7 ms·

Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment

88 points by atdt 5y ago

ordx 5y ago
Same thing is happening in Russian Wikipedia. Majority of articles are written from the official pro-Kremlin point of view and any attempts to change that are blocked. Given that there are millions of Russian-speaking people live outside of Russia, something like this split needs to be done.
- yorwba 5y ago
  The article argues that it was the split of Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia into country-specific Wikipedias that fractured the community and enabled the takeover of the Croatian Wikipedia.
- varjag 5y ago
  I concur. It's usable if you want to know how T-72B2 differs from T-72B3 but is heavily editorialized for most non-technical topics, not even directly political.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The uncomfortable truth is that many average Russians support "the official pro-Kremlin" outlook. Similarly, if the Chinese Wikipedia was not blocked by the government, it would probably look a lot like Baidu Baike, and all the articles about "sensitive" topics would be whitewashed and socially harmonised by the "great human flesh search engine crowd". The Chinese government is actually doing Wikipedians a favor by keeping the nationalist masses from accessing the site!
- cosmodisk 5y ago
  I remember having a very heated discussion on some pretty recent historical events with a few Russians. At some point I thought I'm in some sort of an alternative reality.. However, eventually,after almost smacking each other faces, we figured that the way we were taught at school was miles and miles apart and they didn't know any alternative opinions. It took quite some effort to at least acknowledge it.
Keyframe 5y ago
While pretty much all mentioned wikis share same bias and mistrust towards them, apart technical articles... Proposed solutions make sense, except for Encouraging the affected communities to discuss the possibility of re-merging Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language projects into the original Serbo-Croatian language projects to re-align with the practices of other pluricentric Wikipedia language versions. Which will not happen, and on top of it is border-line offensive and shows a dose of not understanding the differences. Serbo-croatian or Croato-serbian (as the full name of the language is) was an artificially constructed language during social-communist Yugoslavia. All involved parties agreed to part ways on unification of the languages for a myriad of reasons, not all political ones.. and that's now water over the bridge.. and now this entity, probably through ignorance, wants to offer re-introduction of the topic which countries have fought wars over? Nah. One of the reasons why SH (serbo-croatian) wiki even exists is because there's a group of people living in the past and which makes, for themselves, communities like that. Raisong the issue as a possible course of resokution and common ground not only gives legitimacy to it, but is border-line offensive and absolutely ignorant of the issues at hand. Otherwise, apart from that, great. Something needs to haooen to ex yugoslavian wikis throughout to make them at least half-thrustworthy.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Serbo-Croatian is a family of very closely related languages. There are some differences in lexicon and script, but there are also differences among varieties of English. And you could write English down using a different script like Devanagari, but this would not somehow make it into a different language.
  - dragandj 5y ago
    > There are some differences in lexicon and script Even this is only to a point; namely, all these languages use Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic (Serbian uses both alphabets). Croatian originally used Glagolitic script (many centuries ago). This Latin/Cyrillic division is caused by Catholic/Orthodox church split and Habsburg/Ottoman empire border rather than being some central feature in languages.
- 5y ago
beaner 5y ago
Same thing happens in the English wikipedia. Criticisms and scandals feature prominently in the bios of right-leaning political figures when they are present or even hinted at, and largely cut out or downplayed for left-leaning political figures. No I do not have a source, it's just something you notice when reading wikipedia regularly for 20 years. I didn't keep a record in anticipation for this HN comment.
disabled 5y ago
As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, you never want to go to the Croatian version of Wikipedia. Anyways, a lot of this pressure being put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia is through the investigative journalism organization, Balkan Insight (see links below that I referenced). The reason why people do this stuff is because not only do they want war—-they want to commit genocide again. Here is what I wrote about it a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788882 It [Wikipedia] does have power over what it allows to be published, although it does not have the staff to enforce violations. As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, it is best to avoid the Croatian language Wikipedia pages about wars, with some more recent than others. It is quite hateful, xenophobic, and nationalistic. The news source I provided is investigative journalism for Balkan countries funded via European Union. > "Wikimedia Foundation Inc, the US-based non-profit charitable NGO, is the owner of the Croatian version of Wikipedia." [1] > "However, the Wikimedia Foundation is not the founder of the Croatian version, nor does it accept that it is responsible for the accuracy of its articles. It insists that it does not have any power over Croatian-language Wikipedia entries." [1] Other reads are provided for reference [2][3][4]. [1] Wikipedia Not Responding to Inquiries on Croatian Entries: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/04/23/wikipedia-not-replying-to-inquires-on-croatian-entries-04-20-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/04/23/wikipedia-not-replying-... [2] Croatian Wikipedia Removes ‘Polish Genocide of Germans’ Claim: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/29/croatian-wikipedia-removed-claims-on-polish-genocide-over-germans-03-29-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/29/croatian-wikipedia-remo... [3] How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/26/how-croatian-wikipedia-made-a-concentration-camp-disappear-03-23-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/26/how-croatian-wikipedia-... [4] Croatia Wikipedia Alters Jasenovac Camp Entry Again: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/29/croatia-wikipedia-further-disputes-research-on-jasenovac-camp-08-29-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/29/croatia-wikipedia-furth...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  This is not "pressure being put on Wikimedia", it's the Wikimedia folks trying to re-establish/enforce the underlying principles of their projects, which have existed since these projects got started.
createdapril24 5y ago
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fbi-computers-used-for-wikipedia-edits-idUSN1642896020070816 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fb... This kind of vulnerability seems to be a very difficult one to plug. Ultimately, Wikipedia should be seen as a source of information, but not to be trusted blindly. That's a good stance to take purely out of factual inaccuracy and data incompleteness - but also necessary from the perspective that Wikipedia has, is and will be used to influence because it holds an authoritative position.
mrkramer 5y ago
