The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
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The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
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Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#2Clearly the system is not working, and this isn't about editor/ideologues taking over the Wikipedia entry for a favorite game or public figure, but an entire nation. I'm Croatian, and while I've never used the site, I could see my kids going there for a school assignment and getting horrible ahistoric nonsense in the their heads.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#3Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone seems to have no values.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#4Looks like it's time to fork. And this seems to have already happened:
> Many editors, including some of the dissenting admins, have left Croatian Wikipedia. Those who haven't abandoned Wikipedia altogether are resigned to edit elsewhere, chiefly at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia.
All that's left now is for Wikipedia to drop Croatian.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#5Tbh that just sounds like the regular Wikipedia editing drama.
"Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda. This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#6>There is no tangible evidence of mass executions [taking place in the Jasenovac concentration camp]
Shame that there are no links in the article pointing to the Croatian wiki articles in questions, the one on Ante Pavelić, for instance, states that the estimated number of victims in Jasenovac is 70 000 - 80 000 people. "Među ustaškom logorima najpoznatiji je Sabirni logor Jasenovac, gdje je, prema pretpostavkama, stradalo od 70 000 - 80 000 ljudi." https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#7Steering clear of the underlying, complicated regional politics:
The survivor (victim/perpetrator/some of both/neither) writes history, descendants rewrite it. (How else would we get "Whalers on the Moon?") Yet, the web complicates it as a living organism of impermanence/bit-rot, fiefdom platforms and essentially unaccountable anonymity.
Further complicating reality, bias is as inescapable as the human condition, the unconscious variety being somewhat irreducible; while the integrity of the amateur copywriter (fairness, completeness, quality, accuracy and correctness) is implicitly (if not explicitly) socially-contracted to deliberately aspire to such ideals in each task.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#8Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone seems to have no values.
To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows: It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by default.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#9Tbh that just sounds like the regular Wikipedia editing drama. "Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda. This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.
Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative expertise/oral history. I had a guitarist Wikipedia editor tell me that a niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that industry. Smh. History lost forever.
Re: The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
#10As others have noted, I don't think this is an entirely unique situation. The decentralized nature of Wikipedia's editorship results in these kind of situations with fair frequency.
> Something can be factually true, but where there is a number of facts, choosing the less important ones and omitting the more important ones tends to lead to wrong conclusions. According to sources, Tito was both an autocrat and a dictator, and stating only the milder qualification is an unacceptable act, an act of vandalism.
I think the above quote from the article gets to the root of the problem - when it comes to politics and history (especially on Wikipedia), the game of framing can always be played where something can be made to look either good or bad by the accentuation of certain facts and the omission or downplaying of other facts.