Hot take: Why is there even a Croatian, a Serbian, a Bosnian, a Montenegrin and a Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia? It's the same thing, why split the knowledge base into five? Not like there's a UK, US and an Australian Wikipedia.
Serbian is typically in Cyrillic - but everyone knows/uses both Cyrillic and Latin. First year of elementary school you learn reading/writing in Cyrillic, second year it's Latin, and in third you get first foreign language (e.g. German, French, English... My parents had Russian, but both my 11 years older sister and me had German as first foreign language). And in 5th year of elementary school it's another foreign language (for sister and me it was English). Street signs - especially highway/cities are in both scripts.
Croatian is Latin only - and IIRC only people born before ~1980 or so were taught Cyrillic in school (unless they are "Serbians from Croatia"). Street signs are only in Latin, but in past I think they had kind of dual script signs like in Serbia.
Bosnian ... Ugh well Serbian/Orthodox-Christian majority parts (Republika Srpska) have signs only in Cyrillic. Non Serbian parts (so Croatian and Muslim/Bošnjak parts) have signs only in Latin.
So I guess BiH (Bosnia & Herzegovina) might be the only valid use case for Serbo-Croatian?
Montenegrin used to be exactly the same as Serbian (so Cyrillic, and different dialect/accent and very few actually different words). But they also started inventing new words to distinguish themselves from Serbian - so I'm not really sure which version of Wikipedia they would default to.
BTW all the words can be transliterated between Latin and Cyrillic with dummy search/replace. For example "đ" = "ђ" = "dj" (if you don't have "fancier" version of "d" on your Latin typewriter/keyboard)
Meanwhile (Former Yugoslav Republic OF /and now known as just Northern/) Macedonia was always Cyrillic (except like in Kosovo there's many Albanian speaking people there, and they use mostly Latin, though I can't say for sure about Christian Orthodox minority in Albania).
And despite being rather different than Serbian/Croatian (let's not stir up flames by saying mix of Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian). When I run into random Macedonian people - they literally say "Two countries (Serbia and Macedonia), but one nation".
PS. I'm originally from Belgrade/Serbia; Wife is 1990s refugee from Croatia; When we were born it was one bigger Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia; We're living in The Netherlands; Our kids have Serbian and Croatian citizenship; Friends and Family are scattered across that former/bigger Yugoslavia (mostly Serbia and Croatia) and some live in the rest of Europe.
Since when I shared the link with my friend from Croatia - he commented:
"Ha. Tamo pak povijest ne bi išao gledati" (Losely translated as "Lol. Yeah I wouldn't be reading about history there")
To which I've replied:
"Eh pa to kao i vesti - pogledaš/proveriš sve verzije, pošto je 'istina' negde između." (Losely translated as "Yeah it's like news, you check all variants/versions, because the 'truth' is somewhere in between").
Wikipedia rides its old reputation but it has long been taken over by ideologues. It is still great for information on math, physics, engineering, comp sci, etc. But anything politics, political science, history, and partially philosophy is very biased and this bias is practically impossible to offset.
Powers in this world wants control. It is impossible to create a reliable source of political news.
Politicians however have no incentive to manipulate math, physics, engineering, etc.
Humanistic subjects however are a target as it is commonly used for propaganda, to divert attention from economics, etc. etc. Unfortunately there are many people who can easily be distracted by this hook.
> Politicians however have no incentive to manipulate math, physics, engineering, etc.
IMHO, Wikipedia's main problem isn't with politicians (though, IIRC there's likely a fair amount of state-actor editing), it's with zealots.
You have to be deeply, deeply weird to be a Wikipedia editor, especially in a controversial topic area. My feeling is most of those editors are motivated by blatant ideological POV pushing, and their bad-faith motivations are only sublimated by Wikpedia's policies. Most of the conflict is in the form of elaborate passive-aggressive bureaucratic walls of text, which only the truly insane would willingly participate in.
Over time, as the editor population dwindles, it will become less and less diverse and more and more biased.
2. Why would unfairness on one specific political topic impugn the judgement of Wikipedia editors generally?
3. Who are these ‘moderators’? Do you mean editors or admins? If you mean the former, any general judgement is pretty hard to justify; if you mean the latter, admins don’t intervene often enough for their misjudgements to cause a problem for the whole website. I’ve substantially edited at least a dozen relatively important articles (which is not that much by Wikipedia standards admittedly) and have never had to interact with an admin on matters of content.
Yes, obviously in saying they can’t intervene enough to cause a problem for the whole website I envisage the possibility that they could intervene often enough to cause a problem for a part thereof.
In the same breath, you say "what's wrong with them", which is just as bad as saying "there is no evidence of it" while emoting obfuscating and cobbling the terms of "moderator", "editor", "contributor" together and confuse the input mechanism of Wikipedianship even further.
Wikipedian admins are the worst.
While it still isn't perfect, my fight with Wikipedia is over introduction of "Deaf" with capital "D" against editors who have no claim in this culture other than their "preservation culture of preconceived notions".
Would take 18 years before I rallied enough Deaf Wikipedian editors to muscle past those "old foggities".
Yeah, was triggered so I am putting that tidbit of observational data there.
I fail to see why asking for evidence is the same as denial that there is any.
> while emoting obfuscating and cobbling the terms of "moderator", "editor", "contributor" together and confuse the input mechanism of Wikipedianship even further
I’m not sure how I ‘emot[ed]’ anything. There are no Wikipedia ‘moderators’, and I, in good faith, considered the two plausible candidate meanings. I do not see how else one is meant to respond to claims about strictly inextant groups. You yourself now refer to admins, which were one possible group I specified. It is more obfuscatory to use an ambiguous and strictly non-referring term than to specify plausible reinterpretations (admins, editors). It is exceedingly odd to accuse someone who points out a distinction of ‘cobbling[sic]’ what is so distinguished together.
