One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia (2021) | Hacker News Reader

One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia (2021)

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5 pointsthrowrqX7 comments

People like her are the reason I believe in Wikipedia.

One thing I hope they'd do is to better curate their pages on historical revisionism, negationism, pseudohistory, and the like in order to better keep track of all the bad, false, or fabricated sources flying around.

Of course, academia and its funders are partly to blame because OA has not still caught up that well.

As someone did not like my comment, I can add that it is not just this particular case; many historical events and episodes are subject to the same thing. For instance, this case is highly debated here with lots of dubious claims, opinions, and non-academic sources thrown around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization

As archives are not really yet available, its mostly weaponized in politics even today.

> lots of dubious claims, opinions, and non-academic sources thrown around

Can you expand on the issues with that article, please? As a non-Finn, I don't have the background to critique the article content or understand what's wrong with it.

I don't have time to go into the details, but mostly it seems quite okay as is, although the sources are mostly from US commentators. You might consult the editors who have done quite a good job with the article on the Finnish Civil War, which is well-sourced with primary Finnish sources.

As for why it is a thorny issue here: there are still a lot of high-ranked Finnish people from the Cold War era with all kinds of (past) connections to both the east and the west. The real historical scholarship on this topic starts only after the Finland-related KGB and CIA archives are opened, which might still take something like 50+ years.

Thankyou!

I live in Estonia (I am not Estonian) and while I know Finland and Estonia are similarly linguistically and culturally, I also know there are huge differences often due to the decades of USSR influence or occupation, respectively.

Re your comment on the cold war era and people still having influence, I read this article about a double agent coming to light only through his posthumous memoirs today: https://news.err.ee/1608974018/double-agent-secret-revealed-...

Thanks for posting that; it was a good spy story with a happy end. There are probably many more with not such happy ends, and also some recent cases (like Mr. Herman Simm).

By the way, there would be a lot to patch up also in Wikipedia regarding Estonia's post-1989 history. Also Finnish-Estonian relations are mostly absent except a word or two on the page about the Singing Revolution. Finland's reluctance to fully engage during the events between 1985-1991 is also something that is not considered a proud moment of history here by some people.

You're right - in fact, the History section of the Wikipedia page on Estonia seems to end with the restoration of independence. Nothing about the three decades since.

I noted a few other things that seem to be portrayed in a sanitized fashion. For example, the section on natural resources notes the presence of forest and nothing at all about the huge controversy about how much is being logged, including in national parks.

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