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Wikipedia’s “Supreme Court” to review Polish-Jewish history during WWII

79 points by kurtreed 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
advisedwang 4y ago
This example gets to a fundamental reality in group decision making: some issues for some people are too important to them for them to accept the group deciding against them. That can be perfectly legitimate - for example a minority shareholder should not accept a majority owner giving a dividend only to the minority; or a subset of a population should not accept a political process that strips them of rights. Depending on how a decision system is set up and supported and what the people are willing to do, the outcomes can be very different. Some possible outcomes are deadlock (where no decisions can be made), disintegration (e.g. where people unilaterally act and group decision making ends), exception (where rules are suspended and some other process makes the decision this time) or violence (which could be state power enforcing a decision but also can be assassination etc). It sounds like ArbCom is a managed form of exception to the usual consensus decision making. I hope its effective.
- viraptor 4y ago
  The interesting part for me is how do other encyclopedias deal with this. It's not mentioned in the paper itself (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) but I'm sure this is not the only case and the paper volumes we used to buy decades ago dealt with similar issues, just much less visibility into the process. I actually can't find any good writeups about similar issues in the past, yet I'm sure various encyclopedias in Europe had a very different view on some details. There must've been internal editor conflicts too. With Wikipedia, we can just observe that in real time.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    I’d guess part of it was that people cared less because it was their job.
    - viraptor 4y ago
      I've met librarians and researchers before. Those people have some serious opinions. It's extremely unlikely that none of the encyclopedia editors cared. There were surely some doing this as their 9-5, but I bet this was a small fraction.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        I don’t mean that none of them cared. Bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment about how the intensity can ramp up when the compensation is zero. On one hand, payment motivates people. On the other hand, when you hire volunteers you have selected for people who find pushing their specific view of the Holocaust to be its own reward. This is not likely to make the situation easier to resolve.
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    As far as I'm am aware most traditional encyclopedias rely on experts for such things, backstopped by traditional corporate governance. So basically the corporate owners pick experts based on their own motives and those experts set the direction and fine tuning of articles. Really the only group decision making happening is small committees (who can be overriden by executives) and the board of directors.
dvt 4y ago
The article that Grabowski[1] wrote seems extremely heavy-handed and reeks of having an axe to grind. I am no fan of Wikipedia or their incessant edit wars, bad information and bickering, but Prof. Grabowski does not seem tempered in his criticism (going as far as calling out specific editors, which seems unprofessional to say the least). Looking into his sources is also a bit dubious, occasionally providing conclusions as being prima facia obvious, which (at least to me) is hard to swallow given an ultra-charged topic of discourse like the Holocaust. As an example, the "Jew with a Coin" Polish statuette caricature mentioned in the article is certainly offensive and insensitive, but calling it blanket anti-Semitisim needs some evidentiary work (whereas Grabowski considers it an obvious implication). [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...
- frozenport 4y ago
  If they don't call editors it unverifiable. Sometimes you gotta call the bad actors by name.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  The "Jew with a Coin" is antisemitic. The coin is used in this case to symbolise greed which antisemites here automatically assign to all Jews. (I know, I am a Pole)
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    I’m curious of your assessment of the Wikipedia article’s accuracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin It takes a more measured tone than your own, but the practice still seems rooted in deeply anti-semitic tropes.
    - dvt 4y ago
      Hm, yeah, all of a sudden I think I'm more on Grabowski's side. This is extremely weasel-worded: "Opinions about the motif vary; some cultural studies scholars believe it promotes Polish–Jewish dialogue or view it as harmless folklore or nostalgia, while others believe it is an antisemitic and offensive stereotype." Maybe you can argue the trinkets aren't in themselves anti-Semitic, but I completely agree with you that they're 100% undeniably rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. I mean even the word "nostalgia" there is weird. Nostalgia for what?
PicassoCTs 4y ago
There was alot of horrific things that went on in those "in-between-empire" countries, that got steam rolled regularly, reappeared half digested during defeats and either imitated there old masters, hoping to keep independent by mimicry or in re-aligning with new empires, imagining those who suffered the wrath of other empires, to be more sympathetic. Those trying to transcend nationalism and imperialism of course were there mortal enemies, as they subverted the endeavor for freedom and independence. Im pretty certain some dreamed aloud about becoming the muscovites instead of the muscovites. The bandera activities on polish jews come to mind https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778 and the formation of collaborator legions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaboration_with_N... and the sovjet union punished them severely, after hitler fed them into the churning war. There was a corner house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_House_(Riga) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_House_(Riga)) in