> against editors
This is very confusing. You began by complaining that admins are ‘the worst’. Now you are complaining about editors. Is your complaint that admins unfairly decided on consensus following discussion by editors? If so, it seems that the admins are at fault there.
I’ve lost arguments on Wiki before, and I think the people who disagreed were silly. But that doesn’t indicate much about editors in general, or indeed Wiki procedures. What would be generally damning is if the cases you have in mind were to show that the admins are systematically and unfairly predisposed one way or another.
15 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadSerbian Wikipedia is far worse in that regard.
Croatian is Latin only - and IIRC only people born before ~1980 or so were taught Cyrillic in school (unless they are "Serbians from Croatia"). Street signs are only in Latin, but in past I think they had kind of dual script signs like in Serbia.
Bosnian ... Ugh well Serbian/Orthodox-Christian majority parts (Republika Srpska) have signs only in Cyrillic. Non Serbian parts (so Croatian and Muslim/Bošnjak parts) have signs only in Latin.
So I guess BiH (Bosnia & Herzegovina) might be the only valid use case for Serbo-Croatian?
Montenegrin used to be exactly the same as Serbian (so Cyrillic, and different dialect/accent and very few actually different words). But they also started inventing new words to distinguish themselves from Serbian - so I'm not really sure which version of Wikipedia they would default to.
BTW all the words can be transliterated between Latin and Cyrillic with dummy search/replace. For example "đ" = "ђ" = "dj" (if you don't have "fancier" version of "d" on your Latin typewriter/keyboard)
Meanwhile (Former Yugoslav Republic OF /and now known as just Northern/) Macedonia was always Cyrillic (except like in Kosovo there's many Albanian speaking people there, and they use mostly Latin, though I can't say for sure about Christian Orthodox minority in Albania).
And despite being rather different than Serbian/Croatian (let's not stir up flames by saying mix of Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian). When I run into random Macedonian people - they literally say "Two countries (Serbia and Macedonia), but one nation".
PS. I'm originally from Belgrade/Serbia; Wife is 1990s refugee from Croatia; When we were born it was one bigger Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia; We're living in The Netherlands; Our kids have Serbian and Croatian citizenship; Friends and Family are scattered across that former/bigger Yugoslavia (mostly Serbia and Croatia) and some live in the rest of Europe.
Since when I shared the link with my friend from Croatia - he commented:
"Ha. Tamo pak povijest ne bi išao gledati" (Losely translated as "Lol. Yeah I wouldn't be reading about history there")
To which I've replied: "Eh pa to kao i vesti - pogledaš/proveriš sve verzije, pošto je 'istina' negde između." (Losely translated as "Yeah it's like news, you check all variants/versions, because the 'truth' is somewhere in between").
Politicians however have no incentive to manipulate math, physics, engineering, etc.
Humanistic subjects however are a target as it is commonly used for propaganda, to divert attention from economics, etc. etc. Unfortunately there are many people who can easily be distracted by this hook.
IMHO, Wikipedia's main problem isn't with politicians (though, IIRC there's likely a fair amount of state-actor editing), it's with zealots.
You have to be deeply, deeply weird to be a Wikipedia editor, especially in a controversial topic area. My feeling is most of those editors are motivated by blatant ideological POV pushing, and their bad-faith motivations are only sublimated by Wikpedia's policies. Most of the conflict is in the form of elaborate passive-aggressive bureaucratic walls of text, which only the truly insane would willingly participate in.
Over time, as the editor population dwindles, it will become less and less diverse and more and more biased.
2. Why would unfairness on one specific political topic impugn the judgement of Wikipedia editors generally?
3. Who are these ‘moderators’? Do you mean editors or admins? If you mean the former, any general judgement is pretty hard to justify; if you mean the latter, admins don’t intervene often enough for their misjudgements to cause a problem for the whole website. I’ve substantially edited at least a dozen relatively important articles (which is not that much by Wikipedia standards admittedly) and have never had to interact with an admin on matters of content.
Sure, but admins can influence the narrative of specific topics/pages that they care about.
Wikipedian admins are the worst.
While it still isn't perfect, my fight with Wikipedia is over introduction of "Deaf" with capital "D" against editors who have no claim in this culture other than their "preservation culture of preconceived notions".
Would take 18 years before I rallied enough Deaf Wikipedian editors to muscle past those "old foggities".
Yeah, was triggered so I am putting that tidbit of observational data there.
I fail to see why asking for evidence is the same as denial that there is any.
> while emoting obfuscating and cobbling the terms of "moderator", "editor", "contributor" together and confuse the input mechanism of Wikipedianship even further
I’m not sure how I ‘emot[ed]’ anything. There are no Wikipedia ‘moderators’, and I, in good faith, considered the two plausible candidate meanings. I do not see how else one is meant to respond to claims about strictly inextant groups. You yourself now refer to admins, which were one possible group I specified. It is more obfuscatory to use an ambiguous and strictly non-referring term than to specify plausible reinterpretations (admins, editors). It is exceedingly odd to accuse someone who points out a distinction of ‘cobbling[sic]’ what is so distinguished together.
> against editors
This is very confusing. You began by complaining that admins are ‘the worst’. Now you are complaining about editors. Is your complaint that admins unfairly decided on consensus following discussion by editors? If so, it seems that the admins are at fault there.
I’ve lost arguments on Wiki before, and I think the people who disagreed were silly. But that doesn’t indicate much about editors in general, or indeed Wiki procedures. What would be generally damning is if the cases you have in mind were to show that the admins are systematically and unfairly predisposed one way or another.