I am Croatian and I don't understand what's the problem? Croatian admins are probably patriots who want to protect our country from the past Communist ideology and defend our War of Independence. I'm sure US admins are patriots as well for example and are proud of their War of Independence and all the good things that US has done in the past while at the same time being critical of all the bad things that happened in the past. After all Wikipedia should be facts not opinion articles but of course there is always some commentary on top of facts which can be ideological. In Croatia there is Culture War going on between the Left and the Right for the last 30 years but that is democracy. If we all think the same then nobody is thinking. Why is Croatia singled out and not Poland for example? Poland is more "right" than Croatia and over there we can see intense and sometimes violent confrontations between left and right.
- brazzy 5y ago
  The problem is that a cabal of people subverted the processes of Wikipedia to gain effective control of the Croatian Wikipedia, and used that control to exclude opposing viewpoints entirely and in some cases insert and preserve completely counterfactual content. That is what is being "singled out", not their political ideology.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    Every time when I read Croatian Wikipedia I see facts I mean historical facts. Commentary on top of facts can be ideological but facts are facts. From the Wikipedia report I can see topics of WW2 and War of Independence being problematic but I read about these topics on Croatian Wikipedia and I didn't see any "counterfactual content". And like I said Wikipedia is not about opinion articles it is about factual information.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  "Croatian admins are probably patriots who want to protect our country from the past Communist ideology and defend our War of Independence." Exactly, they're not interested in the truth, but to push their own political views. Sharing those political views doesn't make them true.
anigbrowl 5y ago
The report quality is excellent and a worthwhile template for disinformation investigations in other contexts. I found it especially interesting because while I am not an expert in Balkan affairs, I'm expert-adjacent; have friendships with refugees, journalists and former military/intelligence involved in the conflict on various different sides and have read deeply into it in my own time. A standout was the table listing relevant facts (specifically convictions of war criminals by an international tribunal) and whether the language sub-wikis accurately reflect those facts or not. Whether one likes or dislikes a given fact, its occurrence is a kind of ground truth that can serve as a reference marker by which to weight the factual content of an article. Thus, whether someone was convicted by a tribunal is a fact; whether it was fair is open to debate, but failure to mention the fact at all amounts to a concealment of information, whether negligent or willful. When we see a pattern of factual errors (including glaring omissions), we can assess the degree of deliberation involved by looking at whether the errors all run in similar directions and how systematic/assiduous the erroneous editor is in rejecting alternative points of view. A complicating factor here is Wikipedia's general open-access policy. As you probably know, some people who are interested in a topic appoint themselves gatekeepers of it and revert edits they disapprove of. Over time, I can be difficult the distinguish between passion and expertise. For example, suppose you grew up in a village where a battle was fought (before you were born or aware of such things). You receive from your parents, peers, and teachers an approximate view of the historical event as experienced by those who lived through or were directly impacted by it. While in high school, you find a Wikipedia page about the battle which has some details wrong - geographical facts, say - and you correct those with your local knowledge. As time goes on, you become the leading Wikipedian curating this topic, and enrich the article with all kinds of valuable information on how the battle was fought. But suppose you find yourself getting into arguments about why the battle was fought; now you're going outside the scope of your local knowledge. Battles might fought for purely logistic reasons (control a river crossing, cut an enemy off from supply lines), personal ones (a commander has family or reasons to love or hate a particular place), or strategic factors (to weaken enemy resolve or tempt a misallocation of forces). These might not be apparent from the local perspective; received wisdom might posit a local cause that was actually just the initial skirmish of a larger action. Case studies illustrate some of the difficulties in evaluating controversial information. For example, the entry on Ratko Mladić, a Bosnian Serb, is heavily slanted on Serbian wikipedia, which emphasizes his positive qualities and plays down negative aspects of his story, as well as introducing analysis and speculation favorable to Serbian nationalist narratives. Now, a problem with bias accusations is subjectivity; a Mladić apologist might argue that other narratives omit contextual information that seems to justify his actions, or that emphasis on his criminality serves to distract from crimes by other parties that equally severe but less strenuously prosecuted. Although there may be large differences of opinion, that can be OK when the contextual variations are truthful. Different people can have very different ideas about what the significant factors are, and exploring those differences can be valuable. Most historical arguments (in my non-professional view) are not so much debates about what happened but rather over what matters, and that can vary both because people are on different sides of a tribal argument but also because people have different assumptions about moral/ethical considerations that are orthogonal to their tribal membership. Missing from the report (perhaps because most people are not that interested) is any kind of dynamic information about the development and intensity of the divergences. It might be interesting to mine the article history and/or talk pages to get a sense of which parties struggled over control and how those struggles played out - for example, was there an openly revisionist challenge on core topics that was eventually sustained by attrition of disagreeing voices, or a stealth campaign of incremental nudges in one direction with a large cumulative effect?Modeling and visualizing these dynamics could yield valuable insights on other sorts of networked conflicts.
samrolken 5y ago
I’m not sure if it’s the same kind of situation, but the Macedonian Wikipedia is absolutely rife with all kinds of nationalist pseudo-history and ethnic-based bias. I think this is a problem for a lot of multilingual online platforms. On Facebook there are pages in Macedonian that constantly publish completely vile hateful material against Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians. These pages would absolutely be banned, except it seems that Facebook lacks the linguistic and cultural ability to understand what this content is and to do something about it.
- soco 5y ago
  ...and when you report them, the canned answer is "it doesn't go against our community standards". I wonder, do they have different community standards for non-English, or censor English only punctually because they were pressured to intervene?
kpozin 5y ago
An earlier discussion of this problem: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737090 — Dec 2019 (31 comments)

