4 ms·

The Hungarian wikipedia being overrun by ... how to say this politely? neonazis, yes, that's a polite word, I guess, is a well known fact. I am not at all surpr

by chx 4y ago

The Hungarian wikipedia being overrun by ... how to say this politely? neonazis, yes, that's a polite word, I guess, is a well known fact. I am not at all surprised this happened to the English one as well. Long ago there has been an analysis of how much better organized the "pro life" crowd was online than the "pro choice" and this is just another facet of the same: alas, it seems those on the right are playing this better. Oh well. Everyone knows or should know Wikipedia can not be trusted or if they didn't then the Scottish Wikipedia scandal should have taught them this.

leephillips 4y ago
Everyone should know, and yet I often see people, in HN comments for example, citing Wikipedia as if it means something. As the great Tycho has said, “The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.” https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-power https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-pow...
- akolbe 4y ago
  An additional factor here is that now chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on Wikipedia as well, in addition to search engines' knowledge graph panels and voice assistants bringing up Wikipedia texts in response to queries. It does make you wonder sometimes whether technological progress really does make things work better than before ...
- arp242 4y ago
  On the other hand if I link to example.com, random-website.org, or even a published study, then that's also not a guarantee it's anywhere near accurate. Blindly trusting Wikipedia would be foolish, but so would blindly trusting anything else, or blindly mistrusting Wikipedia. Gathering reliable and comprehensive information on any topic you're not an expert on is hard, because you lack the background knowledge and expertise to judge the accuracy of something – basic critical thinking/bullshit detection helps, but will only get you so far. Wikipedia isn't perfect and has its share of issues, but it's not bad either.
version_five 4y ago
> it seems those on the right are playing this better I'm sure many would disagree with this, personally I find the idea of the right dominating (English) wikipedia laughable. But that's a pointless discussion. I think the takeaway should be there is no such thing as neutral media - one man's "neutral" perspective is another's far $political_direction. It's similar to "fact checking". Reality outside of the hard sciences (and even then) is subjective. It's much better to communicate the perspective from which reporting is done, or at least to not pretend to be neutral. And interested people necessarily need to seek a broad range of perspectives and not take any one platform as truth, no matter how neutral
- akolbe 4y ago
  There's another discussion here currently, concerning another academic study concluding that Wikipedia has a "moderate yet systematic" liberal citation bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34744696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34744696 Basically I agree. Generally speaking the English Wikipedia skews slightly left. However, Wikipedia is so vast that the direction and intensity of bias can vary from topic to topic even in the English Wikipedia. (For example, I once came across a whole bevy of articles singing the praises of the Kazakh government.) It all depends on who is most interested in the articles and most motivated to edit them.
quickthrowman 4y ago
[I deleted a part of this comment where I incorrectly attempted to correct the OP] I have no good ideas about how to solve this problem, I’m guessing that the smaller audience a wiki has, the more likely it is that an ideological faction will have influence on the content. The first thing that came to mind for me was making all of the other non-English wikis read-only machine translations of the English version since it has the most eyeballs on it. The problem with that is, then you miss out on things that are notable (by Wikipedia standards) in other languages that don’t have sources in English, which isn’t fair to non-English speaking countries that have their own notable culture and history. Enforcing an NPOV across all of the wikis across many different languages (or even just the English wiki) seems like an intractable problem. And that’s without opening the ‘what is a neutral point of view’ can of worms.
- akolbe 4y ago
  This is incorrect. The paper is about Polish editors editing the English Wikipedia.
  - quickthrowman 4y ago
    You are correct, my apologies. I have edited my post and left a note that I was mistaken in its place.
akolbe 4y ago
The Hungarian Wikipedia being overrun by neonazis is news to me. Are you sure you didn't mean the Croatian one? In the Croatian case, the Wikimedia Foundation commissioned a study (a "Disinformation Assessment") that did indeed come to that conclusion. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinformation_Assessment-2021 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform... If you do have info on the Hungarian Wikipedia, a link or two would be appreciated. Thanks.
- chx 4y ago
  > The Hungarian Wikipedia being overrun by neonazis is news to me. Are you sure you didn't mean the Croatian one? Quite. It's subtle but the bias is obvious. But, since it's Hungary ... who gives a damn? Have you seen the prime minister?
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Could you name a few prominent Hungarian Wikipedia articles that you feel are problematic? I don't speak Hungarian, but DeepL and Google Translate do a reasonable job and I'd be interested in looking into it. Yes, I'm aware of Hungarians' choice of prime minister and would expect to see that preference reflected in the Hungarian Wikipedia. I just didn't think it was as far out as the Croatian one. If it is – well, people did care about the Croatian one eventually. There are a number of places where it's possible to flag concerns (Wikimedia-l mailing list, Meta-Wiki, Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia Weekly, etc.)
    - chx 4y ago
      Even in English, I have been fighting to delete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people but I simply gave up. Look at the sources. There's "Detailed report about a Hungarian expedition" and if you click on the first article, https://web.archive.org/web/20080605115547/http://www.mno.hu/portal/401039 https://web.archive.org/web/20080605115547/http://www.mno.hu... it literally starts with "There are no such people as Magyarabs". Second sentence "The black Hungarians straight out of a romantic grand novel do not exist." The other reference https://web.archive.org/web/20050213015534/http://w3.datanet.hu/~demokrat/muh1-429.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20050213015534/http://w3.datanet... now that's a neonazi rag. The whole thing started when in the 30s a couple Egyptians decided to bilk a Hungarian noble wandering around there and got rewarmed by a hustler in the sixties who spent two semesters in Cairo then sold himself as an expert back in Hungary in all matters Egyptian and got a posh job for himself at the public radio as such. His Egyptian dictionary was so shit it never got printed, though. Him sharing a name with one of the most famous archeologists didn't hurt his prospects, of course. Then in the 90s said rag dug up the whole thing again for nationalistic reasons and now people consider it fact despite the expedition that was sent to find them found nothing. Quite obviously. And, by now, people consider it fact mostly because of Wikipedia... As for subtlety and for why all your translations are completely pointless can be not found in the Holocaust article https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsid%C3%B3_holokauszt_Magyarorsz%C3%A1gon https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsid%C3%B3_holokauszt_Magyaror... which, while does paint a picture of cruelty from the Hungarians, almost completely lacks the work of Krisztián Ungváry -- and it's quite important work. It was he who have found in the records that Hungarians sent many more trainloads of Jews than the Germans asked for, so much so the Germans told them to slow down. And now look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriszti%C3%A1n_Ungv%C3%A1ry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriszti%C3%A1n_Ungv%C3%A1ry and tell me, do you see any mention of him being an important Holocaust researcher despite even the Hungarian holocaust article uses him as a source once and uses another article of his as "additional information". (And of course he is only quoted on the forced labor battalions not on the Holocaust itself in Hungary.) Perhaps most importantly, where is https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861738-007 https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861738-007 from this page, not to mention several non-scholarly articles? What is missing is telling. As for the influence being known, Klára Sándor was explicitly asked to edit https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely%E2%80%93magyar_rov%C3%A1s%C3%ADr%C3%A1s https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely%E2%80%93magyar_ro... and she refused.

