this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2022
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I bet that if it was the US asking Wikipedia to edit articles the media wouldn't use the word "demand" or attribute it to the whole US. A likely headline would be: "email shows US official asked Wikipedia to censor 'misinformation'".
The US edits information on Wikipedia to serve its narrative all the time, just through quiet back channels. Western media wouldn't report on it even if it were done super obviously. It's rumored that one of the most prolific Wikipedia editors is really British Intelligence. You can also trace the IPs doing edits to places like the CIA.
It's called contribution, and everybody does that. All parties, NGOs, institutions (etc) do it. That's how wikipedia works, with radical transparency to expose those conflicts of interests which exist in any paper/encyclopedia but are usually hidden.
https://botsin.space/@congressedits
Close, from the article-
Wikipedia is not volunteer run... They're using language to make it seem like it's a little website with a dream being bullied by the mean Russians. Wikipedia is run by its administrators, who do not let anyone else encroach on their power. 3 editors are responsible for most edits (I want to say 90%). Famously there is one editor that edits from 6 am to 10pm every day without fail (mostly pro war edits) , and the most prolific editor worked as a TSA and ICE agent terrorizing migrants.
There are thousands of Wikipedia administrators, and they're voted in by the community. The people who actually run Wikipedia are Bureaucrats.
The 3 editors your referring to are bot accounts that do things like archive pages and format things consistently.
Please learn more before spouting blatant lies, thanks :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators
lmao okay defend the Ayn Rand libertarian website if you want, what do you want me to tell you?
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Are you white and male by chance?
You can't just drop links and racism and pretend that's an argument. Your post talked about administrators, I explained why that's wrong. That goal post stays where it is.
You are what I expect someone who calls themselves a wikipedia editor to be lol. Cheers.
Errr parent comment was troubling, but your claiming that calling out whiteness is "racism" is even more troubling. I don't know a single place on earth where anti-white racism is a thing, despite fascists claiming that. To be clear, some anti-white resentment does exist in white-supremacist regions, but resentment is not racism or rather is a small subset of racism and not the actual problem that we more precisely call "structural racism". (see also the wikipedia pages on those topics :))
I left Ruqqus for the stupid racism there, didn't expect to find it on Lemmy
That aside, I agree with most of what you said. My post was just to call out CriticalResist for running behind text walls after posting patently false info
Yea i agree the original comment was inappropriate, but please be careful when using such a loaded word as "racism" just because someone spelled "white" or "black" :P
I also strongly recommend you read the wikipedia page on reverse racism, aka anti-white racism. Have a good day!
WTF? Are you suggesting anti-white racism is a thing? Funny idea for someone who likes to think of themself as anti-imperialist... If you're instead suggesting that i said anti-white racism is a thing please read the comments again i was saying the exact opposite.
The joke's on you who haven't even read the wikipedia page i linked to. Quoting the literally second paragraph:
That linked page is so full of bullshit it's hard to skim through. There are some good points: various interest groups using Wikipedia as a platform to promote their worldview, sexist bias leading to important women being denied their page... but there's also a lot of unsourced or shaky assertions.
Source? The specific governance varies with every language community, but at least in the French-speaking Wikipedia is administered by a registered non-profit. I can't say i agree all the time with their positions, but their power is transparent and no power is given to random people.
Source? I've never heard of either though i don't consider it impossible, but you have to remember that all admins are all-powerful: a single admin can not control the site, so such allegations imply that the whole staff is on it?
Source? Wikipedia has been constantly "improving" the participation UX. I personally prefered their old interface but i appreciate the new one is easier to use.
So the source for this is down now, but we can read it on the wayback machine. So it's an interview from this guy Kohs who denounces that some people writing on wikipedia have an agenda and we should be aware of that and check sources/history. Good advice so far. Oh wait this guy is behind that scandal and was actually paid to do commercial PR on Wikipedia and was banned for that... funny ;)
This makes no sense. First, i'd be interested in ethnic/religious/cultural stats on Wikipedia. Second, these stats should be made by language community because every language has its own policies on Wikipedia. Third, in the history and geography of humanity, whiteness is not necessarily linked to white supremacy. White supremacy itself is a rather "recent" phenomenon that started with european colonization and the rise of capitalism. It's also not present in the entire "white" world: for example racial oppression in France is mostly a form of cultural supremacy, not white supremacy. Or as a french rapper put it, "here they love you when you're rich and eat pork".