every occupied city, and a room with swiss-cheese walls in ever one of those houses. The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has infected the us at the core and is slowly eroding its values away. It has put up a good fight though, allowing for example other cultures, languages, ideas and countries to flourish relatively free in its influence sphere. And there are still competing traditional empires, yearning for the g(l)ory days, of mercantilism and neverending sunsets or worse still revenge, for imagined slights received aeons ago. I honestly do not know how to overcome it, but it certainly seems, that people who experience empires in there daily lifes, suppressed by hierarchies into miserable servitude with no actual control & freedom, are more susceptible to projecting there pride upon these expansionists behemoths. Is all this past any justification for the atrocities of russia against ukraine today? No. Never was. Never will be.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  > The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has infected the us at the core I think the Guatemalans, Chileans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Libyans, etc. could tell you that the US has been an empire for quite a long time...
lynguist 4y ago
Interesting. It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia Croatian Wikipedia was used to deliberately and succesfully instill nationalist and neo-fascist points of view onto the users of the page, young people in Croatia. The really odd thing is that literally 4 Wikipedias were started in the Serbo-Croatian language: the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, the Serbian Wikipedia, the Croatian Wikipedia, and the Bosnian Wikipedia. The Croatian one is often the most biased one. — I often read the English and the German Wikipedias. I found that I can edit the English Wikipedia and my changes are accepted, my changes on the German Wikipedia however are rejected. The English Wikipedia is up-to-date. In topics such as computers or science or popular culture, it is very accurate. The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don’t have any of the recent developments, and the information is very outdated. If I read history, English and German Wikipedias present completely different articles, where the German one tends to be better and unbiased. Only in these topics (history and the like) the easy editability of the English Wikipedia makes it a target and victim of misinformation and bias.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don’t have any of the recent developments, and the information is very outdated. There are a lot of English Wikipedia pages like that, too. Sometimes it's pretty blatant, like super-comprehensive list of something that just stops in 2013 or something.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  It may be interesting also to compare a revision of each actually from 2006.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tablespoon 4y ago
> Sometimes that abuse is relatively easy to identify. In 2019, ArbCom disciplined the two editors most involved in this subject area, instituting a topic ban for their “incivility and inflammatory rhetoric.” But what about the more insidious cases when there are no blatant signs of harassment? Wikipedians told me that these “civil” disputes are much more challenging to resolve because of a key jurisdictional issue: ArbCom has authority to decide on user conduct disputes but is not permitted to rule on article content. Also Wikipedia's toxic culture often refuses to call a spade a spade, and gives some favored problematic editors a long leash to be uncivil, so long as they learn to avoid a few of the most blatant unacceptable behaviors. IMHO, they need to be more consistent and more final with their bans, because a community with a lot of individuals who've been taught how to obscure their misbehavior and/or expertly push it right up to the line is still a shitty community.
- the_af 4y ago
  This is a problem with any community, right? Regardless of how open it purports to be, if you don't belong to the trusted circle you are at a disadvantage. And you can only belong to that circle if you were there from the beginning or you spend a lot -- and I mean, a lot -- of time making yourself known so that they accept you. Most people don't have that kind of time. I don't know if this can be avoided.
  - bjourne 4y ago
    That is fair, but the problem is that most people do not know that Wikipedia is run by various cliques. Article content does not converge to the "truth". Instead it converges to whatever those who has the most time to waste on Wikipedia believes the truth to be. Take Wikipedia's article on male circumcision. It very much underplays the ethical, moral, and physical issues associated with it because the clique that controls that article see no problem with cutting off unconsenting boys' body parts. People don't know that so when they read that article they think it is "fair" and "objective" which it is not.
    - doubleg72 4y ago
epolanski 4y ago
Politics, history, economics and many other fields will always spur debates. Little can be done here and there is no such thing as truth.
- feoren 4y ago
  > there is no such thing as truth This is exactly what people say when they want to re-write the truth to fit their ends. It may be hard to find out what the truth really is, it may even be impossible to get it 100% right, but there is an actual truth of what happened. Denying that gives power to liars.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    > but there is an actual truth of what happened. In terms of cold hard quantifiable facts -- "X happened" -- yes. But history isn't made of facts. History is made up of interpreting facts to form larger coherent narratives that mean things. It's saying "X happened because Y". It means assigning motivation and goals in the behavior of people and organizations -- all of which is ultimately subjective. It means making judgment calls about which events can be explained as inevitable given historical forces, versus which were essentially random. History isn't about the what, it's about the why. And no, there is no "actual truth" there. There is hopefully a gradually forming consensus, which then sometimes gets overturned decades later in a paradigm shift, then overturned again.
