The curious case of Croatian wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Politics is getting extremely polarized in a lot of the western world. In Croatia, we never had non-polarized politics.
You can’t expect an open project to be healthier than the culture that fosters it.
You either restrict it, shut it down, or live with the dysfunction. Or, if you have the time and resource, create tons of red tape and the illusion of openness (i.e. Reddit).
"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.
Perhaps there is a need for a wiki-based encyclopedia that allows in-depth articles and information by experts, but WP has decided that it is not it.
This is putting too much weight and responsibility on Wikipedia and this kind of thought only serves to build up the narcissistic Dunning-Kruger editors/contributors rather than label Wikipedia for what it is: crowd-sourced, with all the drawbacks and caveats thereof.
If there is a piece of history you think is important, capture it someplace else so that it isn't lost forever.
> 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.
* The English wiki says "while his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian [..], Tito has traditionally been seen as a benevolent dictator."
* The German wiki calls Tito a dictatorial head of state.
* In the Italian wiki his is clearly a "dittatore".
* The spanish one does not seem to judge.
* Neither does the french one.
An example of something I encountered was that many articles on India in Wikipedia were written in a manner that is sort of child like, aiming at grandiose claims and conspiracy theories. It was obvious, reading from the outside, that it was nonsense.
Anyway, in general I find a English language Wikipedia pretty good where there is a lot of traffic but it looks like the rarer articles are where random people assert their propaganda.
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
> 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.
But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
Copying is so cheap these days that it often becomes intractable to erease it all.
> But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?
I often observe that we think that some things should be private but that we do not spend the effort to keep them that way.
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.
> I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.
By the same logic, for Thomas Jefferson, born 1743 in a British colony, it would be even more inappropriate to call him American, as that country didn't exist until 1776.
What's true however is that, historically, the ideologies of current nation states didn't exist in 1473, and that some categorizations used today are really ahistorical. Still, people knew which language their ancestors and family spoke, and there is some information about that in Wikipedia regarding Copernicus. That's something that means something even to us today, where we could live in one country and mostly speak one language but still don't deny that our family speaks another, or that we don't speak the language of our ancestors. E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
"With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey."