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|{{{1|"Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust" in Poland and "self-focus bias" in coverage of global events}}}|By [[User:Groceryheist|Nathan TeBlunthuis]], [[User:Piotrus|Piotr Konieczny]] and [[User:HaeB|Tilman Bayer]] |
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=== "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust" === |
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=== Wikipedia Does Censorship: Massive Holocaust-Related Suppression of Independent-Thinking Polish Scholars. Jewish Influence. Grabowski === |
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:''Reviewed by [[User:Groceryheist|Nathan TeBlunthuis]]'' |
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Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust, by Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein. 2023. Journal of Holocaust Studies 36(4)1-58 (online) |
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English-language Wikipedia, so influential in shaping collective memory in today's world, has been presenting systematically misleading information about Nazi Germany’s genocide of the European Jews, by "whitewash[ing] the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolster[ing] stereotypes about Jews." |
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Wikipedia Does Censorship. Thought Control: Protecting the Monopoly of Dominant Holocaust Narratives |
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Showing this is the important contribution of "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust,"<ref>{{Cite journal| doi = 10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939| issn = 2578-5648| volume = 0| issue = 0| pages = 1–58| last1 = Grabowski| first1 = Jan| last2 = Klein| first2 = Shira| title = Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust| journal = The Journal of Holocaust Research| date = 2023-02-09| url = https://doi.org/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939}}</ref> a scholarly essay by [[Jan Grabowski]] and Shira Klein published in ''[[The Journal of Holocaust Research]]''. |
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In the past few weeks, this publication has already sparked a response including media coverage and a new [[Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Holocaust_in_Poland|arbitration case]]. |
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This review's purpose is to summarize the essay and its contributions and to reflect on its merits and significance, and it will not engage the widespread debates in this area more than necessary (see also coverage in [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-03-09/In the media|this]] and [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-20/In the media|the previous]] issue of ''The Signpost''). |
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[[File:Bialystok-following-1939-So.jpg|thumb|A photo that (in [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/7/75/20211110104517%21Bialystok-following-1939-So.jpg this version]) is featured as figure 1 in the paper, with the caption "Photograph of a sign in Białystok, wrongly captioned by Poeticbent [one of the editors described as having "a Polish nationalist bent"] as a Jewish welcoming banner for the Soviets" (referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bia%C5%82ystok_Ghetto&diff=794106878&oldid=793942440 this edit])]] |
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This extensive article focuses on the “revisionist” and “distorted” portrayal of the Holocaust that is allegedly pushed on Wikipedia by those big, bad Polish nationalists. How dare anyone challenge any aspect of Holocaust orthodoxy! |
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Grabowski and Klein's central claim is twofold. First, Wikipedia articles often support a narrative of Holocaust distortion (not denial) with four elements: (1) overstating the suffering of Poles in comparison to Jews during World War II, (2) understating Polish antisemitism and Nazi collaboration while overemphasizing the rescue of Jews by Poles, (3) insinuating that Jews "bear responsibility for their own persecution" because of their communism and/or greed, and (4) exaggerating the role of Jewish-Nazi collaboration. |
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The result misrepresents the Polish nation's role in the Holocaust and contradicts mainstream historiography, as Grabowski and Klein show by citing prior scholarship. |
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Grabowski and Klein provide very strong support for this first claim, that Wikipedia bolsters each form of distortion. They offer myriad examples where articles ranging from [[Stawiski]], [[Warsaw Concentration Camp]], [[Naliboki massacre]], [[History of the Jews in Poland]], [[Collaboration with the Axis Powers]], to [[Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust]], and [[Polish Righteous among the Nations]] have supported the distortion narrative by including claims backed by dubious sources or overemphasizing facts aligned with the distortion narrative while ignoring or underemphasizing facts that do not support it. |
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Author Grabowski also details the work of Jewish activists that desperately try to silence the Polish voice. This includes Icewhiz (Ice Whiz), who has circumvented getting banned by using multiple sock puppet accounts. (p. 55). |
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Many of the errors Grabowski and Klein identify, and their role in the narrative, are not obvious to non-experts, and so an important contribution of this scholarship is to make the pattern of distortion clear. |
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Wikipedia's distorted coverage is harmful, Grabowski and Klein persuasively argue, because "Wikipedia plays a critical role in informing the public about the Holocaust in Poland." |
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RESTRICTING THE FLOW OF INFORMATION ON JEWISH-RELATED MATTERS |
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It is important that Wikipedia not reproduce it because misremembering the Holocaust can increase the risk of future antisemitic violence and genocide. |
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Many Poles believe elements of the distortion narrative which Poland's current government has taken [[Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance|legal]] and administrative steps (e.g., creating monuments for apocryphal Poles who rescued Jews) to popularize. |
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To be clear, critiques of distortion do not blame the Polish for the Holocaust. No one is confused that Nazi Germany is at fault. Still, Grabowski and Klein cite evidence that Polish antisemitism was common during, before, and after WWII, and that Poles (without direct Nazi coercion) committed atrocities against Jews during the war as well as afterward when Jews returned to Poland and attempted to reclaim their stolen property. |
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Although they are not entirely clear about why distortion is popular, this juxtaposition suggests that it relieves a sense of national guilt. |
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The second part of Grabowski and Klein’s thesis is that a small group of committed Wikipedians "with a Polish nationalist bent" have persistently and successfully defended both the distortion narrative's claims and sources advancing it. |
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It is most interesting that two of the three most contested subjects on Wikipedia revolve around the Jews and their narratives. Grabowski makes these eye-opening statements, |