by chx 4y ago

leephillips 4y ago

Everyone should know, and yet I often see people, in HN comments for example, citing Wikipedia as if it means something. As the great Tycho has said, “The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.” https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-power https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-pow...

akolbe 4y ago
An additional factor here is that now chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on Wikipedia as well, in addition to search engines' knowledge graph panels and voice assistants bringing up Wikipedia texts in response to queries. It does make you wonder sometimes whether technological progress really does make things work better than before ...
arp242 4y ago
On the other hand if I link to example.com, random-website.org, or even a published study, then that's also not a guarantee it's anywhere near accurate. Blindly trusting Wikipedia would be foolish, but so would blindly trusting anything else, or blindly mistrusting Wikipedia. Gathering reliable and comprehensive information on any topic you're not an expert on is hard, because you lack the background knowledge and expertise to judge the accuracy of something – basic critical thinking/bullshit detection helps, but will only get you so far. Wikipedia isn't perfect and has its share of issues, but it's not bad either.

version_five 4y ago

> it seems those on the right are playing this better I'm sure many would disagree with this, personally I find the idea of the right dominating (English) wikipedia laughable. But that's a pointless discussion. I think the takeaway should be there is no such thing as neutral media - one man's "neutral" perspective is another's far $political_direction. It's similar to "fact checking". Reality outside of the hard sciences (and even then) is subjective. It's much better to communicate the perspective from which reporting is done, or at least to not pretend to be neutral. And interested people necessarily need to seek a broad range of perspectives and not take any one platform as truth, no matter how neutral

akolbe 4y ago
There's another discussion here currently, concerning another academic study concluding that Wikipedia has a "moderate yet systematic" liberal citation bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34744696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34744696 Basically I agree. Generally speaking the English Wikipedia skews slightly left. However, Wikipedia is so vast that the direction and intensity of bias can vary from topic to topic even in the English Wikipedia. (For example, I once came across a whole bevy of articles singing the praises of the Kazakh government.) It all depends on who is most interested in the articles and most motivated to edit them.