True. Wikipedia even has a dedicated page on that topic. Why not link to it?
Source? I certainly see bias on certain language communities, but arguing that Wikipedia as a whole promotes "white supremacist, anti-Semitic, fascist and sexist viewpoints" is a very far stretch. If anything, the french-speaking wikipedia does exactly the opposite although i disagree with the liberal "rough consensus" that most pages reach.
The article doesn't appear to contradict itself. It points out that deaths can be mostly attributed to disease, while still pointing out countless colonial atrocities. It does not appear particularly bad or biased to me.
All in all, that article is full of FUD. Wikipedia has bias and strong debates, but this "prolewiki" article lacks both. In that sense, it's a lot worse than most wikipedia article that i come across. Too bad for something that's supposed to show how unreliable wikipedia is...
EDIT: Their page on Anarchism is also hilariously bad, as if it was written by interns working for The Party™.
Wow. So much wrong in that sentence. Yes anarchism has some economic analysis: the entire cooperative movement was born from Proudhon's theories (he can be criticized on many other topics but that's not exactly the point). There are anarchist unions such as the CNT in Spain and the IWW in USA, both of which have been very involved in revolutionary activity and were the biggest unions of their time. The quoted sentence is an easy dismissal that's completely disconnected from reality of anarchism as a political struggle.
LOL. More like Bolshevism in Russia became a counter-revolutionary tendency and slaughtered dozens of thousands of workers who were real revolutionaries.
It's insulting to reduce decades of popular struggles to a dismissive sentence grouping together very different histories under a single umbrella. If anything, anarchism in Catalonia was the driving force of the socialist movement for a long time... many peasants learnt to read in anarchist circles, and the CNT was the biggest union with over 1 million members in Barcelona alone. Wikipedia also has short but good articles on the Ukraine Commune and the Korean Commune.
Fun fun fun. If you'd like to name TAZ/ZADs, then let's name a few more: Standing Rock, Notre Dame des Landes, Hambach... We could also mention anarchist communes, or libertarian communist (anarchist, in my view) territories like the zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas, or the free communes from Catalonia/Korea/Ukraine we mentioned earlier.
SOOOOOOOO after examining two articles on your "source" i'm glad to say it's entirely bullshit and if you want practical/useful information you should stay away from that "prolewiki".
anarchists siding with the bourgeoisie against the mean tankies, what else is new? prolewiki is a proletarian encyclopedia, we do not hide the fact that we are marxist-leninists and that we reject anarchism as a petty-bourgeois, counter-revolutionary ideology. You are free to make your anarchist encyclopedia if you want to.
Edit: Zapatistas are not anarchists, and they have been saying that for decades. I know anarchists have nothing else to cling to, but it's really appropriating to have them keep claiming the Zapatistas are anarchists when the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist.
Well that's new. For example in revolutionary Spain, an anarchist revolution made the bourgeoisie practically disappear overnight (though not via a genocide like Pol Pot has committed, which is laudable in my view), and it is in fact the Nation State apparatus (which the anarchists refused to seize, but unfortunately didn't abolish formally) controlled by the communist party (supported by USSR) that reintroduced commerce and bourgeoisie in Catalonia as well as dismantled the people's militias and forced women to drop their guns. This is well-documented in many works, including in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia or in Martha Ackelsberg's Free Women of Spain.
I appreciate that. I was simply pointing out that your articles are very poor: either no sources or very shaky sources. You could do a better propaganda job if you put your heart to it. Comrade Lenin would certainly be disappointed in your lack of rigorous scientific marxism ;)
I know zapatistas do not refer to themselves as anarchists, they are "from below on the left". It just so happens that most anarchists also are "from below on the left" (because that's the very definition of anarchism) and therefore identify with the zapatistas, rather than appropriate their revolution. I think it's also important to point out that it's not me personally drawing this connection: the zapatistas movement has a strong support base in the anarchist circles across Mexico (Mexico itself having a long and complex history of anarchism), and has strong connections to the international libertarian communist (anarchist) networks as outlined recently by the zapatistas delegations visiting communities who struggle across Europe (in the ZADs, in the squats, in the unions, in the popular districts, etc).
