Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-26/In the media
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Russia
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-continues-information-crackdown-with-new-wikimedia-fine-2023-04-06/ 800,000 ruble fine assessed c. 6 April
https://apnews.com/article/russia-wikipedia-censorship-fine-war-ukraine-51b4e08b96cceaedb455ea3f9564208c 2 million ruble fine assessed 13 April
Slate covers World War II arbitration case
Stephen Harrison in Slate writes about the ongoing arbitration case on World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (see previous Signpost coverage: 1, 2). Commenting on the historical context, Harrison says:
It is hard to convey the sheer magnitude of the underlying historical tragedies at issue—From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany murdered some 6 million Jews. Roughly half of these victims had resided in Poland, which claimed prewar Europe's largest Jewish population. The Auschwitz complex of concentration and extermination camps was located in Poland, as were others.
The suffering of Poland's non-Jewish population was also extraordinary, even by the standards of World War II. Poland was the only nation to be attacked simultaneously by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, both of whom rejected Poland’s right to exist as a sovereign nation and set about eliminating the country’s political, cultural, and military elites. More than 2 million non-Jewish Poles are estimated to have perished during the war, which left the country in ruins.
Polish Jews and the broader nation of Poland were thus victims of previously unimaginable horrors, and acknowledging one tragedy, and the suffering of one population, shouldn't detract from the other. But the historical record remains subject to intense political scrutiny, unresolved wounds, and understandable sensitivities.
Harrison notes that there are competing historical narratives. According to the one promoted by Poland's current right-wing government, World War II marked "a period when the nation achieved the peak of moral virtue", exemplified by its steadfast refusal to collaborate with the Germans. Scholars like Jan Grabowski – whose paper in The Journal of Holocaust Research, co-written with Shira Klein (User:Chapmansh), sparked the current arbitration case – would like to see greater acknowledgment of the fact that Poland saw some of the same antisemitism that existed elsewhere in Europe and that there were cases of Polish involvement in Jewish suffering.
Looking at how Wikipedia deals with this topic area, Harrison revisits the 2019 story of the "fake Nazi death camp" as one example of misinformation raised by Grabowski and Klein that lasted for more than a decade in Wikipedia before being corrected in 2019 (see previous Signpost coverage). He also explains that addressing such cases is made more difficult by the fact that Wikipedia's arbitration committee is not permitted to rule on content but can only decide conduct disputes.
Harrison argues that there is something "deeply unsatisfying" about this dichotomy, but he sees no easy solution. He quotes Chapmansh and Piotrus – both university teachers who have worked with Wikipedia in the classroom, though they are on opposite sides in this case – as saying that it would be good to have more academics contributing to Wikipedia. Harrison is sceptical, however:
Could experts really save Wikipedia? On the one hand, there is a lot to be said for greater collaboration between scholars and Wikipedia; after all, Wiki pages often have far more reach and page views than traditional scholarly papers. But some Wikipedians are understandably cautious about handing the site over to an exclusive club of specialists. Previous experiments have flopped, such as Nupedia – the predecessor to Wikipedia – which required volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise for every article. That project was shut down in 2003 after producing only 21 articles during its inaugural year.
Contentious issues, moreover, don't cease being contentious when experts are called in, and there are other ways that involving experts in Wikipedia's adjudicative process could backfire in future cases. Consider the two other topics that, along with the Holocaust in Poland, Wikipedia has placed in its highest category of concern: India–Pakistan and Israel–Palestine. If the precedent is established to invite experts into an ArbCom trial, each side would enlist its own champion advocate in Court TV fashion. The volunteer arbitrators would have to decide who won the battle of experts, despite having no formal qualifications to do so.
More fundamentally, looping in experts at a content trial would undercut the ethos of Wikipedia. The spirit of the site is that volunteer editors curate information by following certain policies, such as using reliable sources. So long as those policies are followed, it's not supposed to make a difference whether experts are actually involved in the article-making process.
Harrison reports that some issues in Wikipedia's coverage identified by Graboswki and Klein have since been addressed, due to an injection of new blood in the topic area, although he says this can be a hit-and-miss process given the prevalence of battleground behaviour and cases of entrenched editors being hostile to newcomers.
