Wikipedia still has up Nazi propaganda in regards to the “Holodomor” with old or cherrypicked or outright false statements from sources calling it a genocide when in fact it’s widely recognized as, basically, a fuckup of Soviet policy under Stalin. Not genocide.
The “double genocide” shit is Nazi propaganda and yet Wikipedia legitimizes it. Any ignorant person who googles it after reading “derp derp Stalin killed 10 kazillion people!” Would find themselves quickly on a webpage “confirming” that false belief.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor link for anyone curious.
Wikipedia can be decent for some stuff, but while shit like this remains on the site, I dunno, it can’t be trusted in many regards.
Please stop forcing me to defend Wikipedia. 🥺
Btw,
Holodomor:
The Holodomor,[a] also known as the Great Ukrainian Famine,[b] was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
Holocaust:
The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland.
The opening paragraphs from the respective articles.
Spot the difference.
man-made famine
more neutral wording would have been just ‘famine’. there was nothing deliberate about it and the famine killed not just Ukrainians but Russians too.
and ‘holodomor’ itself is a term which makes people think its like holocaust. ‘Communism as bad or worse than Nazism’ is historical revisionism.
It’s man-made because the severity of the famine was undeniably affected by policy. I don’t think there’s anything biased about that. What it means, and the extent to which it was deliberate, if at all, should be expanded upon in the article proper.
The usage of “Holodomor” is so common that it’s perfectly reasonable for an encyclopedia to use it. It’s the article title most people are going to be looking for, after all. But it’s worth noting that the very first section (etymology) has a paragraph about how Holodomor is different from the Holocaust due to no evidence of intentional extermination.
wikipedia could have Holodomor redirect to Soviet Famine but they don’t.
Holodomor is different from the Holocaust due to no evidence of intentional extermination.
why call it man-made then? sure you can argue that man-made doesn’t mean ‘deliberate’ but thats not how most people would interpret it. ‘famine’ is the clear neutral term.
where is mention of ‘man-made’ in Bengal Famine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Bengal’s economy had been predominantly agrarian, with between half and three-quarters of the rural poor subsisting in a “semi-starved condition”. Stagnant agricultural productivity and a stable land base were unable to cope with a rapidly increasing population, resulting in both long-term decline in per capita availability of rice and growing numbers of the land-poor and landless labourers. A high proportion laboured beneath a chronic and spiralling cycle of debt that ended in debt bondage and the loss of their landholdings due to land grabbing.
where is the criticism is British policy?
why call it man-made then? sure you can argue that man-made doesn’t mean ‘deliberate’ but thats not how most people would interpret it. ‘famine’ is the clear neutral term.
If you only read the first paragraph and ignore the rest of the article you deserve to not understand anything.
where is mention of ‘man-made’ in Bengal Famine?
Feel free to add it. I’ll support the change
If you only read the first paragraph and ignore the rest of the article you deserve to not understand anything.
misleading people is good, got it.
Feel free to add it. I’ll support the change
First, the page is protected, also good luck getting that past mayo ass mods.
I don’t think it’s misleading. Distinguishing between famines caused solely by external factors, and famines caused in part or in whole by policy, seems entirely reasonable. I was responding to your assertion that someone might misunderstand the meaning of “man-made”.
The biases of Wikipedia reflect the biases of its editors (there are Wikipedia articles about that). It could be a great tool for radicalization, but I suppose it’s easier to just complain about it.
the human component of the famine is disputed by (even liberal) historians to this day. Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia promoting a No point-of-view policy, should not be so strict on classifying the famine like this in the very opening paragraph. Additionally it’s accepted that non-human factors played into the famine, so it’s also wrong to imply the famine was strictly man-made.
Unless they mean man-made to say that the kulaks burned their grain, but somehow I doubt that. Still, it does raise a question of ambiguity: who was responsible for the man-made factor? In my opinion, this should then be left out of the opening paragraph because it can confuse the reader, and developed in the article.
There were many factors
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Natural factors because the year of the famine was not good for crops.
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Kulak factor resulted in destruction of crops and farm animals.
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Government incompetence in calculations and policy favouring cities over rural areas.
Keep in mind that once Collectivisation was in full effect, the famine situation in the USSR improved drastically.
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Yeah policy exacerbating the problems of the famine through mismanagement still shouldn’t be described simply as man-made. At best you could call it a mismanaged famine. Man-made ascribes something deliberate to it.
It would be like calling the deaths by covid in America man-made. Which is sort of true, the US government engaged in negligence and let a million people die. But if I said “covid is man-made” that would be a poor way of framing it, right? It would sound like someone deliberately designed the disease.