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The essay argues that these editors are substantially responsible for the observed distortion pattern, citing article diffs, excerpts from on-wiki discussions, and edit counts. It also relies on interviews with some of the editors that it describes as "distortionists", their opponents, and involved Wikipedia administrators. |
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Grabowski and Klein persuasively argue that these editors heavily worked on Wikipedia articles that (typically in versions from early 2022) included the four types of distortion, and in doing so often cited uncredible sources that contradict historical scholarship. |
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“Many editors have tried to counter the revisionist group over the years, only to face a monumental struggle. Indeed, this topic area has become one of the most contested topics in all of Wikipedia. It is one of only three content areas on which the Arbitration Committee – the highest authority of administrators, elected by the community from among Wikipedia’s most experienced editors – has placed a special set of restrictions on the entire topic, the other two being India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine.” (p. 40). |
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These editors surface again and again throughout the topic area and its controversies, defending the source-validity of dubious authors while attacking "well-known experts on Holocaust history" that contradict them. |
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In a striking quantitative description of the distortionist editors' outsized influence, Grabowski and Klein argue that Wikipedia cites two authors they view as distortionist ([[Richard C. Lukas]] and [[Marek Jan Chodakiewicz|M. J. Chodakiewicz]]) much more than the mainstream experts ([[Doris Bergen]], [[Samuel Kassow]], [[Zvi Gitelman]], [[Debórah Dwork]], [[Nechama Tec]]) even though the former have far fewer academic citations than the latter according to Google Scholar. |
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Two of the editors criticized as distortionists, Piotrus and Volunteer Marek, have [[User:Piotrus/Response|defended]] [https://volunteermarek.substack.com/p/main-response-to-grabowski-and-klein themselves] in terms of the essay's omissions and possible errors, only some of which are actual errors. One notable inaccuracy is that the method for counting citations using Google Scholar is imprecise and today surfaces many more citations to Richard C. Lukas than Grabowski and Klein reported. |
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Now tell me that Jewish influence does not exist. And who needs conspiracy theories when it is out in the open? Note that both Poles and Palestinians are the recipients of heavy-handed Jewish acts, so perhaps Poles and Palestinians should unite in order to fight the Jewish censorship that stifles both peoples. |
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Yet, even this inaccuracy does not change the broader conclusion that Wikipedia relies too heavily on Lukas' work (also, Klein has uploaded a [https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=11&article=1000&context=history_data&type= table with updated numbers (.csv)] which continue to support the original conclusion). The title of his most-cited work, ''[[The Forgotten Holocaust]]'', refers to the suffering of Poles under Nazi occupation. The Nazis indeed had a murderous colonial policy to "Germanize" Poland (see <ref group=supp>[https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/polish-victims]</ref>), but this is distinct from [[the Holocaust]], which refers to the genocide of European Jews. Lukas' title thus insinuates a false equivalence between Polish and Jewish suffering. Arguably, Wikipedia should not reference this at all, at least not without blinding clarity about how it contradicts mainstream sources. |
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From these editors' defensive responses, it is clear Grabowski and Klein have interpreted their actions unsympathetically to the extent that they overlooked their many valuable contributions to Wikipedia, some of which involved removing distortion. This omission is mostly understandable. A thorough account of these editors' Wikipedia careers (spanning over 18 and 17 years, respectively) would have distracted from identifying and accounting for the Holocaust distortion on Wikipedia. In this reviewer's view, even if we take these defenses on board, Grabowski and Klein's possible errors are small relative to their abundant evidence that this group, comprising around a dozen or so editors, helped secure a foothold for the Holocaust distortion in Wikipedia articles. |
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But why the censorship? Grabowski (p. 2) realizes that Wikipedia is not a credible site used by scholars but notes that it is widely read. (pp. 2-3). This makes thought control all the more important. We just cannot let the unwashed masses think for themselves, especially when it comes to the sacrosanct Holocaust. |
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That said, we should recognize how this case surfaces some of Wikipedia's more fundamental problems. At its core, this was a conflict about which Holocaust narratives belong on Wikipedia exemplified by questions such as: "Should Wikipedia include elements of Polish heroism?" and "How should facts about Poles rescuing Jews from the Holocaust be sourced, emphasized or positioned relative to facts about Polish atrocities or complicity in the Holocaust?" |
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The Wikipedia censorship is no isolated event. It must be put in the broader context of the thought control related to the Holocaust that has noticeably increased in recent years. We see renewed attention to the bogeyman of Holocaust denial, and this has been expanded by their newly invented rhetorical cousins: “Holocaust distortion”, “Holocaust obfuscation”, “Holocaust inversion”, and “Holocaust trivialization”. Of course, no other genocide gets this consideration. The expansive imagination of the Holocaust establishment is astonishing! |
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These questions are broad, complex, and require subject-matter knowledge and historiographic consideration to answer. |
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In their essay's final and most thought-provoking section, Grabowski and Klein describe how Wikipedia administrators and arbitration committee (ArbCom) members responded to the conflict. |
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WIKIPEDIA DOES CENSORSHIP: TARGETED POLISH SCHOLARS |
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They are sharply critical of ArbCom members who "don't do the homework it takes to recognize distortion" and "wish to avoid fights in this area." |
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It is standard practice on Wikipedia for administrators to avoid questions like those above by bracketing them as content disputes (which community members are normally supposed to resolve on their own) rather than misconduct (which administrators are normally empowered to address). |