  - Avicebron 4y ago
    There might be objective fact, but without a time machine.. Remember when that meme about the dress went around circa 2015? Whether the dress was gold/white, black/blue? People looked at the same thing and saw different things. In a philosophical sense, history is a lot like that.
    - mcphage 4y ago
      > People looked at the same thing and saw different things. However, the dress was an actual dress, which had an actual color. Sometimes it's hard to see what the truth is, but just because people look at the same thing and see different things, doesn't mean all of those things are equally valid.
wslh 4y ago
There is a stronger political discussion at country levels between Israel and Poland regarding this topic. It is easy searchable, you can find articles like this [1]. The author doesn't seem to study the topic in all extent. I suggest to read the paper which sets a more scientific ground to Wikipedia issues that other anecdotes. Beyond this specific topic, I don't know of topics which enable a level of discussion of this caliber. [1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-06-30/ty-article/.highlight/why-israels-new-government-is-finally-standing-up-to-polands-holocaust-revisionism/0000017f-e88e-dc91-a17f-fc8f6b8b0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-06-30/ty-article/.h...
chx 4y ago
Eastern European history topics insidiously edited by the far right? Where did I hear that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747388 So far we have Wikipedia admitting Croatia and Poland and if they were to look I am sure they would find interesting things in Hungary as well as I pointed out.
the_af 4y ago
Anyone who has tried to deal with Wikipedia on any remotely controversial topic knows this is true (from the article): > Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or energy to fight. This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my single most visited website ever. But in the end, what stays there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to fight for. It can be exhausting to try to correct something if you don't have limitless time or don't "know" the right people, which makes Wikipedia way less open than it pretends to be. Then again, I wouldn't be able to edit an article on the Encyclopedia Britannica...
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my single most visited website ever. Me too. >But in the end, what stays there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to fight for. "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827>
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or energy to fight. DoS? > Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[5] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[6] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
rzlemidsq 4y ago
Based on the editors involved and the subject matter, this is a re-run of one of Wikipedia's most famous scandals: the Eastern European Mailing List (EEML).[0] The EEML was a group of Eastern European editors who set up a secret mailing list to coordinate their activities in their never-ending nationalist edit wars, primarily (but not only) against Russian editors. Secretly coordinating over a back channel is a real no-no in Wikipedia culture, because it allows a group of editors to completely subvert the rules. For example, one of Wikipedia's bright red lines is that no editor may revert the same page more than three times in 24 hours.[1] If you have a secret mailing list with all your like-minded editors, you can always just send out a request for someone else to revert on your behalf. That's exactly what the EEML did. Two things made the EEML special. First, they had an admin in their ranks (Piotrus, who is also a party to this latest Arbcom case about Polish-Jewish history), who was actively scheming with them to sideline and ban their enemies. That gave them significantly more power than a random group of editors would have had. Second, their entire mailing list was published by Wikileaks. Yes, Wikileaks, not Wikipedia. The speculation is that there was a mole in the EEML, who eventually passed their correspondence to Wikileaks. You can read a sample of the messages from the EEML here: [2]. There was a big argument over whether Arbcom should even consider the evidence from Wikileaks, or whether that would violate the privacy of the EEML editors. But Arbcom did end up taking the emails into account, because how could it not? The emails were pretty spectacular, showing all sorts of underhanded scheming: things like, "You, you and you will push editor X's buttons, and when he responds, I'll report him for incivility." The EEML editors mostly got off the hook with a slap on the wrist. You would think they would have gotten permanently banned, but somehow, they weren't. Several of them have remained extremely active in Eastern European nationalist edit wars, and are in fact now parties to this new case. This latest case centers around the history of antisemitism in Poland, and particularly around the involvement of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust. One of the biggest flashpoints was an article about a supposed concentration camp for non-Jewish Poles.[3] The camp never existed. It's an urban legend, invented in order to claim that non-Jewish Poles were equal victims as Polish Jews. But there was a big fight between Polish nationalist and Israeli editors over the article. Ah, Wikipedia, what a miserable place. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern_European_mailing_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:3RR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:3RR 2. https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotrus https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr... 3. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-04/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-fake-nazi-death-camp-wikipedias-longest-hoax-exposed/0000017f-e367-d568-ad7f-f36f77000000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-04/ty-article-ma...

