Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
It should be, as daenney posted: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...>
> The prowling may be foiled due to wrong footing, which may wake up the whole family. They intruder may get chased away with hot water splashed on him, or be thrown out of the window. Strict parents chase the intruder or threaten him with marriage or a stick while liberal ones pretend to be asleep even if they know the prowler is around. This is more likely if they know the prowler is a suitor they would like to have for their daughter. It is not difficult to guess who the prowler might be in small close-knit villages.
> Boys generally attempt to complete the task and make a quick exit if the parents of the girl are in and may stay longer if the girl is alone. It is in some places a custom that a boy discovered in the morning by the parents shall become the husband of the girl, but usually the boy and the girl make sure that the boy exits before the parents get up in the morning. If he oversleeps, they may still find a way to sneak out.
> In part due to the lack of proper understanding of the practice and partly due to the influence of westernized urban bias towards the primitive folk practices of rural communities, modern Bhutanese urbanites, particularly those who are engaged in development and gender issues and who carry out their conversations in English, have inaccurately used the misnomer ‘night hunting’ in English to refer to this traditional practice although neither the word ‘night’ nor the word ‘hunting’ exists in the original terms used to refer to it in places where it is practised. The misnomer leads to a serious misinterpretation of the practice and leads the audience to think that there is a degree of exploitation and abuse, objectification, and animality involved as the word ‘hunting’ would imply.
https://texts.mandala.library.virginia.edu/text/bomena-night... by Karma Phuntsho, Bhutanese scholar. I recall similar practices in other societies, such as Cambodian 'love huts' that fathers build for their daughters, where suitors might come to her at night.
The grandparent commenter might be annoyed by the later section? But it is not a "nationalist defence", it's just putting the practice in context.
Where can I read more about it? (other than Wikipedia) Now I'm curious if it's just a way for young people who still live with parents (like, most people in Asia's rural areas) to have sex, or non-consentual rape is really rampant there. Sure regional nationalists aren't objective, but outsiders aren't necessarily objective either, because they often judge foreign cultures through the prism of their own cultures, see "culture shock"
[..] This essay will show how the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. We will show how a handful of editors steer the historical narrative away from evidence-driven research toward a skewed version of history touted by right-wing Polish nationalists. [..]
It reads like someone losing an editor war and taking the conversation to some other medium where the people involved in the process have no way to address, let alone present facts or even their case.
Wikipedia is vulnerable to coordinated, tendentious editing, and the "in Wikipedia" process has no effective way, nor even will, to address it. Making accusation itself can get you sanctioned.
Wikipedia is not a primary source. Wikipedia quotes primary sources. If you insist in pushing a belief that's not supported by primary sources then you are the problem, not wikipedia.
To me this article reads like someone trying to push unfounded propaganda I'm wikipedia to whitewash conspiracy theories with a veneer of authoritative source, but was stopped by their inability to present primary sources that supports his personal claim.
Once that character lost an edit war, he resorted to attack wikipedia with yet another conspiracy theory.
It's telling that the article has been framed with a conspiracy behind wikipedia while leaving the supposed sources as unquestionable.
Your original question at the top of this thread made it seem like you had a reasonable meta-question about whether it’s appropriate to “escalate” editorial conflicts to a journal, and that was answered by several posters. But I don’t think you really had a question: you seem to have a dog in this fight. Might I suggest that HN is not the right forum to pursue it.
Holocaust denial is a long lived conspiracy theory. There is no way of getting around that fact.
> Your original question at the top of this thread made it seem like you had a reasonable meta-question about whether it’s appropriate to “escalate” editorial conflicts to a journal (...)
There is no escalation. There's at best a blatant attempt to throw accusations in a way that prevents those attacked of defending themselves, and at worst there is libel.
Let's look at the facts: the wikipedia article on the Holocaust is clear in pointing out that the 6 million figure was actually provided by the leading Nazi official responsible for the Holocaust. The same wikipedia article then says in no unclear terms that "Historians estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000." What exactly is questionable about these facts? Nothing.
I'll assume you meant secondary sources.
I would normally agree. The original idea was for dispassionate scholarly discussions followed by consensus. Except that gangs who have no intention of allowing that to happen can and do circumvent that process. Bullying, hostility, gaslighting and weaponizing sanction procedures are tools in the toolbelt of these gangs, and as I said there is no effective in-Wikipedia process for recognizing and defeating it. There is in fact a willful denial that this is even a possibility, which essentially guarantees that it's rampant.
The particular topic is not surprising either because it is very important to modern politics.
The whole concept of an editor war is a fascinating topic in itself.
If the folks arguing the other side feel differently, then can certainly respond in a similar forum.
ETA: Or failing that they can hunt down any open Internet forum that is discussing the article and brigade it with opinionated takes. Which may explain what’s happening in this HN thread.
This sort of whataboutisn is a blatant attempt at reframing the issue as an irrational ideological battle where one side just so happens to be winning instead of what it really is: a random guy trying to push unfounded conspiracy theories into a medium designed to express consensus supported by primary sources.
* Essentially have regional or clustered versions of events/history
For example, Afghanistan will have a different perspective on the US invasion than the US, but I think there’s value in seeing what the other thinks. (Does *not* necessarily imply one is more correct than the other)
Then have some sort of ranking system where (not sure how this would happen) votes can be had on which perspective is more correct. This hopefully would weed out the intense/false perspectives, but still gives people the ability to see the different ones.
A core problem we have is what constitutes misinformation/disinformation/propaganda/truth
I think the incorrect approach we’ve tried to take is either having a vetting committee/website that evaluates what is true, or just outright censorship. This fuels the actual conspiracy theories because they can use this as grounds for their cause (since, at times these vetting bodies are verifiably wrong)
We cannot withhold information, it travels too quickly and is easy to circumvent without total authoritarian control.
And all it takes is a few “valid” cases for the authoritarian seeds to be sown in the soil of good intentions
But we can generate unending oceans of bullshit. If you can't stop the truth, then make up unnumbered truths that wear down the most avid learners. Democracies vote in tyrants all the time, votes are easily bought in any number of ways.
* the number of people who died as a result of ghettoization, genocide, and indirect deaths (disease, suicide, etc) was far higher than 6 million
* the number of Jews murdered by German SS, local blackguards, and in death camps is between 4.5 million and 5.5 million, with 6 million being an off the cuff estimate in the aftermath of the Holocaust ( https://yvng.yadvashem.org/ )
* investigating and accumulating evidence of the deaths of the Holocaust for the purposes of evidence and historical research is valid and should continue
* Litigating the number of dead is an extremely common tactic of Holocaust deniers, as if 1 or 2 million dead would be just reasonable domestic policy
* this article is conflating the latter with the former
* commentary on the above without deep knowledge of the research of Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Museum, and other major reaearchers of the Holocaust (no matter one's position on Wikipedia or the Holocaust) is 100% ineffective
* including this comment.
Note that 20% of Poland’s population died in WWII, and many more Eastern European civilians were murdered in that region than Jews were throughout Europe:
https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II/Costs-of-the-w...
The Wikipedia controversy is talking about 4.5 vs 6 million Jewish deaths in camps, out of the total of ~11 million killed in those camps. Also, scorched earth military tactics killed many civilians too. Poland lost 5.6 million; Russia lost 7 million.
There was even an official holocaust denial policy in post war Germany, where they claimed there was no racial discrimination against Roma gypsy groups, and only criminals were sent to the concentration camps:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-o...
Anyway, there were many victims of genocide in WWII. Most were not jewish, but historians tend to ignore groups that were being killed by allied Russia (and, of course, Japan).