88 points by atdt 5y ago

ordx 5y ago

Same thing is happening in Russian Wikipedia. Majority of articles are written from the official pro-Kremlin point of view and any attempts to change that are blocked. Given that there are millions of Russian-speaking people live outside of Russia, something like this split needs to be done.

yorwba 5y ago
The article argues that it was the split of Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia into country-specific Wikipedias that fractured the community and enabled the takeover of the Croatian Wikipedia.
varjag 5y ago
I concur. It's usable if you want to know how T-72B2 differs from T-72B3 but is heavily editorialized for most non-technical topics, not even directly political.
zozbot234 5y ago
The uncomfortable truth is that many average Russians support "the official pro-Kremlin" outlook. Similarly, if the Chinese Wikipedia was not blocked by the government, it would probably look a lot like Baidu Baike, and all the articles about "sensitive" topics would be whitewashed and socially harmonised by the "great human flesh search engine crowd". The Chinese government is actually doing Wikipedians a favor by keeping the nationalist masses from accessing the site!
cosmodisk 5y ago
I remember having a very heated discussion on some pretty recent historical events with a few Russians. At some point I thought I'm in some sort of an alternative reality.. However, eventually,after almost smacking each other faces, we figured that the way we were taught at school was miles and miles apart and they didn't know any alternative opinions. It took quite some effort to at least acknowledge it.

Keyframe 5y ago

While pretty much all mentioned wikis share same bias and mistrust towards them, apart technical articles... Proposed solutions make sense, except for Encouraging the affected communities to discuss the possibility of re-merging Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language projects into the original Serbo-Croatian language projects to re-align with the practices of other pluricentric Wikipedia language versions. Which will not happen, and on top of it is border-line offensive and shows a dose of not understanding the differences. Serbo-croatian or Croato-serbian (as the full name of the language is) was an artificially constructed language during social-communist Yugoslavia. All involved parties agreed to part ways on unification of the languages for a myriad of reasons, not all political ones.. and that's now water over the bridge.. and now this entity, probably through ignorance, wants to offer re-introduction of the topic which countries have fought wars over? Nah. One of the reasons why SH (serbo-croatian) wiki even exists is because there's a group of people living in the past and which makes, for themselves, communities like that. Raisong the issue as a possible course of resokution and common ground not only gives legitimacy to it, but is border-line offensive and absolutely ignorant of the issues at hand. Otherwise, apart from that, great. Something needs to haooen to ex yugoslavian wikis throughout to make them at least half-thrustworthy.