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This practice means that transforming a broad conflict about a content area into a series of narrow misconduct cases can be an effective strategy for winning (or at least dragging out) the conflict about content. Many times, administrators dismissed reports about the distortionists for being about content not conduct. On three occasions reports resulted in arbitration cases and even sanctions such as topic bans on distortionists and a discretionary "reliable-source consensus" requirement ([[WP:APLRS]]) intended to empower administrators to intervene against controversial sources. Efforts to enforce such sanctions, however, were themselves dismissed as content disputes and the topic bans were ultimately reversed (once ahead of schedule). |
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Emerging from this administrivia is a picture of Wikipedia's highest institutions straining under the complexity of this case. |
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The following Polish scholars are demonized by Grabowski and are in the crosshairs of Wikipedia censorship: Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Leszek Zebrowski, Mark Paul, Mariusz Bechta, Peter Stachura, Wojciech Muszynski, Jan Zaryn, Ewa Kurek, Tadeusz Piotrowski, Richard C. Lukas, and others. You can look up these scholars on my website and form your own opinion about them. Everyone has a right to disagree with some or all of these scholars, but no one has the right to silence them. They have just as much a right to be heard, and to be as accessible to the public reader on Wikipedia, as do all other scholars. |
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Strikingly, steps taken to simplify administrators' tasks shift the burden of proof onto the parties of a conflict. |
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Short word-limits in case statements were too constraining for defenders of historical accuracy to be able to explain to non-experts the problems with distortion in the articles (indeed; it takes Grabowski and Klein most of 50 pages), but provided enough space for distortionists to deflect the accusations. |
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Thus advantaged, the authors argue, distortionists skilled in [[WP:WL|wikilaywering]] effectively steered the content-dispute-averse administrators away from the fundamental conflict over historical narratives and toward the particular conduct of individual editors, which is easier for the ArbCom to address. |
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As noted above, Grabowski and Klein may have made errors, yet these barely undermine their central argument. |
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PLAYING WITH THE NUMBERS OF PHD’S |
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An audience of Wikipedia scholars is more likely to feel underwhelmed by the essay's sparse engagement with the existing Wikipedia research literature beyond the amount needed to demonstrate Wikipedia's influence and importance to collective memory. Better positioning this case study within Wikipedia scholarship could have shed new light on Wikipedia's fundamental limitations. |
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Past scholarship has discussed systematic flaws in Wikipedia's dispute resolution processes<ref group=supp>[https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2495196]</ref> (cf. our review: "[[:m:Research:Newsletter/2014/October#Critique_of_Wikipedia's_dispute_resolution_procedures|Critique of Wikipedia's dispute resolution procedures]]") and the damage when disagreements about article content turn into conflicts about bureaucratic process and individual conduct <ref group=supp>[https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22869]</ref>. |
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Grabowski zeroes-in on the Chodakiewicz’ Golden Harvest or Hearts of Gold (pp. 24-25), and lamely tries to discredit this work by doing a war dance about the fact that “only” seven of its authors are PhDs. So, what magic number of PhD’s must a book have before Grabowski and other censors stop objecting? |
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In the [[Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)|Gamergate Controversy]], for example, [[WP:ARBGG|the ArbCom's decision]] to punish editors who were defending against a coordinated anti-feminist brigade similarly reveals how Wikipedia administrators' myopic focus on civil conduct and procedural fairness can distract from a fundamental conflict about content—and even become an effective tool for disingenuous actors<ref group=supp>[https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/8404]</ref>. |
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Yet other research finds that Wikipedia can be remarkably resilient to partisan misinformation because conflicting partisans hold each other to the same policies<ref group=supp>[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0541-6]</ref> (cf. our review: [[:m:Research:Newsletter/2018/February#Politically_diverse_editors_and_article_quality|Politically diverse editors and article quality]]"). |
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It is no secret that Jews dominate academia, and that there are many more Jewish Ph.D.’s than Polish PhD’s. So, the citing of “few” Polish PhD’s, as a putative ground for discrediting a book, itself smacks of Jewish elitism. It effectively creates a “might makes right” situation, in that Jews can always marshal more PhD’s to support their position than Poles can do for theirs. It is not a level playing field! This inequity becomes more pronounced whenever the dominant group (Jews) actively uses censorship to further silence a marginalized group (the Poles). |
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We might ask: What (if anything) was special about this Holocaust case such that it reveals Wikipedia’s limitations so starkly? Or: How (if at all) should Wikipedia's institutions for dealing with content disputes evolve? |
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This case presents an important opportunity to consider such questions. Grabowski and Klein, content to draw attention to this case and document it in great detail, have left this to future work. |
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THE HUE AND CRY ABOUT REFEREED LITERATURE |
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Grabowski extols “rigorous and blind peer-review”. (p. 24). Let’s take a closer look at this. What if the referees think very much alike, and effectively form a Judeocentric echo chamber? This, by its very nature, chills dissent, and monopolizes a particular narrative about the Holocaust–usually an anti-Polish one–exactly as intended. Thanks to the Wikipedia censorship, and as planned, this is all that the unsuspecting reader gets to see. |
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And just what kind of “reliable sources” does Grabowski so earnestly believe in? He cites a Gazeta Wyborcza article in order to try to “discredit” Leszek Zebrowski. (p. 13). Please try not to laugh. |
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Ironically, Grabowski’s tireless complaints about distortions and unsupported statements all beg the question about the same in conventional Holocaust-approved materials! For example, what kind of referees allowed for the publication, and acclamation, of Kosinski’s Painted Bird and of Wilkomirski’s Fragments? Only belatedly were they found to be fraudulent. What kind of reputable publisher (Princeton University Press) first agreed to publish Jan T. Gross Neighbors trash? Pointedly, what kind of editorial standards allow Grabowski to continue to peddle his totally unsupported self-serving voodoo number of 200,000 fugitive Jews in German-occupied Poland? See: |
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https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/05/26/holocaust-scholarship-jew-killing-wwii-by-poles-200000-fake-news-the-polish-jew-killing-horror-stories-renewed-grabowski/ |