FDR’s Dustbowl genocide
I felt the same way until I started trying to correct errors in my professional field of research and they stubbornly refused to fix the errors despite a wealth of primary literature showing that the current scientific consensus contradicts what was written on Wikipedia.
As useful as it is for science, it has serious issues. I wish I could say I haven’t found many similar errors or poor/outright contradictory sourcing over the last decade. They need to seriously examine their own biases and restructure their editing process. Wikipedia is one of my favorite human projects, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore its flaws.
Holodomor is under their genocide collection. It 100% wasn’t a genocide, it shares no umbrella with the Holocaust. If anything the slightly less direct language shows that you can only distort reality so much.
I was more specifically referring to the part in the table portion (whatever that’s called. The very top first area) that says something like “recognized as a genocide by X number countries”. It’s just putting that out there right off the bat for the average person going “wait a second… I thought this was… ah! Yeah! I knew it! Genocide denier!” My faith in humans to read beyond that table is… low.
But even if they scroll to the intro that you quoted, I mean, that is such a lightly veiled accusation. Like if a neutral statement is a 5/10, I’d say that’s 7/10 towards accusatory. Maybe that’s my bias. Including “man-made” in the intro, I dunno, I wouldn’t do it ESPECIALLY when it’s now become a hot issue for liberals and right wingers to call the Holodomor a genocide. The author is just fueling their beliefs, imo.
I suppose this delves into ethics and such around authorship of pages like this and their responsibility to limit misunderstandings and false narrative propagation. I personally believe science and history writers, even if writing a summary for a wiki, do have this responsibility to make clear that while there might be controversy on a subject, it’s manufactured controversy. Like a Wikipedia on abortion I would expect (I haven’t looked) to NOT mention anything about pro-life, God, etc. until some later section specifically labeled “Controversies” and then lay out why people have an issue with it from purely non-scientific, non-medical, purely theological and ideological bases. The same should be done regarding the Holodomor. It can be in the introduction even, but briefly mentioned with something like “some far right coalitions in certain countries have attempted to classify the famine as genocide for ideological reasons.” That’s a factual statement. I’m sorry if that hurts right wingers feelers when they read it on Wikipedia BUT ITS TRUE and putting up vaguely worded things and starting off the article by saying “all these countries call it a genocide!” is representing the right wing narrative.
There’s other examples on Wikipedia of doing misinformation or “kinda true if you ask the right wingers” shit. The Korean War is an easy one. It says the DPRK started the war when it crossed the border (they mean the US-created 38th parallel which neither side considered significant or a border). History shows that the US and US controlled SK instigated the war and the DPRK was defending its fledgling democracy. See a problem with accusing defenders of being attackers? I do. And it just happens to be the US’s official stance on the war… which… do I need to say the US is lying? Does that need to be said?
Anyway, this was a bit scattered, but my point summarized is Wikipedia tends to always take pro-US stances and anti-USSR (and adjacent countries) stances, which is a big fucking problem considering the US constantly lied during the Cold War making these narratives up and now they’re repeated forever on Wikipedia. I’m not a fan.
Considered genocide by 26 countries and the European Parliament
It’s not necessarily cherry picked, only a statement of who considers it what
[…] whether the Holodomor constitutes a genocide remains in dispute.
Article seems pretty in line with your description of the event as well
No that kind of language is dangerous and also false, it’d be like saying that evolution/young earth creationism is disputed. Like technically it is but the people that are disputing are arguing it out of purely ideological reasons. The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 is no longer disputed since the opening of the Soviet archives, even Robert Conquest a person that was a huge anti-communist, so anti-communist that he was in support of the contras, has walked back his Cold War language since then and has said that the soviets didn’t purposely cause it.
It’d be like if wiki had an article up about abortion and starts with “Abortions are considered illegal in x countries” and " […] whether abortions constitute murder remains in dispute", and the article listing like abortion numbers and stuff like that.
The article is not written from a neutral position because the average american has consumed a ton of cold war propaganda and a lot of Wikipedia has really bad slants because the overwhelming majority of its user base identifies as male (80+%), and works in STEM and/or are a white-collar worker, on top of that people from the USA are the biggest user group so their biases will dominate, like I say that as someone that managed to edit some articles on Wikipedia in the past and has given up because it is incredibly tedious if you are going against the STEM/USA/Male biases that come up over and over again.
The article on Evolution has an entire section about the controversy, with links to dedicated articles about it.