zozbot234 5y ago
Serbo-Croatian is a family of very closely related languages. There are some differences in lexicon and script, but there are also differences among varieties of English. And you could write English down using a different script like Devanagari, but this would not somehow make it into a different language.
- dragandj 5y ago
  > There are some differences in lexicon and script Even this is only to a point; namely, all these languages use Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic (Serbian uses both alphabets). Croatian originally used Glagolitic script (many centuries ago). This Latin/Cyrillic division is caused by Catholic/Orthodox church split and Habsburg/Ottoman empire border rather than being some central feature in languages.
5y ago

beaner 5y ago

Same thing happens in the English wikipedia. Criticisms and scandals feature prominently in the bios of right-leaning political figures when they are present or even hinted at, and largely cut out or downplayed for left-leaning political figures. No I do not have a source, it's just something you notice when reading wikipedia regularly for 20 years. I didn't keep a record in anticipation for this HN comment.

disabled 5y ago

As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, you never want to go to the Croatian version of Wikipedia. Anyways, a lot of this pressure being put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia is through the investigative journalism organization, Balkan Insight (see links below that I referenced). The reason why people do this stuff is because not only do they want war—-they want to commit genocide again. Here is what I wrote about it a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788882 It [Wikipedia] does have power over what it allows to be published, although it does not have the staff to enforce violations. As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, it is best to avoid the Croatian language Wikipedia pages about wars, with some more recent than others. It is quite hateful, xenophobic, and nationalistic. The news source I provided is investigative journalism for Balkan countries funded via European Union. > "Wikimedia Foundation Inc, the US-based non-profit charitable NGO, is the owner of the Croatian version of Wikipedia." [1] > "However, the Wikimedia Foundation is not the founder of the Croatian version, nor does it accept that it is responsible for the accuracy of its articles. It insists that it does not have any power over Croatian-language Wikipedia entries." [1] Other reads are provided for reference [2][3][4]. [1] Wikipedia Not Responding to Inquiries on Croatian Entries: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/04/23/wikipedia-not-replying-to-inquires-on-croatian-entries-04-20-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/04/23/wikipedia-not-replying-... [2] Croatian Wikipedia Removes ‘Polish Genocide of Germans’ Claim: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/29/croatian-wikipedia-removed-claims-on-polish-genocide-over-germans-03-29-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/29/croatian-wikipedia-remo... [3] How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/26/how-croatian-wikipedia-made-a-concentration-camp-disappear-03-23-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/26/how-croatian-wikipedia-... [4] Croatia Wikipedia Alters Jasenovac Camp Entry Again: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/29/croatia-wikipedia-further-disputes-research-on-jasenovac-camp-08-29-2018/ https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/29/croatia-wikipedia-furth...

zozbot234 5y ago
This is not "pressure being put on Wikimedia", it's the Wikimedia folks trying to re-establish/enforce the underlying principles of their projects, which have existed since these projects got started.

createdapril24 5y ago

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fbi-computers-used-for-wikipedia-edits-idUSN1642896020070816 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fb... This kind of vulnerability seems to be a very difficult one to plug. Ultimately, Wikipedia should be seen as a source of information, but not to be trusted blindly. That's a good stance to take purely out of factual inaccuracy and data incompleteness - but also necessary from the perspective that Wikipedia has, is and will be used to influence because it holds an authoritative position.

mrkramer 5y ago

I am Croatian and I don't understand what's the problem? Croatian admins are probably patriots who want to protect our country from the past Communist ideology and defend our War of Independence. I'm sure US admins are patriots as well for example and are proud of their War of Independence and all the good things that US has done in the past while at the same time being critical of all the bad things that happened in the past. After all Wikipedia should be facts not opinion articles but of course there is always some commentary on top of facts which can be ideological. In Croatia there is Culture War going on between the Left and the Right for the last 30 years but that is democracy. If we all think the same then nobody is thinking. Why is Croatia singled out and not Poland for example? Poland is more "right" than Croatia and over there we can see intense and sometimes violent confrontations between left and right.