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It stands to reason that the standards for accuracy of Holocaust materials that are aimed at impressionable children should be even stricter than those that are aimed at adults. So exactly what kind of standards against distortion are there in force that allow MAUS to populate the classroom–along with its palpable falsehoods of Poles giving the Heil Hitler! salute and of being well-fed German-serving pigs? |
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RHETORICAL DEVICES FOR EXCLUDING NON-JUDEOCENTRIC VIEWPOINTS |
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The creativity of the Holocaust gatekeeper censors is a sight to behold, and there is an endless variety of pretexts available for delegitimizing any unwelcome scholar. He/she can be delegitimized just because the work is “self-published” (p. 7), or because it is pronounced “widely discredited” (p. 7)(“widely discredited”–if so–by whom? By the self-serving Holocaust establishment, of course). |
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In fact, an unwelcome viewpoint can be removed from Wikipedia almost at will–by being called an “unreliable” source, or, failing that, a “fringe” source (or “fringe” academic: p. 37, 43), or even a “non-mainstream” source. Grabowski extolls “mainstream Holocaust views” (p. 47), as if “mainstream” was necessarily synonymous with fairness and objectivity. Additionally, this does not factor the Judeocentrism that is baked-in right into mainstream Holocaust thinking. |
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Get this: A non-conformist viewpoint can even be rejected for having a POV (point of view) bias, which is doubly ironic and self-serving, as “POV bias” is an exceedingly subjective construct, and much the same criticisms could be said about most standard Holocaust-related messaging that is accepted in Wikipedia without question. |
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THE FARCE OF DELEGITIMIZING DISSENTING SCHOLARS: AN EXAMPLE |
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The central irony of Grabowski’s incessant complaints about the need for “qualified scholars” and “qualified sources” is the fact that most of the claims of independent-thinking Polish scholars, which he conveniently and summarily dismisses, can be reconstructed by using only “credible” sources! For example, I have verified the central arguments of independent-thinker Ewa Kurek (pp. 27-28) solely by using primary sources and other “mainstream” information. To see this for yourself, please go my website, and type-in the phrase “Ewa Kurek Correct” into the search box located on the top-right of the home page, and it will bring up my reviews of these “credible” sources that support Kurek’s conclusions. |
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TAKING CHEAP SHOTS AT INDEPENDENT-THINKING POLISH SCHOLARS |
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Failing everything else, Grabowski resorts to innuendo and ad hominem attacks against scholars not to his liking. He tries to delegitimize historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz based on his views on homosexuality (pp. 25-26)–as if one’s position on LGBT has anything to do with one’s qualifications to speak authoritatively on Holocaust-related matters. |
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Even better, Grabowski gets all excited about Wojciech Muszynski and his decades-old sketch of then-candidate Obama’s head in a hangman’s noose. (pp. 30-31). Grabowski conveniently disregards the fact that effigies and hangman’s nooses are a common form of political speech, and, besides this, they have absolutely nothing to do with one’s qualifications regarding Holocaust-related matters. |
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Grabowski’s character-assassination tactic is reminiscent of Communist leader Beria and his quip: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Were we to take Grabowski seriously, we would ask how many “respectable” Holocaust scholars we could delegitimize if we performed a fishing expedition and dredged-up something objectionable about their past statements. |
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Grabowski says that Ewa Kurek has “a reputation as a Holocaust denier” (p. 28). Sounds like Grabowski has no integrity. |
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THOSE PESKY GERMAN BULLET SHELLS AT JEDWABNE |
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Grabowski makes the juvenile argument that there “is no evidence of any Jews having been killed with bullets” at Jedwabne. (p. 29). What does Grabowski want–The Jewish skeletons wearing badges verifying their deaths as the outcome of German bullets? |
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Evidently, Grabowski wants us to believe that the Germans at Jedwabne just shot their guns for no reason. They were wasting bullets in a time of war. Let us help Grabowski use his imagination. Perhaps the Germans were bored with just standing around and watching the Poles slay Jews (as per Jan T. Gross) and felt a sudden need to make some noise with their guns in order to liven things up. |
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Grabowski’s statement is not only laughable. It is cynical–in view of the fact that the Holocaust establishment is blocking a proper exhumation at Jedwabne, which is exactly what is needed to show the remaining full effects of firearms in the Jedwabne massacre. |
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HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY ON STEROIDS |
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Keeping the Jews’ Holocaust elevated above Polish suffering is really what it is all about. Grabowski does not even bother to be subtle about it. |
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He has a conniption about the use of the term Polocaust (Polokaust)(p. 52) because it indicates that Polish victimhood equals Jewish victimhood. Exactly right! So sorry, Grabowski. There are no Master Genocides just as there are no Master Races. There are no valid victim hierarchies. As for using the term Polokaust, I myself plead guilty, and will continue to use this term, if only to call attention to the unfair Jewish monopolization of the term Holocaust. |
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Jan Grabowski’s fulminations are also directed at historian Chodakiewicz, whose Between Nazis and Soviets clearly shows that Poles and Jews killed each other. (p. 24). This flies in the face of the everlasting “Jews can do no wrong” paradigm, and Grabowski quotes Laurence Weinbaum, who laments that Chodakiewicz and like-minded scholars ‘are hard at work explaining why the murdered–not the murderers–are guilty.’ (p. 24). Evidently, a Jew cannot be a murderer: Only a Pole can be. This goes deeper. The death of a Pole at the hands of a Jew is not as significant as the death of a Jew at the hands of a Pole. This smacks of Talmudic-style racism. |
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WIKIPEDIA DOES CENSORSHIP: ZYDOKOMUNA DENIALISM YET AGAIN |
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Predictably, Grabowski tries to wish away the Zydokomuna, and, in doing so, shoots himself in the foot. He tells us that there could not possibly have been a Zydokomuna because so many Jews were deported to Siberia (p. 32)–as if the two were mutually exclusive. In bringing this up, he inadvertently demolishes the chief exculpatory argument for Jews supporting Communism–that of Jews reacting against Polish antisemitism. Now Grabowski tacitly admits that Jews knowingly served Communism all the while having no problem with Communist antisemitism. |