79 points by kurtreed 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This example gets to a fundamental reality in group decision making: some issues for some people are too important to them for them to accept the group deciding against them. That can be perfectly legitimate - for example a minority shareholder should not accept a majority owner giving a dividend only to the minority; or a subset of a population should not accept a political process that strips them of rights. Depending on how a decision system is set up and supported and what the people are willing to do, the outcomes can be very different. Some possible outcomes are deadlock (where no decisions can be made), disintegration (e.g. where people unilaterally act and group decision making ends), exception (where rules are suspended and some other process makes the decision this time) or violence (which could be state power enforcing a decision but also can be assassination etc). It sounds like ArbCom is a managed form of exception to the usual consensus decision making. I hope its effective.

viraptor 4y ago
The interesting part for me is how do other encyclopedias deal with this. It's not mentioned in the paper itself (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) but I'm sure this is not the only case and the paper volumes we used to buy decades ago dealt with similar issues, just much less visibility into the process. I actually can't find any good writeups about similar issues in the past, yet I'm sure various encyclopedias in Europe had a very different view on some details. There must've been internal editor conflicts too. With Wikipedia, we can just observe that in real time.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  I’d guess part of it was that people cared less because it was their job.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    I've met librarians and researchers before. Those people have some serious opinions. It's extremely unlikely that none of the encyclopedia editors cared. There were surely some doing this as their 9-5, but I bet this was a small fraction.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      I don’t mean that none of them cared. Bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment about how the intensity can ramp up when the compensation is zero. On one hand, payment motivates people. On the other hand, when you hire volunteers you have selected for people who find pushing their specific view of the Holocaust to be its own reward. This is not likely to make the situation easier to resolve.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  As far as I'm am aware most traditional encyclopedias rely on experts for such things, backstopped by traditional corporate governance. So basically the corporate owners pick experts based on their own motives and those experts set the direction and fine tuning of articles. Really the only group decision making happening is small committees (who can be overriden by executives) and the board of directors.

dvt 4y ago

The article that Grabowski[1] wrote seems extremely heavy-handed and reeks of having an axe to grind. I am no fan of Wikipedia or their incessant edit wars, bad information and bickering, but Prof. Grabowski does not seem tempered in his criticism (going as far as calling out specific editors, which seems unprofessional to say the least). Looking into his sources is also a bit dubious, occasionally providing conclusions as being prima facia obvious, which (at least to me) is hard to swallow given an ultra-charged topic of discourse like the Holocaust. As an example, the "Jew with a Coin" Polish statuette caricature mentioned in the article is certainly offensive and insensitive, but calling it blanket anti-Semitisim needs some evidentiary work (whereas Grabowski considers it an obvious implication). [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

frozenport 4y ago
If they don't call editors it unverifiable. Sometimes you gotta call the bad actors by name.
twawaaay 4y ago
The "Jew with a Coin" is antisemitic. The coin is used in this case to symbolise greed which antisemites here automatically assign to all Jews. (I know, I am a Pole)
- catiopatio 4y ago
  I’m curious of your assessment of the Wikipedia article’s accuracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin It takes a more measured tone than your own, but the practice still seems rooted in deeply anti-semitic tropes.
  - dvt 4y ago
    Hm, yeah, all of a sudden I think I'm more on Grabowski's side. This is extremely weasel-worded: "Opinions about the motif vary; some cultural studies scholars believe it promotes Polish–Jewish dialogue or view it as harmless folklore or nostalgia, while others believe it is an antisemitic and offensive stereotype." Maybe you can argue the trinkets aren't in themselves anti-Semitic, but I completely agree with you that they're 100% undeniably rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. I mean even the word "nostalgia" there is weird. Nostalgia for what?

PicassoCTs 4y ago

There was alot of horrific things that went on in those "in-between-empire" countries, that got steam rolled regularly, reappeared half digested during defeats and either imitated there old masters, hoping to keep independent by mimicry or in re-aligning with new empires, imagining those who suffered the wrath of other empires, to be more sympathetic. Those trying to transcend nationalism and imperialism of course were there mortal enemies, as they subverted the endeavor for freedom and independence. Im pretty certain some dreamed aloud about becoming the muscovites instead of the muscovites. The bandera activities on polish jews come to mind https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778 and the formation of collaborator legions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaboration_with_N... and the sovjet union punished them severely, after hitler fed them into the churning war. There was a corner house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_House_(Riga) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_House_(Riga)) in every occupied city, and a room with swiss-cheese walls in ever one of those houses. The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has infected the us at the core and is slowly eroding its values away. It has put up a good fight though, allowing for example other cultures, languages, ideas and countries to flourish relatively free in its influence sphere. And there are still competing traditional empires, yearning for the g(l)ory days, of mercantilism and neverending sunsets or worse still revenge, for imagined slights received aeons ago. I honestly do not know how to overcome it, but it certainly seems, that people who experience empires in there daily lifes, suppressed by hierarchies into miserable servitude with no actual control & freedom, are more susceptible to projecting there pride upon these expansionists behemoths. Is all this past any justification for the atrocities of russia against ukraine today? No. Never was. Never will be.