At the end of his article, Harrison notes that some of the editors at the centre of the controversy are vigorously defending their actions in the court of public opinion. He comments on how engaging with such emotive subject matter can be a risky affair, linking to a press report on how Grabowski himself was taken to court in Poland over some of his academic writing and noting that some of the editors with whom Grabowski and Klein disagree are reporting sustained off-wiki harassment.
Their situation serves as a stark reminder that the boundary between "real" life and Wikipedia activity can be perilously thin, and that engaging with this painful history poses risks for everyone involved.
—AK
Top scoops
Twitter X'd, Wikipedia scoops Musk
Elon Musk has changed Twitter's name to X Corp. as well as the corporation's state of registration. Twitter, a Delaware corporation owned by Musk, was merged into X Corp, which is owned by a Nevada holding company X Holdings Corp., which is owned by Musk. Twitter is gone. Only X Corp. and X Holdings Corp. remain.
Twitter first revealed the move in a court document dated April 4, but the document was apparently not noticed by the media until Slate published the story on April 10 at 20:29 UTC (4:29 PM New York time). Slate reported that Twitter responded to a question about the deal, but only with a poop emoji. Wikipedia first published the news five-and-a-half hours after Slate at 2:01 UTC, April 11. A non-notable, unreliable crypto blog, CoinGape cited Wikipedia as one of their sources at about 5:00 UTC April 11. Musk's first mention of the news seems to have been a single letter Tweet at 7:03 UTC, April 11, "X". For further details see "not news".
Who is to blame for wrong Vatican flags - Wikipedia? Britannica? NASA? the Vatican itself?
A bogus version of the flag of Vatican City has appeared throughout the world according to Wikipedia had the wrong Vatican City flag for years. Now incorrect flags are everywhere from the Catholic News Agency. In the article, Father William Becker, of the St. Columbanus Parish in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, who wrote the book on Vatican flags[dead link], says that a Wikipedian added a red disk at the base of the Papal tiara in 2017 which lasted as the main Wikipedia illustration of the flag through 2022. The illustration at the top shows a white disk below the tiara, as it has since 2022. The bottom photo shows a flag in the Vatican Museum. The official Vatican City website gives an illustration without a red disk.
Father Becker and CNA credit a March 22 Reddit post for bringing the issue to their attention. It was also covered by Depths of Wikipedia, who put the issue in the context of past "citogenesis" incidents, while pointing out that Encyclopedia Britannica includes the red disk in their version of the flag, too. But @depthsofwiki should have scrolled down to Britannica's "Vatican City" article which has a white-disked flag — E.B. gives an unexplained split decision.
However, Reddit's version, which started this red hat-ring business, uncovered that NASA sent a red disk flag to the moon on Apollo 11 in 1969, which was put on display in the Vatican Museum. And a later reply to @depthsofwiki shows Pope John Paul II sitting next to a red disk flag on a 1998 state visit to Italy. So who's to blame? —S, H
In brief
- Subtitle: An article in The Washington Examiner claims the Wikimedia Foundation and various newspapers and tech companies took part in a "tabletop exercise" conducted by the Aspen Institute designed to suppress news of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. The article alleges the exercise took place in June 2020, about four months before the story appeared in The New York Post.
- Podcast on diversity in Wikipedia biographies: Economist and media personality Tyler Cowen hosts a podcast interview with scientist and Wikipedia personality Jess Wade.
- Five games about Wikipedia: [1].
- Subtitle: https://russianlife.com/the-russia-file/is-wikipedia-next/ (merge with top story?) ditto
- Who's "government-funded"? Ask Wikipedia: Elon Musk says Twitter is using a Wikipedia list to help decide which news organizations are labeled 'government-funded media' – Business Insider – according to the article, Category:Publicly funded broadcasters is used to guide decision-making at Twitter. But look away from the elephant in the room: NPR is on that list.
- Subtitle: Text text text.
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Discuss this story
Elon Musk has essentially shown why you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source. In all honesty, Elon Musk is basically an example of everything you should not do if you control something. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:19, 26 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Washington Examiner doing the "mainstream bad" thing again. --Firestar464 (talk) 20:42, 27 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]