I mean thanks for making my point I guess? Creationism doesn’t come up during the first few paragraphs at all because it’s not a relevant theory, people read the first couple of paragraphs and usually just skip the rest and that’s completely fine, so let’s see what the first few paragraphs are about:
1st Paragraph: What evolution is 2nd Paragraph: Who came up with the theory of evolution. 3rd Paragraph: Competing ideas of evolutions and models and such. 4th Paragraph: LUCA, fossile records and general stuff 5th Paragraph: Ongoing study of various aspects of evolution.
So ‘dispute’ comes up after long and very good and thorough explanations of evolution like people need to scroll through a ton of other stuff before they get to creationists. Creationism isn’t presented as this grand other theory it’s waaaaay down and presented as ‘[…] but it returned in pseudoscientific form as intelligent design (ID), to be excluded once again in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.’
Which article do you think addresses their topic better, which article do you think has a higher overall quality? Again Wikipedia will have a generally good quality if it’s in the STEM field but once they get to the ‘soft sciences’ the quality drops like a ton and many wikipedia users will go “I know how to do physics let me just write a short article about this event I learned about in high school”.
The article in question is of a poor quality and it pushes the idea “The Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis” and we can see that effect all over the world now with the Canadian government giving a standing ovation to a SS-Nazi, Söder in bavaria being ok with ‘ex-nazi’ Aiwanger and any other place I haven’t heard about but I’m sure someone will tell me about nazi normalization happening in other ‘civilized nations’.
Considered genocide by 26 countries and the European Parliament
For this, the source from wiki https://www.dw.com/en/european-parliament-recognizes-ukraine-holodomor-as-genocide/a-64107714 from 15 December 2022. What happened in 2022 I wonder? Why all of sudden it’s a genocide, what happened from 1933 to 2021?
Every time I say something positive about Poland, I get hit by something awful in return
It looks like only a portion of the article is available on Prolewiki. Is the page still being edited or is the partial transcription on purpose? Shouldn’t be a problem since the source is open access, but I’m curious since it cuts off in the middle of the introduction.
You’re correct, this was never finished lol. That’s the problem with people starting too many projects at once and forgetting what they have going on
Gotcha. All good, I know how that is!
Just wanted to check this was the case and I wasn’t missing something.
Definitely read from the linked source in the meantime, I notified the editor who imported this to see if they’re gonna finish it lol
Reminder Wikipedia removed the page on the Alley of Angels memorial dedicated to children killed by Ukrainian terrorists.
big oof
Votes for “keep” far outnumber votes for “delete”. The discussion is mainly about whether to keep the article as-is or to rename it to something like “Yaroslav Hunka affair”, which would include a biography.
Of all the things you can criticize Wikipedia for, this honestly just isn’t one of them.
Yeah I just looked and you’re right.
But to be fair here all of what you mention is obfuscated away behind another discussion page and their own “policy” which no normal person would ever know or even care about.
They could make it far more transparent to the visitor and most of these things could be included in that header.
The talk page is wild
Special mention to someone called “Death Editor 2” explaining how a waffen SS division was not racist
Am I reading the talk page and attributed user accounts that commented wrong? Doesn’t the name of the user who left the comment follow the comment immediately?
It looks like TheFriendlyFas2 and Yfff argued that being part of the division did not imply he was a white supremacist and it was Death Editor 2 that was arguing the opposite.
Oh, you are correct, my bad; Death Editor 2 is indeed the sane one
I don’t really know how Wikipedia articles are written or updated, but isn’t the idea that if one of us doesn’t like the way an article is written, we can just… change it?
By and large Wikipedia is managed by autocratic administrators who simple got here in the early days. In 2019 they discovered for example that they had named a random Texas kid as admin of the Scots instance who just pretended to speak the language in the most over-the-top ironic way possible. He defaced hundreds of pages and got named as the admin when he was like 12.
90% of their editors are men and most are white, so it’s like maybe 75-80% of their editors are white men yknow. There’s actually very few pages on notable women because they keep being deleted and women keep being chased away from the platform. Essentially if someone doesn’t like you writing on Wikipedia they’ll get their admin friend to ban your IP.
If you make an edit you’ll have it reverted in a few minutes by hawks who watch pages all day long and claim these pages as theirs.
The funniest example (funniest because it’s so sad you just laugh) was some guy who named his account after his Belgian Army grandpa arguing that the genocide in the Belgian Congo was not a genocide. I couldn’t even make this up.
We cover most of it here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia and even then it’s far from being exhaustive.