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Grabowski tells us that Jewish Communists identified themselves according to class differences (p. 15)–as if they magically shed their Jewishness merely by identifying in terms of class rather than by ethnicity or religion. Grabowski assures us that Jewish Communists did not operate according to any “Jewish agenda”. (p. 15) (as if Grabowski was a mind-reader). Surely the Jewish Communists were well aware of the fact that they had sought and had obtained much influence and power. What if that, even by itself, was the “Jewish agenda”? |
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POLES WHO DIED ATTEMPTING TO RESCUE JEWS: NEVER ENOUGH |
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Jan Grabowski goes on and on about how Poles are “exaggerating” (if so, ever heard of hyperbole?) the number of Poles killed by Germans for helping Jews. (p. 8). What would it even matter if Grabowski was correct this time? Would Jews suddenly start appreciating Polish sacrifices if the number of Poles killed on behalf of Jews was 1,000? Or 10,000? Or even 50,000? |
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=== "Let's Work Together! Wikipedia Language Communities' Attempts to Represent Events Worldwide" === |
=== "Let's Work Together! Wikipedia Language Communities' Attempts to Represent Events Worldwide" === |
Revision as of 10:13, 9 March 2023
"Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust" in Poland and "self-focus bias" in coverage of global events
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust"
- Reviewed by Nathan TeBlunthuis
English-language Wikipedia, so influential in shaping collective memory in today's world, has been presenting systematically misleading information about Nazi Germany’s genocide of the European Jews, by "whitewash[ing] the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolster[ing] stereotypes about Jews." Showing this is the important contribution of "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust,"[1] a scholarly essay by Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published in The Journal of Holocaust Research. In the past few weeks, this publication has already sparked a response including media coverage and a new arbitration case. This review's purpose is to summarize the essay and its contributions and to reflect on its merits and significance, and it will not engage the widespread debates in this area more than necessary (see also coverage in this and the previous issue of The Signpost).
Grabowski and Klein's central claim is twofold. First, Wikipedia articles often support a narrative of Holocaust distortion (not denial) with four elements: (1) overstating the suffering of Poles in comparison to Jews during World War II, (2) understating Polish antisemitism and Nazi collaboration while overemphasizing the rescue of Jews by Poles, (3) insinuating that Jews "bear responsibility for their own persecution" because of their communism and/or greed, and (4) exaggerating the role of Jewish-Nazi collaboration. The result misrepresents the Polish nation's role in the Holocaust and contradicts mainstream historiography, as Grabowski and Klein show by citing prior scholarship.
Grabowski and Klein provide very strong support for this first claim, that Wikipedia bolsters each form of distortion. They offer myriad examples where articles ranging from Stawiski, Warsaw Concentration Camp, Naliboki massacre, History of the Jews in Poland, Collaboration with the Axis Powers, to Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, and Polish Righteous among the Nations have supported the distortion narrative by including claims backed by dubious sources or overemphasizing facts aligned with the distortion narrative while ignoring or underemphasizing facts that do not support it. Many of the errors Grabowski and Klein identify, and their role in the narrative, are not obvious to non-experts, and so an important contribution of this scholarship is to make the pattern of distortion clear.
Wikipedia's distorted coverage is harmful, Grabowski and Klein persuasively argue, because "Wikipedia plays a critical role in informing the public about the Holocaust in Poland." It is important that Wikipedia not reproduce it because misremembering the Holocaust can increase the risk of future antisemitic violence and genocide. Many Poles believe elements of the distortion narrative which Poland's current government has taken legal and administrative steps (e.g., creating monuments for apocryphal Poles who rescued Jews) to popularize. To be clear, critiques of distortion do not blame the Polish for the Holocaust. No one is confused that Nazi Germany is at fault. Still, Grabowski and Klein cite evidence that Polish antisemitism was common during, before, and after WWII, and that Poles (without direct Nazi coercion) committed atrocities against Jews during the war as well as afterward when Jews returned to Poland and attempted to reclaim their stolen property. Although they are not entirely clear about why distortion is popular, this juxtaposition suggests that it relieves a sense of national guilt.
The second part of Grabowski and Klein’s thesis is that a small group of committed Wikipedians "with a Polish nationalist bent" have persistently and successfully defended both the distortion narrative's claims and sources advancing it. The essay argues that these editors are substantially responsible for the observed distortion pattern, citing article diffs, excerpts from on-wiki discussions, and edit counts. It also relies on interviews with some of the editors that it describes as "distortionists", their opponents, and involved Wikipedia administrators.
Grabowski and Klein persuasively argue that these editors heavily worked on Wikipedia articles that (typically in versions from early 2022) included the four types of distortion, and in doing so often cited uncredible sources that contradict historical scholarship. These editors surface again and again throughout the topic area and its controversies, defending the source-validity of dubious authors while attacking "well-known experts on Holocaust history" that contradict them. In a striking quantitative description of the distortionist editors' outsized influence, Grabowski and Klein argue that Wikipedia cites two authors they view as distortionist (Richard C. Lukas and M. J. Chodakiewicz) much more than the mainstream experts (Doris Bergen, Samuel Kassow, Zvi Gitelman, Debórah Dwork, Nechama Tec) even though the former have far fewer academic citations than the latter according to Google Scholar.
Two of the editors criticized as distortionists, Piotrus and Volunteer Marek, have defended themselves in terms of the essay's omissions and possible errors, only some of which are actual errors. One notable inaccuracy is that the method for counting citations using Google Scholar is imprecise and today surfaces many more citations to Richard C. Lukas than Grabowski and Klein reported. Yet, even this inaccuracy does not change the broader conclusion that Wikipedia relies too heavily on Lukas' work (also, Klein has uploaded a table with updated numbers (.csv) which continue to support the original conclusion). The title of his most-cited work, The Forgotten Holocaust, refers to the suffering of Poles under Nazi occupation. The Nazis indeed had a murderous colonial policy to "Germanize" Poland (see [supp 1]), but this is distinct from the Holocaust, which refers to the genocide of European Jews. Lukas' title thus insinuates a false equivalence between Polish and Jewish suffering. Arguably, Wikipedia should not reference this at all, at least not without blinding clarity about how it contradicts mainstream sources.