nivenkos 4y ago
> The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has infected the us at the core I think the Guatemalans, Chileans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Libyans, etc. could tell you that the US has been an empire for quite a long time...

lynguist 4y ago

Interesting. It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia Croatian Wikipedia was used to deliberately and succesfully instill nationalist and neo-fascist points of view onto the users of the page, young people in Croatia. The really odd thing is that literally 4 Wikipedias were started in the Serbo-Croatian language: the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, the Serbian Wikipedia, the Croatian Wikipedia, and the Bosnian Wikipedia. The Croatian one is often the most biased one. — I often read the English and the German Wikipedias. I found that I can edit the English Wikipedia and my changes are accepted, my changes on the German Wikipedia however are rejected. The English Wikipedia is up-to-date. In topics such as computers or science or popular culture, it is very accurate. The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don’t have any of the recent developments, and the information is very outdated. If I read history, English and German Wikipedias present completely different articles, where the German one tends to be better and unbiased. Only in these topics (history and the like) the easy editability of the English Wikipedia makes it a target and victim of misinformation and bias.

tablespoon 4y ago
> The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don’t have any of the recent developments, and the information is very outdated. There are a lot of English Wikipedia pages like that, too. Sometimes it's pretty blatant, like super-comprehensive list of something that just stops in 2013 or something.
mgdlbp 4y ago
It may be interesting also to compare a revision of each actually from 2006.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tablespoon 4y ago

> Sometimes that abuse is relatively easy to identify. In 2019, ArbCom disciplined the two editors most involved in this subject area, instituting a topic ban for their “incivility and inflammatory rhetoric.” But what about the more insidious cases when there are no blatant signs of harassment? Wikipedians told me that these “civil” disputes are much more challenging to resolve because of a key jurisdictional issue: ArbCom has authority to decide on user conduct disputes but is not permitted to rule on article content. Also Wikipedia's toxic culture often refuses to call a spade a spade, and gives some favored problematic editors a long leash to be uncivil, so long as they learn to avoid a few of the most blatant unacceptable behaviors. IMHO, they need to be more consistent and more final with their bans, because a community with a lot of individuals who've been taught how to obscure their misbehavior and/or expertly push it right up to the line is still a shitty community.

the_af 4y ago
This is a problem with any community, right? Regardless of how open it purports to be, if you don't belong to the trusted circle you are at a disadvantage. And you can only belong to that circle if you were there from the beginning or you spend a lot -- and I mean, a lot -- of time making yourself known so that they accept you. Most people don't have that kind of time. I don't know if this can be avoided.
- bjourne 4y ago
  That is fair, but the problem is that most people do not know that Wikipedia is run by various cliques. Article content does not converge to the "truth". Instead it converges to whatever those who has the most time to waste on Wikipedia believes the truth to be. Take Wikipedia's article on male circumcision. It very much underplays the ethical, moral, and physical issues associated with it because the clique that controls that article see no problem with cutting off unconsenting boys' body parts. People don't know that so when they read that article they think it is "fair" and "objective" which it is not.
  - doubleg72 4y ago

epolanski 4y ago

Politics, history, economics and many other fields will always spur debates. Little can be done here and there is no such thing as truth.

feoren 4y ago
> there is no such thing as truth This is exactly what people say when they want to re-write the truth to fit their ends. It may be hard to find out what the truth really is, it may even be impossible to get it 100% right, but there is an actual truth of what happened. Denying that gives power to liars.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  > but there is an actual truth of what happened. In terms of cold hard quantifiable facts -- "X happened" -- yes. But history isn't made of facts. History is made up of interpreting facts to form larger coherent narratives that mean things. It's saying "X happened because Y". It means assigning motivation and goals in the behavior of people and organizations -- all of which is ultimately subjective. It means making judgment calls about which events can be explained as inevitable given historical forces, versus which were essentially random. History isn't about the what, it's about the why. And no, there is no "actual truth" there. There is hopefully a gradually forming consensus, which then sometimes gets overturned decades later in a paradigm shift, then overturned again.
- Avicebron 4y ago
  There might be objective fact, but without a time machine.. Remember when that meme about the dress went around circa 2015? Whether the dress was gold/white, black/blue? People looked at the same thing and saw different things. In a philosophical sense, history is a lot like that.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    > People looked at the same thing and saw different things. However, the dress was an actual dress, which had an actual color. Sometimes it's hard to see what the truth is, but just because people look at the same thing and see different things, doesn't mean all of those things are equally valid.