brazzy 5y ago
The problem is that a cabal of people subverted the processes of Wikipedia to gain effective control of the Croatian Wikipedia, and used that control to exclude opposing viewpoints entirely and in some cases insert and preserve completely counterfactual content. That is what is being "singled out", not their political ideology.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  Every time when I read Croatian Wikipedia I see facts I mean historical facts. Commentary on top of facts can be ideological but facts are facts. From the Wikipedia report I can see topics of WW2 and War of Independence being problematic but I read about these topics on Croatian Wikipedia and I didn't see any "counterfactual content". And like I said Wikipedia is not about opinion articles it is about factual information.
dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
"Croatian admins are probably patriots who want to protect our country from the past Communist ideology and defend our War of Independence." Exactly, they're not interested in the truth, but to push their own political views. Sharing those political views doesn't make them true.

anigbrowl 5y ago

The report quality is excellent and a worthwhile template for disinformation investigations in other contexts. I found it especially interesting because while I am not an expert in Balkan affairs, I'm expert-adjacent; have friendships with refugees, journalists and former military/intelligence involved in the conflict on various different sides and have read deeply into it in my own time. A standout was the table listing relevant facts (specifically convictions of war criminals by an international tribunal) and whether the language sub-wikis accurately reflect those facts or not. Whether one likes or dislikes a given fact, its occurrence is a kind of ground truth that can serve as a reference marker by which to weight the factual content of an article. Thus, whether someone was convicted by a tribunal is a fact; whether it was fair is open to debate, but failure to mention the fact at all amounts to a concealment of information, whether negligent or willful. When we see a pattern of factual errors (including glaring omissions), we can assess the degree of deliberation involved by looking at whether the errors all run in similar directions and how systematic/assiduous the erroneous editor is in rejecting alternative points of view. A complicating factor here is Wikipedia's general open-access policy. As you probably know, some people who are interested in a topic appoint themselves gatekeepers of it and revert edits they disapprove of. Over time, I can be difficult the distinguish between passion and expertise. For example, suppose you grew up in a village where a battle was fought (before you were born or aware of such things). You receive from your parents, peers, and teachers an approximate view of the historical event as experienced by those who lived through or were directly impacted by it. While in high school, you find a Wikipedia page about the battle which has some details wrong - geographical facts, say - and you correct those with your local knowledge. As time goes on, you become the leading Wikipedian curating this topic, and enrich the article with all kinds of valuable information on how the battle was fought. But suppose you find yourself getting into arguments about why the battle was fought; now you're going outside the scope of your local knowledge. Battles might fought for purely logistic reasons (control a river crossing, cut an enemy off from supply lines), personal ones (a commander has family or reasons to love or hate a particular place), or strategic factors (to weaken enemy resolve or tempt a misallocation of forces). These might not be apparent from the local perspective; received wisdom might posit a local cause that was actually just the initial skirmish of a larger action. Case studies illustrate some of the difficulties in evaluating controversial information. For example, the entry on Ratko Mladić, a Bosnian Serb, is heavily slanted on Serbian wikipedia, which emphasizes his positive qualities and plays down negative aspects of his story, as well as introducing analysis and speculation favorable to Serbian nationalist narratives. Now, a problem with bias accusations is subjectivity; a Mladić apologist might argue that other narratives omit contextual information that seems to justify his actions, or that emphasis on his criminality serves to distract from crimes by other parties that equally severe but less strenuously prosecuted. Although there may be large differences of opinion, that can be OK when the contextual variations are truthful. Different people can have very different ideas about what the significant factors are, and exploring those differences can be valuable. Most historical arguments (in my non-professional view) are not so much debates about what happened but rather over what matters, and that can vary both because people are on different sides of a tribal argument but also because people have different assumptions about moral/ethical considerations that are orthogonal to their tribal membership. Missing from the report (perhaps because most people are not that interested) is any kind of dynamic information about the development and intensity of the divergences. It might be interesting to mine the article history and/or talk pages to get a sense of which parties struggled over control and how those struggles played out - for example, was there an openly revisionist challenge on core topics that was eventually sustained by attrition of disagreeing voices, or a stealth campaign of incremental nudges in one direction with a large cumulative effect?Modeling and visualizing these dynamics could yield valuable insights on other sorts of networked conflicts.

samrolken 5y ago

I’m not sure if it’s the same kind of situation, but the Macedonian Wikipedia is absolutely rife with all kinds of nationalist pseudo-history and ethnic-based bias. I think this is a problem for a lot of multilingual online platforms. On Facebook there are pages in Macedonian that constantly publish completely vile hateful material against Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians. These pages would absolutely be banned, except it seems that Facebook lacks the linguistic and cultural ability to understand what this content is and to do something about it.

soco 5y ago
...and when you report them, the canned answer is "it doesn't go against our community standards". I wonder, do they have different community standards for non-English, or censor English only punctually because they were pressured to intervene?

kpozin 5y ago

An earlier discussion of this problem: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737090 — Dec 2019 (31 comments)