From these editors' defensive responses, it is clear Grabowski and Klein have interpreted their actions unsympathetically to the extent that they overlooked their many valuable contributions to Wikipedia, some of which involved removing distortion. This omission is mostly understandable. A thorough account of these editors' Wikipedia careers (spanning over 18 and 17 years, respectively) would have distracted from identifying and accounting for the Holocaust distortion on Wikipedia. In this reviewer's view, even if we take these defenses on board, Grabowski and Klein's possible errors are small relative to their abundant evidence that this group, comprising around a dozen or so editors, helped secure a foothold for the Holocaust distortion in Wikipedia articles.
That said, we should recognize how this case surfaces some of Wikipedia's more fundamental problems. At its core, this was a conflict about which Holocaust narratives belong on Wikipedia exemplified by questions such as: "Should Wikipedia include elements of Polish heroism?" and "How should facts about Poles rescuing Jews from the Holocaust be sourced, emphasized or positioned relative to facts about Polish atrocities or complicity in the Holocaust?" These questions are broad, complex, and require subject-matter knowledge and historiographic consideration to answer.
In their essay's final and most thought-provoking section, Grabowski and Klein describe how Wikipedia administrators and arbitration committee (ArbCom) members responded to the conflict. They are sharply critical of ArbCom members who "don't do the homework it takes to recognize distortion" and "wish to avoid fights in this area." It is standard practice on Wikipedia for administrators to avoid questions like those above by bracketing them as content disputes (which community members are normally supposed to resolve on their own) rather than misconduct (which administrators are normally empowered to address). This practice means that transforming a broad conflict about a content area into a series of narrow misconduct cases can be an effective strategy for winning (or at least dragging out) the conflict about content. Many times, administrators dismissed reports about the distortionists for being about content not conduct. On three occasions reports resulted in arbitration cases and even sanctions such as topic bans on distortionists and a discretionary "reliable-source consensus" requirement (WP:APLRS) intended to empower administrators to intervene against controversial sources. Efforts to enforce such sanctions, however, were themselves dismissed as content disputes and the topic bans were ultimately reversed (once ahead of schedule).
Emerging from this administrivia is a picture of Wikipedia's highest institutions straining under the complexity of this case. Strikingly, steps taken to simplify administrators' tasks shift the burden of proof onto the parties of a conflict. Short word-limits in case statements were too constraining for defenders of historical accuracy to be able to explain to non-experts the problems with distortion in the articles (indeed; it takes Grabowski and Klein most of 50 pages), but provided enough space for distortionists to deflect the accusations. Thus advantaged, the authors argue, distortionists skilled in wikilaywering effectively steered the content-dispute-averse administrators away from the fundamental conflict over historical narratives and toward the particular conduct of individual editors, which is easier for the ArbCom to address.
As noted above, Grabowski and Klein may have made errors, yet these barely undermine their central argument. An audience of Wikipedia scholars is more likely to feel underwhelmed by the essay's sparse engagement with the existing Wikipedia research literature beyond the amount needed to demonstrate Wikipedia's influence and importance to collective memory. Better positioning this case study within Wikipedia scholarship could have shed new light on Wikipedia's fundamental limitations. Past scholarship has discussed systematic flaws in Wikipedia's dispute resolution processes[supp 2] (cf. our review: "Critique of Wikipedia's dispute resolution procedures") and the damage when disagreements about article content turn into conflicts about bureaucratic process and individual conduct [supp 3]. In the Gamergate Controversy, for example, the ArbCom's decision to punish editors who were defending against a coordinated anti-feminist brigade similarly reveals how Wikipedia administrators' myopic focus on civil conduct and procedural fairness can distract from a fundamental conflict about content—and even become an effective tool for disingenuous actors[supp 4]. Yet other research finds that Wikipedia can be remarkably resilient to partisan misinformation because conflicting partisans hold each other to the same policies[supp 5] (cf. our review: Politically diverse editors and article quality"). We might ask: What (if anything) was special about this Holocaust case such that it reveals Wikipedia’s limitations so starkly? Or: How (if at all) should Wikipedia's institutions for dealing with content disputes evolve? This case presents an important opportunity to consider such questions. Grabowski and Klein, content to draw attention to this case and document it in great detail, have left this to future work.
"Let's Work Together! Wikipedia Language Communities' Attempts to Represent Events Worldwide"
- Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny
The paper[2] addresses the issue of systemic bias, and focuses on English, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish Wikipedias. The authors study the production of seven years of news
on these projects (from the "In the news" (ITN) section on the Main Page and its equivalents), and conclude that while there is an indication of self-focus bias, there is also strong evidence of a global representation of events
. Self-focus, here, refers to focusing on one's home region or culture, and past studies found that about a quarter of most Wikipedias are about "self-focused topics".
The authors ended up with the dataset of a total of 6730 articles... 2064 in English, 1379 in Arabic, 1527 in Chinese and 1760 in Spanish
which correspond to 2064 events, 172 in Arabic-speaking countries, 115 in Chinese-speaking areas, 114 in Spanish-speaking regions, 445 in the US, 472 in other English-speaking countries and 746 in [other] areas
. The events were also coded by topic covered, which resulted in the 192 events classified as Science & Nature, 714 in Notable Person, 337 in Sports, 299 in Politics, 231 in Man-made Incidents, and 291 as Other
categories. To compare Wikipedia's coverage to global media coverage, the author also associated their dataset with that of the GDELT Project.