wslh 4y ago

There is a stronger political discussion at country levels between Israel and Poland regarding this topic. It is easy searchable, you can find articles like this [1]. The author doesn't seem to study the topic in all extent. I suggest to read the paper which sets a more scientific ground to Wikipedia issues that other anecdotes. Beyond this specific topic, I don't know of topics which enable a level of discussion of this caliber. [1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-06-30/ty-article/.highlight/why-israels-new-government-is-finally-standing-up-to-polands-holocaust-revisionism/0000017f-e88e-dc91-a17f-fc8f6b8b0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-06-30/ty-article/.h...

chx 4y ago

Eastern European history topics insidiously edited by the far right? Where did I hear that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747388 So far we have Wikipedia admitting Croatia and Poland and if they were to look I am sure they would find interesting things in Hungary as well as I pointed out.

the_af 4y ago

Anyone who has tried to deal with Wikipedia on any remotely controversial topic knows this is true (from the article): > Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or energy to fight. This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my single most visited website ever. But in the end, what stays there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to fight for. It can be exhausting to try to correct something if you don't have limitless time or don't "know" the right people, which makes Wikipedia way less open than it pretends to be. Then again, I wouldn't be able to edit an article on the Encyclopedia Britannica...

TMWNN 4y ago
>This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my single most visited website ever. Me too. >But in the end, what stays there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to fight for. "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827>
throw0101c 4y ago
> Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or energy to fight. DoS? > Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[5] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[6] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

rzlemidsq 4y ago

Based on the editors involved and the subject matter, this is a re-run of one of Wikipedia's most famous scandals: the Eastern European Mailing List (EEML).[0] The EEML was a group of Eastern European editors who set up a secret mailing list to coordinate their activities in their never-ending nationalist edit wars, primarily (but not only) against Russian editors. Secretly coordinating over a back channel is a real no-no in Wikipedia culture, because it allows a group of editors to completely subvert the rules. For example, one of Wikipedia's bright red lines is that no editor may revert the same page more than three times in 24 hours.[1] If you have a secret mailing list with all your like-minded editors, you can always just send out a request for someone else to revert on your behalf. That's exactly what the EEML did. Two things made the EEML special. First, they had an admin in their ranks (Piotrus, who is also a party to this latest Arbcom case about Polish-Jewish history), who was actively scheming with them to sideline and ban their enemies. That gave them significantly more power than a random group of editors would have had. Second, their entire mailing list was published by Wikileaks. Yes, Wikileaks, not Wikipedia. The speculation is that there was a mole in the EEML, who eventually passed their correspondence to Wikileaks. You can read a sample of the messages from the EEML here: [2]. There was a big argument over whether Arbcom should even consider the evidence from Wikileaks, or whether that would violate the privacy of the EEML editors. But Arbcom did end up taking the emails into account, because how could it not? The emails were pretty spectacular, showing all sorts of underhanded scheming: things like, "You, you and you will push editor X's buttons, and when he responds, I'll report him for incivility." The EEML editors mostly got off the hook with a slap on the wrist. You would think they would have gotten permanently banned, but somehow, they weren't. Several of them have remained extremely active in Eastern European nationalist edit wars, and are in fact now parties to this new case. This latest case centers around the history of antisemitism in Poland, and particularly around the involvement of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust. One of the biggest flashpoints was an article about a supposed concentration camp for non-Jewish Poles.[3] The camp never existed. It's an urban legend, invented in order to claim that non-Jewish Poles were equal victims as Polish Jews. But there was a big fight between Polish nationalist and Israeli editors over the article. Ah, Wikipedia, what a miserable place. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern_European_mailing_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:3RR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:3RR 2. https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotrus https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr... 3. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-04/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-fake-nazi-death-camp-wikipedias-longest-hoax-exposed/0000017f-e367-d568-ad7f-f36f77000000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-04/ty-article-ma...