EDIT: To be clear, the zapatistas movement does not collectively identify as anarchist, however some people from Mexico involved in the zapatistas movement identify personally as anarchists.
So to be clear: i'm not trying to appropriate the zapatistas revolution which is very specific to their local cultural and colonial context. However, i personally understand their revolution to be based on anarchism because it places the Commune front and center and explicitly refuses to build a Nation State. In making a connection between anarchism and zapatism, i'm not trying to rally zapatistas to a specific political brand because i don't care about ideology so much as i care about praxis. On the other hand, i am fully trying to get people interested in anarchism to learn more about the zapatistas caracoles because i believe the socialist/communist/anarchist movement in the global north has a lot to learn from these communities and their struggles.
That's wrong. Not that we have many successes, but anarchism is rising again on all continents. The corruption of political parties and the rise of dictatorial centralized States have led to more people criticizing the systemic aspects of oppression and how they are enacted/reinforced by Nation States. There's a lot happening around the world and simply dismissing anarchist activity as "nothing" (just like the prolewiki article does citing only one anarchist example which doesn't even have a link/source) doesn't help your point against anarchism. For a major Nation-wide controversy involving anarchism in the past years, i recommend you do some reading on "Exarcheia" and "Rouvikonas" in Greece.
I'm interested if you have a link to that! :)
Orwell was a colonial cop who later on kept a list of "crypto-communists" and "anti-white" personalities that he gave to the British gov. It's come to a point where there are serious allegations he was an informant even during his time in Catalonia. That's the kind of thing I mean by siding with the bourgeoisie. But I am not talking about the Spanish revolution, I am talking about you as an anarchist in this comment section, and more generally all anarchists I've met.
What sources should we have decrying anarchism as what it really is? Any marxist analysis of anarchism will ultimately lead to that same conclusion, quoting someone about it would only be a formality. This backhanded compliment does not faze me or any of our editors; we are not here to appeal to anarchists, we are here as a proletarian encyclopedia. We are a handful of volunteer editors and do not have the means Wikipedia (which you seem to be fond of) has, nor do we claim to. Our recent changes page is filled with edits every day, we'll get around to adding things to the article on anarchism when we get to it. Decrying it as imperfect and thus faulty does not solve anything; it is better to publish something viable than not publish at all.
Here is the link you were interested in: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist
I don't know much about Orwell but he was a marxist not an anarchist so i don't see the point.
Can you name one example in these comments where i've "sided with the bourgeoisie"? Or other anarchists for that matter? It's funny to me because in the french political context the communist party is derided for being too lenient and siding with the bourgeoisie (the PCF is often working hand in hand with housing developers to gentrify neighborhoods, and as a whole they don't promote abolition of private property anymore).
So are you suggesting that anti-authoritarian marxism or libertarian communism does not exist? There's plenty of those so why are you suggesting you have the only and ultimate truth?
Does that mean you can only get an account if you're a unionized worker? Disclaimer: I wouldn't fit in that category personally. I mean i don't know about you but in my neighborhood/circles marxists are usually intellectuals from the universities while actual workers/proles tend to be of the "burn everything down" anarchist type who don't care for leaders and nice words like they care for actual change. But maybe that's because in France we have a much stronger history of anarcho-syndicalism with the CGT in early 20th century being the biggest union, all the while promoting sabotage, direct action and general strike.
Oh yes i read that one a few years back but it's really far off from "the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist" (quote from you). It's a piece asking western leftists to not try and fit zapatism into narrow categories including "anarchism and communism", which would fail to capture the specificity of the struggle and would divide the movement on brand not practical concerns.
In that sense, i agree with that link: i personally don't care if you're a marxist or an anarchist (or whatever else really) as long as you are building power for the people, not "dictatorship of the proletariat" (or any other dictatorship really). That approach is common to the zapatistas who build/promote power from below no matter what your ideology/religion is, as the article argues.