Some specific findings suggest that English Wikipedia suffers from a slight under-representation of events in Arabic-speaking countries
. The Arabic Wikipedia project on the other hand does not show much self-bias; instead it over-represents events that happen in English-speaking countries (but not the United States). The Chinese and Spanish Wikipedias, the authors argue, have a stronger self-focus bias than the Arabic and English projects, although still, over 90% of events covered by the news sections of these projects are about items not related to these countries. The authors also find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that larger Wikipedias will react to breaking news faster and update their news section more promptly.
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
- Compiled by Tilman Bayer
"Digital divides in the social construction of history: Editor representation in Wikipedia articles on African independence processes"
From the abstract:[3]
"The present study examines how [Wikipeda's] editor geography is reflected in the editing of articles (participation, impact and success) about the independence of former French colonies in Africa. The analysis is based on 354 Wikipedia articles; by geolocating 75% of the editors (N = 23,408), we show that the majority of edits are made by users located in France. This imbalance is also reflected in the overall share of text they contribute over time. However, when looking at the individual user level, we find that editors from France are only slightly more successful in maintaining their contributions visible to the reader, than editors from African successor states."
"A Wikipedia Narration of the GameStop Short Squeeze"
From the abstract:[4]
"This paper examines the usefulness of Wikipedia pageviews as indicator of the performance of stock prices. We examine the GameStop (GME) case, which drew the investors’ and scholars’ attention in 2021 due to the short squeeze, and its skyrocketing price increase since 2021. [...] The results show strong statistical evidence that increased number of Wikipedia pageviews for COVID-19, which represents the fear of the pandemic, has a negative impact on the GME performance. Moreover, the findings show that the increased interest in information regarding the short squeeze, as expressed by the increased number of pageviews of the relative Wikipedia page, is positively linked with the GME price. The econometric analysis shows that the interest indicator of GME has a positive coefficient, but it is not confirmed at significant statistical level."
References
- ^ Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (2023-02-09). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 0 (0): 1–58. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. ISSN 2578-5648.
- ^ Li, Ang; Farzan, Rosta; López, Claudia (2022-12-03). "Let's Work Together! Wikipedia Language Communities' Attempts to Represent Events Worldwide". Interacting with Computers: –033. doi:10.1093/iwc/iwac033. ISSN 1873-7951. Data: https://github.com/LittleRabbitHole/WikipediaLanguageCommunity
- ^ Schlögl, Stephan; Bürger, Moritz; Schmid-Petri, Hannah (2022). "Digital divides in the social construction of history: Editor representation in Wikipedia articles on African independence processes". In Andreas M. Scheu, Thomas Birkner, Christian Schwarzenegger, Birte Fähnrich (ed.). Wissenschaftskommunikation und Kommunikationsgeschichte: Umbrüche, Transformationen, Kontinuitäten. Münster: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft e.V. pp. 1–12.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link) - ^ Vasileiou, Evangelos (2022-05-25), A Wikipedia Narration of the GameStop Short Squeeze, Rochester, NY, doi:10.2139/ssrn.4119961
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
- Supplementary references and notes:
Discuss this story
<edits violating 500/30 policy (and others) removed>
<edits violating 500/30 policy (and others) removed>
Richard C. Lukas
It is worth noting that Richard C. Lukas' book The Forgotten Holocaust, along with another of his works, is part of the "Background Information" reading list provided on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) website.
It is described on that site as follows: An account of the systematic persecution of the Polish nation and its residents by the German forces. Features endnotes, a bibliography, appendices including lists of Poles killed for assisting Jews, primary source documents, and an index.
I respectfully disagree with the review author's opinion that a work recommended on the USHMM website should not be suitable for citation in Wikipedia. --Andreas JN466 11:52, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For the record
Since Groceryheist's review of Grabowski and Klein's "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust" has been featured *despite* objections from multiple uninvolved editors (other than me), and *despite* the fact that these editors pointed out both stylistic and factual errors in the review, I do feel the need to say that
Volunteer Marek 15:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Google scholar discussion
I legit pity you for being unable to admit the "Jewish welcome banner" caption was shocking, upsetting, and hurtful Holocaust distortion. You must have so much hate and pride in your heart that you seem unable to spare even a drop of empathy. Levivich (talk) 16:10, 13 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]This is as I said a relatively minor point in the overall scheme of things, but I do feel compelled to point out that Zvi Gitelman's main area is the History of Jews in Russia and Soviet Union so it's not surprising that's he's not cited much in Wikipedia's articles on Holocaust in Poland. If he's undercited in the topic area Holocaust in Soviet Union then that should be raised with whoever is working on that. I have no idea why Grabowski and Klein decided to throw him in there, maybe to "inflate" the numbers or, since at least one of them is writing outside their area of expertise, due to ignorance. BTW, Gitelman's work on the Jewish Labor Bund is really good and I recommend this book he edited The Emergence Of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism And Zionism In Eastern Europe (particularly his article) for anyone who wants to fix the under-cited-on-Wikipedia situation. Volunteer Marek 17:22, 10 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@HaeB: So can I write and publish a rebuttal or not? And don't tell me "submissions is that way". I'm not going to waste my time writing something just to have the rug pulled out from me by you (which I think under circumstances is a legitimate concern on my part). People can of course discuss and debate whatever I write but given that you just published what is basically a hit piece against strong consensus, I'd expect some leeway here. Volunteer Marek 20:06, 11 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
So far as I know, there is no way to check Scholar's citation counts at a past moment. I also think this is irrelevant to the question, since the claim is that Scholar's citation counts show a problem in Wikipedia now, and to the (highly dubious) extent this is even a valid method of analysis there is no reason to not use the present counts. If the present counts don't support the hypothesis, then the hypothesis should be discarded. But I think this method of analysis is fundamentally invalid anyway.