There’s a few people in this thread who edit wikipedia and managed to get some of their edits through but honestly even they explain you have to jump through hoops and understand how Wikipedia works to get anything done, like actually participate in the community before you even make any edits. The idea that wikipedia can be edited by anyone or is edited by people “like you or me” is a complete lie upheld by Jimmy Wales who wants to make it seem as though his weird Ayn Rand libertarian ideas actually work in the real world.
a third of the articles on wikipedia have been authored by this chud https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-the-man-behind-a-third-of-whats-on-wikipedia/
80% of edits are made by just 1% of users, and there’s another guy called Philip Cross who edits every day from 6am to 10pm without fail, even during the weekends or national holidays like Christmas and New Year’s. with over 100k edits, he mostly makes pro-war, Zionist, and climate change denial edits. It’s been suggested this is a sockpuppet account managed by the MI5 or other British agency.
Oh yeah, no way that’s a single person working 24/7.
It’s very interesting how it corresponds exactly to office hours lol (with some overtime in the evening)
indeed
what time zone?
I assume local to the account, London. This blog did a deep dive on Philip Cross: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/
nice, thanks for this, very informative
was going to comment on you calling him a chud, but then I realized the guy literally works for the US army wiki page
Wikipedia is notorious for cracking down on antinazism/prosocialism. For example, since the UKR war there have been many attempts to put truth in Wikipedia that is quickly labeled RUS propaganda and deleted.
Hm, I didn’t know. Who is “Wikipedia” in this case? I always thought it was just other users. Is there a set of editors or writers hired by the Wikimedia foundation itself? Or do you just mean, like, an echo chamber of Wikipedia power posters? Are there mods??? lolol
The vote is overwhelmingly to keep lol.
Deletion policy? I wonder what that’s all about then. Or is it just, “Our handlers consider this to be bad for the regime right now”?
The page, as it stands, violates this policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#People_notable_for_only_one_event
The discussion seems to be focused on rewriting the page to be about the event, rather than the person
there is another ‘event’ that happened, Poland wants him extradited.
This is fucking grim.
It’s marked for deletion because this article was created in response to what happened in Canada. He is only notable for one event, which only just happened, and as per Wikipedia’s One Event rule he is not notable enough to warrant an article about him. Or at least, that’s what the process of marking it for deletion is supposed to decide on.
When an individual is significant for their role in a single event, it may be unclear whether an article should be written about the individual, the event or both. In considering whether to create separate articles, the degree of significance of the event itself and of the individual’s role within it should both be considered. The general rule is to cover the event, not the person.
He is only notable for one event, which only just happened
What about the events in WW2?
Notability is a term used in Wikipedia to refer to how often it’s cited by secondary sources. Specifically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_notability_guideline
There is no notability for this guy outside one event, so the article is better focused on the event rather than the person (which is what the talk page is leaning towards)
Well it’s probably rapidly getting more especially that entire fuckup is still spinning.
What a convenient policy to delete anything not “notable”.
I spent a lot of time fighting the BS on Wikipedia. I went from getting I think 6 accounts banned to voting for administrators and editing some of the policy articles.
What came from it in the end was, yes, there are malicious actors and people with agendas on Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is one of the darkest rabbit holes on the internet, and those policies were crafted over literal decades of people arguing - and there is no better set of policies out there. I’m pretty sure their policies beat literal national policies.
So while from time to time I fight the BS, at the end of the day their policies are the best they can be to get the most verifiably accurate version out there. Anything else would allow more BS than currently exists.
So there’s a separate article about the event and he should just be mentioned there? It doesn’t merit two separate articles?
Cool, where’s the article about the Canadian parliament honoring him?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yaroslav_Hunka
The general sentiment seems to be heavily in favor of either keeping the article as is, or rewriting it to be about the event.
It’s interesting how Wikipedia is accused of bias from all sides, by people who can’t be bothered to figure out how it works.
So there’s not an article about the event yet?
No. Because, for whatever reason, the person who first decided to write an article chose to write it about the person instead of the event.
You could write an article yourself if you wanted.
The article about the person is still up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_process
Someone proposed deletion due to the subject not being notable. The next step is finding a consensus.
Currently it looks to me like the article gets to remain as is.
This is what I mean by not bothering to understand how it works.
People shouldn’t have to pour over pages of documentation, debates and policies to read an online wiki that’s crazy
deleted by creator
They are getting clowned on twitter which is cool but I don’t think its enough to get them to not go through with deletion.
This is why the site is what it is. Even if you don’t like an article, you should not delete it if it is factually correct.
I’d never use Wikipedia for anything more than basic information. More specialized wikis are much better.
It’s not going to be deleted.
