of the other non-English wikis read-only machine translations of the English version since it has the most eyeballs on it. The problem with that is, then you miss out on things that are notable (by Wikipedia standards) in other languages that don’t have sources in English, which isn’t fair to non-English speaking countries that have their own notable culture and history.
Enforcing an NPOV across all of the wikis across many different languages (or even just the English wiki) seems like an intractable problem. And that’s without opening the ‘what is a neutral point of view’ can of worms.
In the Croatian case, the Wikimedia Foundation commissioned a study (a "Disinformation Assessment") that did indeed come to that conclusion.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform...
If you do have info on the Hungarian Wikipedia, a link or two would be appreciated. Thanks.
Quite. It's subtle but the bias is obvious. But, since it's Hungary ... who gives a damn? Have you seen the prime minister?
I don't speak Hungarian, but DeepL and Google Translate do a reasonable job and I'd be interested in looking into it.
Yes, I'm aware of Hungarians' choice of prime minister and would expect to see that preference reflected in the Hungarian Wikipedia. I just didn't think it was as far out as the Croatian one. If it is – well, people did care about the Croatian one eventually. There are a number of places where it's possible to flag concerns (Wikimedia-l mailing list, Meta-Wiki, Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia Weekly, etc.)
Look at the sources.
There's "Detailed report about a Hungarian expedition" and if you click on the first article, https://web.archive.org/web/20080605115547/http://www.mno.hu... it literally starts with "There are no such people as Magyarabs". Second sentence "The black Hungarians straight out of a romantic grand novel do not exist."
The other reference https://web.archive.org/web/20050213015534/http://w3.datanet... now that's a neonazi rag.
The whole thing started when in the 30s a couple Egyptians decided to bilk a Hungarian noble wandering around there and got rewarmed by a hustler in the sixties who spent two semesters in Cairo then sold himself as an expert back in Hungary in all matters Egyptian and got a posh job for himself at the public radio as such. His Egyptian dictionary was so shit it never got printed, though. Him sharing a name with one of the most famous archeologists didn't hurt his prospects, of course.
Then in the 90s said rag dug up the whole thing again for nationalistic reasons and now people consider it fact despite the expedition that was sent to find them found nothing. Quite obviously. And, by now, people consider it fact mostly because of Wikipedia...
As for subtlety and for why all your translations are completely pointless can be not found in the Holocaust article https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsid%C3%B3_holokauszt_Magyaror... which, while does paint a picture of cruelty from the Hungarians, almost completely lacks the work of Krisztián Ungváry -- and it's quite important work. It was he who have found in the records that Hungarians sent many more trainloads of Jews than the Germans asked for, so much so the Germans told them to slow down. And now look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriszti%C3%A1n_Ungv%C3%A1ry and tell me, do you see any mention of him being an important Holocaust researcher despite even the Hungarian holocaust article uses him as a source once and uses another article of his as "additional information". (And of course he is only quoted on the forced labor battalions not on the Holocaust itself in Hungary.) Perhaps most importantly, where is https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861738-007 from this page, not to mention several non-scholarly articles?
What is missing is telling.
As for the influence being known, Klára Sándor was explicitly asked to edit https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely%E2%80%93magyar_ro... and she refused.
You can check either https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A9pes_kr%C3%B3nika or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicon_Pictum for any mentions of the uncomfortable truth that this is more a medieval comics than any valid source of history. Once again, even if you consider this debatable -- to be frank, it's not -- it really should be mentioned the historicity of this is heavily questionable.
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Wass to https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wass_Albert . The English one at least talks at length of why he was sentenced to death as a war criminal and what happened later but in the Hungarian one? Almost all of that is missing. Needless to say, the current regime and even further right elements valorize him.
>>no one restricts them in any way.
Yes, because scientific research is explicitly excluded from that law.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44627129
When Poland made it a criminal offence this year to accuse it of complicity in Nazi war crimes, there was an outcry in Europe, Israel and the US.
Anyone found guilty could face up to three years in jail.
Five months later, the right-wing prime minister has moved to change the law to decriminalise the offence, describing it as a "correction".
An amendment to the Holocaust law was quickly backed by the lower house of parliament and now moves to the Senate.
The law had been intended to "defend the good name of Poland" but from now on it would be a civil, not a criminal offence, the head of prime minister's office, Michal Dworczyk, told public radio.
This is not true.
The legal act that regulates it[0] says (only relevant parts)
""" Article 1: This act regulates
1) recording, collecting, developing, maintaining, making available and publishing documents of the state security authorities, obtained and collected from July 22, 1944 to July 31, 1990, as well as Third Reich and USSR security authorities, regarding:
a) crimes committed against persons of Polish nationality or Polish citizens of other nationalities in the period from November 8, 1917 to July 31, 1990: - Nazi crimes, - communist crimes, - crimes of Ukrainian nationalists and members of Ukrainian formations collaborating with the German Third Reich, - other crimes constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes,
[...]
Article 55: Whoever publicly and contrary to facts denies the crimes referred to in Article 1, point 1, shall be subject to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years. The sentence shall be made public. """
(art and research is exempt from this law)
So it is illegal to deny Holocaust or to attribute the responsibility for it to Poland or the Polish nation or to say that the death camps linked to Holocaust were Polish or operated by Poland.
It is legal to suggest or just simply say (as it is documented by the Institute of National Remembrance - a Polish state research institute) that there were individual Polish citizens that collaborated with Nazis and took part in committing Nazi crimes.
[0] https://sip.lex.pl/akty-prawne/dzu-dziennik-ustaw/instytut-p...
The problem is with this bit:
"Article 55: Whoever publicly and contrary to facts denies the crimes referred to in Article 1, point 1, shall be subject to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years. The sentence shall be made public"
It just says "contrary to fact". And as many experts have already pointed out, it allows the prosecutors to define what the "fact" is. Not historians. Today you can freely say that Poles have killed 400 Jews in Jedwabne and yeah maybe you won't get arrested. Tomorrow? With the way the current political system is going? I wouldn't be so sure.