But...it is totally impossible that Lukas' actual (as opposed to Scholar) citations jumped by more than a factor of 6 in 7 months, especially given that his most cited works are quite old. There must be another explanation. A clue can be gained from Gitelman's jump from 2367 to 3690. Looking at Gitelman's Scholar profile, we see 3693 citations but in the sidebar we see that only 115 of them were for all of 2022 and 2023. So Scholar is now saying that Gitelman's count at Aug 2022 was at least 3693-115=3578, much higher than 2367. (These numbers can change by the day.) There are multiple possible explanations: maybe the two searches were not made in exactly the same way, maybe the semantics of the search engine changed, maybe Scholar got better at identifying citations in sources, maybe Scholar got better at telling when two authors are the same person, maybe Scholar added a large number of additional sources in which to look for citations, maybe Scholar's algorithm is broken somehow. Zerotalk 08:33, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Piotrus asked why G&K chose the particular scholars they did for their plot. Haeb claimed they gave a rationale: "Nechama Tec, Samuel Kassow, Doris Bergen, Deborah Dwork, or Zvi Gitelman, to name some well-known experts on Holocaust history". But that only defines the group and not the selection, so the question remains unanswered.
Looking at who was not chosen may help. Of those scholars they named approvingly in their article, Browning, Gross and Polonsky each have far more Wikipedia mentions than any of those they selected. In fact Christopher Browning, who they correctly describe as "one of the world's top Holocaust scholars", has more wiki-mentions than all of the five scholars they selected put together. Then there are other famous Holocaust scholars not named who could have been selected, such as Yehuda Bauer, David Cesarani, Efraim Zuroff and Yisrael Gutman, all of whom are mentioned in Wikipedia more times than any of those they selected. This is very strong evidence that the choice was made to fit the desired result. Bearing this in mind and reading carefully, G&K actually do give a rationale: "Wikipedia mentions Richard C. Lukas 82 times, more than it mentions ... to name some well-known experts on Holocaust history." In other words, as the numerical evidence indicates, these five people were selected because they are mentioned less than Lukas. What has the superficial appearance of a little statistical experiment is nothing of the sort. Zerotalk 15:24, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Removal of comments from this talk page
@Piotrus and Volunteer Marek: Regarding your deletions of comments from this talk page here, here and [17]:
I appreciate the concern and your disagreement with these harsh criticisms of the "Distortion of the Holocaust" review (speaking as the editor of this Signpost section who supported its publication despite strenuous objections from some people). But WP:TPO sets a pretty high bar for deletion of comments and I think that as long as it doesn't reach the level of WP:NPA, we can deal with criticisms like that we are spreading "lies of Grabowski" or furthering "histeria [sic] introduced by Icewhiz and his Jewish friends", however factually wrong they may be.
And seeing that this review might be attracting considerable critical attention from a non-Wikimedian Polish audience, I would not like us/the Signpost/Wikipedia being accused of censorship, especially given that Volunteer Marek's cryptic rationale "500/30 policy" will not likely be intelligible to many. Regards, HaeB (talk) 15:51, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
{{reply to|Chess}}
on reply) 21:03, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]ECP applied
Per WP:APLECP, extended confirmed protection has been applied to this page. This action as been logged at [22]. --Jayron32 16:58, 9 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The chronology on Wikipedia suggests that a progenitor/related concern was first acknowledged through a list of arbitration committee findings in 2009 (with indicators of the source issues and concerns going back to 2005). The current arbitration "revisits" and references a prior arbitration that occurred in 2021. "I know you are but what am I" or "My facts are more correct that your facts" does not negate the process and governance concerns which remained open and thus unaddressed for 13-19 years. I think the current arbitration committee might want to look back to 2009 and prior. Flibbertigibbets (talk) 01:41, 10 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
A more trivial question
I don't intend to join in the intensely substantive discussion among my more informed colleagues, but is this sentence possibly missing a word or two? "Many Poles believe elements of the distortion narrative which Poland's current government has taken legal and administrative steps (e.g., creating monuments for apocryphal Poles who rescued Jews) to popularize." Jim.henderson (talk) 00:43, 11 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Zooming out
Right, this is my point exactly. I am coming at this from knowledge of some of the parties in another subject area deemed off topic, and editing experience in this one that is limited, pre-February 2023, to School of Paris, which only slightly overlaps. Therefore I have been reading, but not debating, the finer points of Polish historiography, which others seem to know much better than I do. But. Is there doubt in anyone's mind that if he told a student that it was ok to use a source for non-controversial matters, he was tactfully saying (to a student editor) that the source was not wonderful but met the reliable sources policy? Is this in any way behavior that should be sanctioned? If an editor is correctly implementing policy and the result is not considered ideal, perhaps the policy needs refining. If so, then I submit that if we let Grabowski determine our policies, why not just knuckle under to the Kremin too? How we do things should start by determining what result *we* want, and that should be accuracy in *my* opinion at least. I very much share MVBW's concern about external vectors. Elinruby (talk) 23:41, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Narrative and admins
I don't edit that much on controversial topics. But I rather dislike the concept of wikipedia articles being criticized for being consistent with a narrative. Such criticisms feel like they give people carte blanche to censor facts and content because it isn't in line with the "correct narrative to be". I feel as if editorial policies should constrain themselves to what is due and what accurately represents the sources and be very cautious about these "narrative" arguments. It all feels like it's part of a "misinformation creep" game, which defines "does not support every aspect of the viewpoint that I would like" as misinformation. I heard people trying to describe undue emphasis as "misinformation".
I also doubt that admins can or should deal with subtle content disagreements. It feels like this vague and fruitless hope that someone if you have enough authority and make your authority good enough it can solve all problems, whereas in reality the more powerful your authority is and the more subtle the issues it deals with the more inclined it is to be captured. Some things just have to play out in a haphazard way rather than be dealt with through process. Talpedia (talk) 00:25, 19 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]