Wikipedia Put a Near Total Ban on Calling Gaza Health Ministry "Hamas-Run" | Hacker News Reader

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

jewishjournal.com

25 pointsmostcallmeyt20 comments

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.

> 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.

And that's exactly the reason why you need to label it: most people reading English language media like Wikipedia aren't going to make that kind of mental correction. That's only the kind of thing someone who is both already knowledgeable and reading in a guarded way would do.

I think the opposite, most people don’t know how hamas controls Gaza. Most don’t know the difference between Gaza and the West Bank.

It seems more like whitewashing the numbers for ill informed people

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.

A lot of critical coverages against Wikipedia have indeed appeared lately.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio...

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4703442

https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltra...

https://forward.com/opinion/550600/wikipedia-holocaust-disin...

https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/wikipedia-road-highway-...

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202401124365

https://theconversation.com/wikipedias-volunteer-editors-are...

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/12/the-hofmann-wobble-wikip...

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

Aaron Bandler of Jewish Journal also wrote many articles criticizing Wikipedia's antisemitic problems in the wake of October 7 attacks too. Not to mention "The Wikipedia Flood" blog which is posting more reports on Wikipedia.

> A lot of critical coverages against Wikipedia have indeed appeared lately.

Which is good, because irrespective of any particular political controversy, Wikipedia has way more goodwill than it deserves. People should look at it way, way more critically, and stop with the hagiographic praise.

Completely agree. In the long term though it's not surprising if the US Congress eventually set up a special committee to open investigations against Wikipedia and possibly other websites, because as can be seen below, some Wikipedia admins have been implicated in serial harassments against women and even actual employees of the USG.

https://www.reddit.com/r/justwikipediathings/wiki/index

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.

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?

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 )

i think they just hate not seeing a magnet link for the nyt genocide enabling style guide

I bet you felt a real rush of pride after writing that.

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