Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust

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30 pointsxenophonf21 comments

15 years ago, the line was "you shouldnt trust wikipedia, because ANYONE could edit it! Those are not official sources!"

now, we've learned that you shouldn't trust wikipedia exactly because those same "official sources" edit it to align with their geopolitical interests.

Then again, we knew that 15 years ago - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia-idUSN1...

They've learned from their mistakes.

These days, people effortlessly get their beliefs enshrined in Wikipedia by paying "journalists" (freelance writers, not actual investigative journalists) to write fluff pieces, which then get cited as factual.

And then in a year or two linkrot happens and now the article exists as some useless thing.

which doesn't matter, because the op is done.

Even the most cursory venture into a Wikipedia talk page usually reveals a Pandora's Box of vitriol, turf wars, ideological zealotry, personal attacks, bad-faith debate, and a pervasive, misanthropic anger, typically coming from long-standing contributors with a huge editing history. They said you don't want to see how the sausage is made, well in the case of Wikipedia the factory seems to double as a toxic waste processing plant. Ever since I realised this was the culture behind the curtain at Wikipedia, I've become far more skeptical about any topic that is remotely controversial.

Exactly. Wikipedia is mainly an ideological turf war, and the combatants are usually pretty toxic and seem to have pretty major personality problems (which are frequently overlooked and forgiven if they have a long tenure and/or align more or less with the Wikipedia zeitgeist.

Even seemingly uncontroversial history/culture articles can be affected [1], though those tend to be fixable after some time, because they get far less attention from the main combatants.

[1] e.g. some nationalist trying to push their agenda by claiming important cultural artifacts/practices of their neighbor actually come from the nationalist's country, using dubious sourcing and interpretation.

This does not seem like a good faith engagement. I scrolled to a random page and it said, "Take the claim in the History of the Jews in Poland article, that Jews have specific physical characteristics." This makes it sound like some kind of antisemitic statement. I checked the cited revision of the Wikipedia article and it stated, "Jews with the specific physical characteristics were particularly vulnerable."[1] This matches the source, which says, "Jews with the physical characteristics of curly black hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, a long nose were in special jeopardy."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Je...

[2] https://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/reference/encyclopedia/#e...

Holocaust is terrible, and terribly complex subject to study. In this particular context, I also suppose it is hard to find balanced views. Most people who speak on the topic have a significant agenda.

Without in any way attacking or discrediting Jan Grabowski, one of the coauthors, he also has an agenda (and that's fine). See for example this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Grabowski#Views

Distilling the Wikipedia article (oh how ironic), Jan Grabowski's view appears to be that any commemoration of Poles who helped Jews during WWII is inappropriate, since it was dwarfed by those who cooperated with Nazis. There were certainly many who did, directly or indirectly, and I won't offer or dispute any numbers. But he seems to be against even mentioning those who unambiguously did help their Jewish neighbours.

He then authors a paper about how Wikipedia white-washes Polish involvement in the Holocaust. I can't help but feel the paper is influenced by his views - indeed, can a historian ever entirely divorce themselves from their views? But then, if true, the far-right nationalists editing articles on Wikipedia are also writing with an agenda.

I guess I just mean, I find it hard to be outraged by (clearly malicious if true!) personal-view-tainted edits on Wikipedia, based on a paper that also seems tainted by personal views.

Some interesting and concerning findings by these researchers. Especially the extent to which this type of intentional distortion remains on Wikipedia due to shortcomings in policy and oversight:

> Even when administrators try to adjudicate on content-related infractions, they often misunderstand the subject matter or condemn the wrong editor. One dramatic instance of administrators completely missing the mark occurred in summer 2019. Icewhiz presented evidence of multiple falsifications to the Arbitration Committee, including Poeticbent's aforementioned insertion of the so-called welcome banner in Białystok, and the fallacies concerning Jewish militias at Stawiski and Radziłów. Icewhiz asked for sanctions against Volunteer Marek, who had both restored the Jewish militia story in the 'Radziłów' article, and defended content borrowed from Mark Paul in the 'History of the Jews in Poland' article. The Arbitration Committee gave this case little attention, tied up as they were with another case (called Fram) taking place at the same time. [...] Moreover, the arbitrators had no expertise in Polish history and little sense of who was in the right. [...]

> The 2019 Arbitration Committee case ended dismally for defenders of historical accuracy. Instead of sanctioning Volunteer Marek for restoring unreliable sources and defending misrepresentations of sources, the administrators accused Icewhiz himself of distortion. Absurdly, they charged him with BLP violations for saying that Ewa Kurek had an 'outlandish interpretation' of the ghettos and that her work was 'questionable from historical and moral points of view,' blind to the fact that these were correct statements based on secondary sources. The arbitrators also claimed that Icewhiz had made an 'ethnically derogatory comment' simply by using the word 'Polocaust' to describe Piotrowski's argument, not realizing that Polish revisionists use this term to assert the equivalence between Polish and Jewish victimhood, and scholars use it to describe such revisionism.

I wonder if this issue generalizes to other topics on Wikipedia, and if so, which ones are similarly adversely affected by arbitration, administrative and policy failures.

Absolutely happens. It is more common than not, with anything controversial.

Wikipedia distortions are standard. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement stubbornly avoids mentioning the reality of the underlying demographic changes. There's a lively discussion on the talk page about this omission. Like writing about JFK assassination conspiracies without mentioning that JFK did, in fact, get shot.

Don't go to Croatian wikipedia. As bad as English wiki might be... oh man.

I once made a small observation on the talk page of a biography of a living person. This identical observation had been made many times in the talk page, I was to learn.

That observation lead inevitably and inexorably, within a single week, in masterly chess moves, by people obviously coordinating, well versed in the rules of Wikipedia and with ungodly amounts of spare time, to my being harassed, doxxed, and sanctioned by Wikipedia. It was the first time in over 15 years of editing I ever had a hint of anything like that happening. It was harrowing. I walked away and will never edit another page at Wikipedia. I tried to have my profile removed under my GDPR rights and got stonewalled.

Wikipedia has no defenses against motivated, coordinating gangs of editors who use the purported concept of consensus and scholarly truth-seeking as a weapon. Amazing.

I read your comment, this sentence in particular, and thought, I wonder if this is related to a very particular group of people known for such harassment:

> That observation lead inevitably and inexorably, within a single week, in masterly chess moves, by people obviously coordinating, well versed in the rules of Wikipedia and with ungodly amounts of spare time, to my being harassed, doxxed, and sanctioned by Wikipedia.

Decided to check your username on Wikipedia, went to your contribution history, and sure enough, it was those exact set of people I was thinking of.

Reminds me of how they treated former Wikipedia admin Athaenara when she made a similarly critical comment.

I'm sorry they inflicted their harassment tactics on you. I know how it feels, I had a similar experience a few years ago on a different forum and it soured me both to their activism and, after a long, critical look at what they were actually demanding, the entire concept behind their activism.

TL;DR Wikipedia has no defense against organized, bad actors. The institutional protection protocols are easily weaponized against unorganized and solo editors.

My experience wasn't so bad. I was less irritated by the harassment and doxxing than I was by Wikipedia's reaction. While that crew's behavior was an attempt to intimidate, I was not really intimidated, but I was deeply disappointed in Wikipedia.

Weird people gotta be weird, so I view them like the wind and sand, just part of the landscape. If I were to conclude that one whole class of people are bad because some people "supporting" them are bad, it'd be a bad conclusion. Every group has good and bad (and weird).

Wikipedia for their part has pseudo-legalistic protocols and policies that are byzantine, contradictory and hard to navigate, rewarding invested troublemakers and discouraging ordinary volunteers. In my case, the crew dug into my contribution history, manufactured an accusation and threw it at the wall to see if it would stick. To my naive surprise and disappointment, their transparently harassing accusation was upheld. The admin literally looked at multiple instances of harassment and supported it. Was the admin colluding with them? Does not matter. Not a community I want to participate in either way.

My conclusion from that experience is that, scratch the surface, and it's clear that Wikipedia as an institution has no effective defense against bad actors when - charitably - the thin line against are just solo, ordinarily volunteers like myself and a comparatively tiny full time staff.

In a world of professional troll farms, all Wikipedia articles that have real-world political meaning, on the Holocaust for example, will inevitably have effective, bad acting editors pushing false ideological agendas, as we see here in the paper. They can and do weaponize the current policies cynically to push out opposing editors.

It is an institutional problem and I don't see how it can be easily fixed.

Well, in today's world, there is just one group that will hunt you down, make your life miserable, harass you and your employer and so on - all this in the name of tolerance for minority.

And for some strange reason the society just accepted it. When people throw the worst shit at the creator of a popular book series,[0] we look away and pretend we don't see, otherwise they may turn their attention to us. It makes me sad because the good intentions have been turned into something fundamentally wrong.

[0] Apparently you can't even play the game based on it, at least in some circles.

> In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews.

If this is true, Wikipedia needs to take very strict action against these editors. Has Wikipedia made a statement in response to this paper? And -- has anyone (including the paper authors) worked to undo these changes?

I can well imagine this was the case; for example, there was a famous case of a "fake" Nazi death camp in Warsaw [1]. I don't understand the background, but for whatever reason it turns out this supposed camp was a right-wing nationalist narrative.

But I can also well imagine, and borderline remember, opposite things happening on Wikipedia too (i.e. Polish wartime history being manipulated and defaced).

I think it's fair to say Wikipedia is like catnip to any organised disinformation group. In particular, something as complex as the Holocaust, in general and also in the context of Polish wartime history, is best not left to a random sample of people with internet connection.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_concentration_camp#Disc...

Seems like this is a topic where there are high stakes riding on both sides of the story. The Polish nationalists want to rid themselves of this atrocity and so want to downplay it (at certain points if you deny certain facts, it becomes denial and so terrible).

But the Holocaust is also an important narrative for Israel to emphasize to get international support, and so out of all historical atrocities also gets more than it's proportional airtime. To be clear, the event is terrible, but there's also vested interests on the other side in continuing to make it very salient over other events in its category.

I can see you're being downvoted by both sides already.

I think the crux of the issue is scale. When people make sweeping statements like "Poles were helping Jews" and "Poles were giving Jews away to the Nazi", technically they are both true, but it really makes the difference how many people were in each group.

The thing is, memories are passed down in a different way. Every Polish family knows someone who helped the Jews during the war. Poles are also the most represented group among the Righteous Among the Nations which is statistically obvious since Jews had the largest population there (for good reasons). But when you pass on your memories, you don't mention anything wrong you might have done during the war.

Polish is the only language that has the word "szmalcownik"[0]. This means that these people existed. It is impossible to estimated them, but we know they were there, and that people hated them. So practically speaking you can make an infinite number of arguments on both sides, finding more and more actual cases, and never finish.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szmalcownik

But I can assure you, there are no other "group[s] of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed [ideological] versions" of anything else! /s

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