Also worth noting: the article is an answer to an post saying we global north anarchists should not support zapatism because it doesn't fit in a narrow understanding of anarchism. We could even say it does defend anarchist principles, or to quote the article:
That is laughably wrong
[citation needed]
Your request for citation is rejected, as per [WP:COWISS] (Citation Only When I Say So).
You're the one making the claims. I see no citations. Burden of proof is on you.
And yet when french secret services detained wikipedia FR admin and forced them to delete an embarrassing page about a SIGINT station, the community took a stand against secret services messing with informing the public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-sur-Haute_military_radio_station#Controversy_over_Wikipedia_article
At the time, the media who reported on it (and the ensuing Streisand effect) didn't go with the State narrative. There's many problems with bias and select information on wikipedia, but blindly following Nation States requests is not one of them. There's many ways in which the media/copyright establishment is annoyed by Wikipedia, and they will take any chance they have to say Wikipedia is highly unreliable because anyone can edit it, but they certainly avoid pointing to "misinformation" on wikipedia they wouldn't like us to know about.
Exhibit number 739499 that no one takes the French army or their intelligence seriously.
made me laugh! but unfortunately to many peoples around the planet the French army and intelligence is still a major threat to their daily lives. for example in Centrafrique or Mali (neocolonies) or in Kanaky/Guyane/Guadeloupe (colonies to this day)
EDIT: spelling
The solution is real simple, don't turn to wikipedia on matters that are politically charged. Get your news from a news outlet, instead of expecting that a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia might be up on current events.
There's tradeoffs involved. Even when a journalist is doing a good job, they may have an editor butcher the article to suit a specific narrative (source: i have journalist friends). And most times, news outlets refuse to publish sources: even on the web, it's rare to find an article that has actual links to more detailed information.
Wikipedia's strength is transparency:
Overall, there are great articles out there on any medium. But on average, i'd choose a wikipedia article over any other media any day of the week :)
Actually, so would I for almost everything - except journalism. Why? because wikipedia was never intended to be used that way. Reading news there is like searching for a palimpsest on a roll of recycled toilet paper. Sure, it could be there, but why would you ever think to look there for it?
Wikipedia has a big part to play, but this kind of thing just brings the information war right up onto the pages of what is arguably the best reference we have.
Curation suggests that we should protect it from becoming involved in an ideological tug of war lest it be damaged in the process.
Do not discount the power of sleepless obsessives. The volunteers at Wikipedia are compulsive about the rules. Facebook needs to hire them to fact check.
Or we could just not have Facebook™ fact checkers at all. Wtf?
Because that be inconvenient for you?
No because Mark Zuckerburg obviously shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't true. Of course.
Yes, that's not working so well, obviously. But there is a cynical assault on truth. It's literally a 1984 meme today. We need to get back to journalistic standards for publishing news. For the most part, the hordes of Wikipedia contributors do a good job at it.
You really think Facebook would be unbiased when choosing which wikipedia contributors to hire? I think it would work like the media, where news companies only hire people who already agree with their worldview. What a silly plan you have.
You're assuming FB cares enough to have opinions on most things. It only cares about generating traffic. Spreading disinformation and generating echo chambers is only a side-effect.
If FB was losing revenue (through boycott or regulation) because it was allowing rampant fake news, the easiest thing it could do would be to hire a pool of people with Wikipedia experience. Do you have a better solution?
The funny thing is that since it was decided that social media platforms would have the role of fighting misinformation, millions of people have left these platforms for alternatives that do not restrict free speech. Telegram, Parler, Mastodon, Gab, Lemmy of course, all created very recently.
You assume I care about Facebook's revenues. I am not offering them a solution because I hope Facebook is shut down forever. You are asking a wolf how best to protect sheep. In which case, yes hire wikipedia editors to "fact check".
I disagree. Wikipedia has historically been a good source for gathering information about an evolving event. It should of course be taken with a grain of salt, but when you have gobs of editors reviewing and revising, misinformation tends to get weeded out pretty quickly.