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Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

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81–90 of 96 posts

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#81
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History was always written by the victors, we only see it happen in real time now.

A simpler way to describe history that is happening in real time is things that are happening now . This is not a case of "history being written by the victors," this is an example of populations being propagandized by their governments and oligarchs about the things those governments and oligarchs are currently doing. The sense of alienation is overwhelming here. We're not reading stories about something that once h…

What’s a pivotal work of Walter Lippmann one could read?

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#82
post #69
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is unfortunately a very big issue and one of the reasons I didn't develop it further.

Why are you posting it again then?

In case you don't realize, I want to let you know that your post comes off as entitled and hostile.

It might not be a perfect tool, but it is interesting and freely given. Tools need not be perfect to be shared freely

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Royal Merchant Marine making huge efforts at resupply, and the UK's own material response.

I wasn't trying to claim that the USSR was the sole contributor to the defeat of the fascists, sorry if it sounded like that. I just wanted to make a pretty strong example of the winners rewriting history and how this propaganda becomes fact for the society. I'm sure everyone here agrees that it's good that the fascists lost the war and that the USA enabled Europe to stay democratic. It was a very brutal period of ti…

Ironically a better example of this would your own claim that focuses solely on the crimes of Nazism without any mention of Communist crimes. Since USSR was on the Allied side, Communism never quite turned into the embodiment of evil that Nazism has become. Due to this, today many academics are proud to call themselves Communists, whereas you would be hard-pressed to find any self-proclaimed nazis, at least in the mainstream of academia. All because history is written by the victors.

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#85
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't trying to claim that the USSR was the sole contributor to the defeat of the fascists, sorry if it sounded like that. I just wanted to make a pretty strong example of the winners rewriting history and how this propaganda becomes fact for the society. I'm sure everyone here agrees that it's good that the fascists lost the war and that the USA enabled Europe to stay democratic. It was a very brutal period of ti…

Ironically a better example of this would your own claim that focuses solely on the crimes of Nazism without any mention of Communist crimes. Since USSR was on the Allied side, Communism never quite turned into the embodiment of evil that Nazism has become. Due to this, today many academics are proud to call themselves Communists, whereas you would be hard-pressed to find any self-proclaimed nazis, at least in the ma…

I like to add a bit of historical context and that is that communism as an ideology,field of study and it’s ideas were quite spread out over Europe and beyond (Way before the Russian revolution and after)

Karl Marx ideas were very revolutionary for its time (a good primer can be found in the book The Value of Everything) and set a lot of ideas in motion. And there was also debate in that regard on how to institute communism. So communism could never reach the “evil” moniker like Nazism, even though it was apparent the Soviet Union was quite a brute. So the ideology was kind of separated cognitively from its implementation by the Soviet Union.

In the Cold War period, the SU was definitely seen as something that had to be defeated. There was a lot of fear of nuclear escalation between the superpowers. The Soviet Union was seen as different at best, and something to be defeated in all cases. And yes, also evil. Just watch some action movies from that time to get a general idea.

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#86
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you posting it again then?

In case you don't realize, I want to let you know that your post comes off as entitled and hostile. It might not be a perfect tool, but it is interesting and freely given. Tools need not be perfect to be shared freely

I found it bewildering that, if they see a “very big issue” with it, so much that they abandoned the project for that reason, that they would repost it again on HN without mentioning that upfront. One thing I missed is that the project hadn’t been open previously, which does explain the repost now, but still it would have been appropriate to mention the insight about its limitations in the submission. Personally I felt misled by the submission text upon reading the GP comment, hence my reaction.

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#87
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you don't realize, I want to let you know that your post comes off as entitled and hostile. It might not be a perfect tool, but it is interesting and freely given. Tools need not be perfect to be shared freely

I found it bewildering that, if they see a “very big issue” with it, so much that they abandoned the project for that reason, that they would repost it again on HN without mentioning that upfront. One thing I missed is that the project hadn’t been open previously, which does explain the repost now, but still it would have been appropriate to mention the insight about its limitations in the submission. Personally I fe…

An IP-based tool is still useful to catch casual malfeasance. The various Twitter bots logging edits from various government IP address ranges for example did highlight interesting edits sometimes. It's just important to remember that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Ultimately it's the structural weakness of Wikipedia that limits how much you can know about the contributors.

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#88
post #23

Pretty cool, please make it run under HTTPS

Seconded. My browser won't even connect over HTTP. This should be a must these days! It's so easy, Let's Encrypt makes it take 5 minutes to get a cert trusted by all modern browsers.

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#89
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't trying to claim that the USSR was the sole contributor to the defeat of the fascists, sorry if it sounded like that. I just wanted to make a pretty strong example of the winners rewriting history and how this propaganda becomes fact for the society. I'm sure everyone here agrees that it's good that the fascists lost the war and that the USA enabled Europe to stay democratic. It was a very brutal period of ti…

Ironically a better example of this would your own claim that focuses solely on the crimes of Nazism without any mention of Communist crimes. Since USSR was on the Allied side, Communism never quite turned into the embodiment of evil that Nazism has become. Due to this, today many academics are proud to call themselves Communists, whereas you would be hard-pressed to find any self-proclaimed nazis, at least in the ma…

For the record, i never claimed anything beyond that the public opinion changed over the years, likely because of propaganda. A lot of factors were at play, including the neverending resistance by good people, both in the Reich and occupied territory, the categorical extermination of educated people that didn't subscribe to the Nazi believes and more. Summing everything up to be because of "n" has always been incorrect.

Which is why I didn't attribute truth to either of these claims, instead I pointed out that the USSR would've likely taken over Europe without the direct involvement of the USA, i don't think that this is controversial at all, or do you believe they would've stopped in the middle of today's Germany if they weren't forced to?

Beyond that, Nazis are hardly vilified, because they're literally villainous. Please remember that Nazism isn't National Socialism, what the Nazi regime was based on. It was one specific version of it, which includes mass murdering vast amounts of people. You can make an argument that national socialism isn't necessarily bad, but doing the same for the Nazis means you also condone mass murder, as a simple example: exterminating queer people and people with disabilities was core to their doctrine.

I'm utterly at a loss how I'm supposedly ignoring the crimes of the USSR. Would I have been glad that the USA protected Europe from it if I considered them faultless?

Re: Show HN: Explore Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and governments

#90

I'm not sure why people are so downhearted by this kind of thing. It's well known that anything controversial on Wikipedia is going to have a lot of edit warring and people trying to control a narrative. What Wikipedia is best at is non-controversial topics. And that has always been the case. Even for controversial topics it's honestly surprising how more or less correct the articles tend to be. Wikipedia is not wher…

When it comes to current events, I think the advantage that Wikipedia has over traditional encyclopedias is not authoritative but rather referential. With most articles (such as historical events or scientific breakthroughs), Wikipedia converges to a pretty authoritative treatment of the subject and can be more accurate than a singe-source encyclopedia. With current events articles, Wikipedia provides a starting poin…

I agree. When you look at the sources used for controversial topics and dive down to the original primary sources (Wikipedia has rules against using primary sources for many subjects) you find that the actual information isn't what was reported.
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