quickthrowman 4y ago

[I deleted a part of this comment where I incorrectly attempted to correct the OP] I have no good ideas about how to solve this problem, I’m guessing that the smaller audience a wiki has, the more likely it is that an ideological faction will have influence on the content. The first thing that came to mind for me was making all of the other non-English wikis read-only machine translations of the English version since it has the most eyeballs on it. The problem with that is, then you miss out on things that are notable (by Wikipedia standards) in other languages that don’t have sources in English, which isn’t fair to non-English speaking countries that have their own notable culture and history. Enforcing an NPOV across all of the wikis across many different languages (or even just the English wiki) seems like an intractable problem. And that’s without opening the ‘what is a neutral point of view’ can of worms.

akolbe 4y ago
This is incorrect. The paper is about Polish editors editing the English Wikipedia.
- quickthrowman 4y ago
  You are correct, my apologies. I have edited my post and left a note that I was mistaken in its place.

akolbe 4y ago

The Hungarian Wikipedia being overrun by neonazis is news to me. Are you sure you didn't mean the Croatian one? In the Croatian case, the Wikimedia Foundation commissioned a study (a "Disinformation Assessment") that did indeed come to that conclusion. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinformation_Assessment-2021 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia_Disinform... If you do have info on the Hungarian Wikipedia, a link or two would be appreciated. Thanks.

chx 4y ago
> The Hungarian Wikipedia being overrun by neonazis is news to me. Are you sure you didn't mean the Croatian one? Quite. It's subtle but the bias is obvious. But, since it's Hungary ... who gives a damn? Have you seen the prime minister?
- akolbe 4y ago
  Could you name a few prominent Hungarian Wikipedia articles that you feel are problematic? I don't speak Hungarian, but DeepL and Google Translate do a reasonable job and I'd be interested in looking into it. Yes, I'm aware of Hungarians' choice of prime minister and would expect to see that preference reflected in the Hungarian Wikipedia. I just didn't think it was as far out as the Croatian one. If it is – well, people did care about the Croatian one eventually. There are a number of places where it's possible to flag concerns (Wikimedia-l mailing list, Meta-Wiki, Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia Weekly, etc.)
  - chx 4y ago
    Even in English, I have been fighting to delete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people but I simply gave up. Look at the sources. There's "Detailed report about a Hungarian expedition" and if you click on the first article, https://web.archive.org/web/20080605115547/http://www.mno.hu/portal/401039 https://web.archive.org/web/20080605115547/http://www.mno.hu... it literally starts with "There are no such people as Magyarabs". Second sentence "The black Hungarians straight out of a romantic grand novel do not exist." The other reference https://web.archive.org/web/20050213015534/http://w3.datanet.hu/~demokrat/muh1-429.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20050213015534/http://w3.datanet... now that's a neonazi rag. The whole thing started when in the 30s a couple Egyptians decided to bilk a Hungarian noble wandering around there and got rewarmed by a hustler in the sixties who spent two semesters in Cairo then sold himself as an expert back in Hungary in all matters Egyptian and got a posh job for himself at the public radio as such. His Egyptian dictionary was so shit it never got printed, though. Him sharing a name with one of the most famous archeologists didn't hurt his prospects, of course. Then in the 90s said rag dug up the whole thing again for nationalistic reasons and now people consider it fact despite the expedition that was sent to find them found nothing. Quite obviously. And, by now, people consider it fact mostly because of Wikipedia... As for subtlety and for why all your translations are completely pointless can be not found in the Holocaust article https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsid%C3%B3_holokauszt_Magyarorsz%C3%A1gon https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zsid%C3%B3_holokauszt_Magyaror... which, while does paint a picture of cruelty from the Hungarians, almost completely lacks the work of Krisztián Ungváry -- and it's quite important work. It was he who have found in the records that Hungarians sent many more trainloads of Jews than the Germans asked for, so much so the Germans told them to slow down. And now look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriszti%C3%A1n_Ungv%C3%A1ry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriszti%C3%A1n_Ungv%C3%A1ry and tell me, do you see any mention of him being an important Holocaust researcher despite even the Hungarian holocaust article uses him as a source once and uses another article of his as "additional information". (And of course he is only quoted on the forced labor battalions not on the Holocaust itself in Hungary.) Perhaps most importantly, where is https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861738-007 https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861738-007 from this page, not to mention several non-scholarly articles? What is missing is telling. As for the influence being known, Klára Sándor was explicitly asked to edit https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely%E2%80%93magyar_rov%C3%A1s%C3%ADr%C3%A1s https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely%E2%80%93magyar_ro... and she refused.