this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Please stop forcing me to defend Wikipedia. π₯Ί
Btw,
Holodomor:
Holocaust:
The opening paragraphs from the respective articles.
Spot the difference.
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.
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
where is the criticism is British policy?
If you only read the first paragraph and ignore the rest of the article you deserve to not understand anything.
Feel free to add it. I'll support the change
misleading people is good, got it.
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.
i do not wish to spend the rest of my life in edit-wars with crackers. i've already had the pleasure of having to talk to these annoying turds in neoliberal economics related articles.
There haven't really been that many famines throughout history (at the very least in the last few centuries) that have been caused by there not being enough food to eat per se. Most of them are caused by food being distributed away (either directly via railroads or "indirectly" by market forces and speculation) towards places that already have enough food.
There is no such thing as a famine "caused solely by external factors". The wording is misleading because it implies there is such a thing as a famine that isn't man made and therefore the one that occurred in the Soviet Union being called "man-made" is already a deliberate attempt at drawing a distinction between it another famines. It is a fact that in all famines there is a human factor necessary to compound on environmental factors in order to cause a famine. You don't get famines that occur due to nature alone. The problem with this article is that by starting out with such language the myth is reinforced that there was something exceptionally malicious about this famine.
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
Natural factors because the year of the famine was not good for crops.
Kulak factor resulted in destruction of crops and farm animals.
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.
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.