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Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

jewishjournal.com

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Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#4
post #2

Excellent reporting. We need more insights like this into Wikimedia's/Wikipedia's political decisions. They have power and power needs to be scrutinized.

Is this bad or good in your opinion?

Is what good or bad?

Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#5
post #2

Excellent reporting. We need more insights like this into Wikimedia's/Wikipedia's political decisions. They have power and power needs to be scrutinized.

Is this bad or good in your opinion?

[flagged]

Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this bad or good in your opinion?

Is what good or bad?

Isn’t that obvious ? “The hamas-run health ministry is reporting 40,000 deaths” is a not-so-subtle way make the number questionable… But some will say mentioning hamas is fair, because it is factually true that it runs the government. No wording is neutral… all newspapers have style guides and guidelines and “elements of language”, the NYT ones for the US-funded destruction of Palestine leaked not so long ago, the ones for Israel counter-terrorism operations by Wikipedia is in the article… (see, no wording is neutral, I guess everyone hates me now )

Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#7
I dunno, the problem with processes is that they still get it wrong sometimes. But absent any sort of process all you get is trash. Wikipedia has managed to maintain a certain credibility in the world largely due to these democratic processes. Do the processes fail sometimes, sure. But I'll take this over 4chan any day.

In the meantime, the only government-like structure left in Gaza is Hamas, and so if you say the Gaza Health Ministry, anyone who knows what's going on, understands that Gaza is run by Hamas, which makes the reporting super dubious, AND clearly Hamas-run. So I think for most people, it is super redundant to use it every time it's referenced. Once at the top of an article as a quick reminder, sure. But to insist that the name of the organization is the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which is a ministry of the Hamas-run Gaza government, that's foolish and only useful for folks with a specific agenda.

Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#8
Is this just for article where Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) is mentioned, e.g., an article about a particular fight that says something like "The Gaza Health Ministry reports 241 casualties", or does this also apply to articles about GHM?

If it is just for articles that mention GHM but are not about GHM then it seems reasonable. The text "Gaza Health Ministry" in those articles should link to the GHM article and people can click that if they want to find out more about GHM including who controls it.

In general this seems like it would be a reasonable policy for pretty much any organization or person that has a Wikipedia page. When an organization or person is mentioned on another page it should only need qualification if the qualifier is the reason it is being mentioned.

Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#9
And this over an article that gets on average 200 pageviews a day... I run my own wiki project and this sorta political bike-shedding would get you labeled as a troublemaker and then thrown out, though I envy how wikipedia can survive with this kinda democratization where the inmates are running the asylum and it mostly performs flawlessly. I step away for a day and my inmates have regressed to speaking in wingdings and trying to eat the moderators.

Re: Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run"

#10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this bad or good in your opinion?

[flagged]

Globally ? Nope … “by western governments and a few others” is more accurate ( most liberation movements are called terrorist at some point, most French called their internal resistance in WWII terrorists, only to use the same word for groups who fought France in their decolonization (Viet-Minh, FLN)

Terrorism is not even defined in international laws ; the more generic notion is war crime is used. ( not that lexical discussions change much for the civilians of any side who lose their lifes … )

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