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Reminder Wikipedia removed the page on the Alley of Angels memorial dedicated to children killed by Ukrainian terrorists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
