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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this during the election. As soon as Kamala become the contender, it was edited out that her father was described as a "marxist scholar" by a college newspaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...

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They also removed a big part of her page when she was a primary candidate in 2019/2020 about a man she intentionally kept in prison despite knowing he was innocent. Wikipedia is absolutely a political battleground. Take a look at this old version of her 2019 page about Daniel Larsen [1] and compare it with her current Wikipedia page.

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

> Wikipedia is absolutely a political battleground.

Even the titles are a place of political warfare. For example, note carefully which incidents are labelled as "riots" and which as "unrest", and try to find any objective, politically neutral principle that could explain those results.

I think that when a wealth of other reliable sources don't describe an economist as Marxist, Wikipedia shouldn't give precedence to a single op-ed in the Stanford Daily from 1976.

You're focusing on when the word "Marxist" was removed in 2024, but you might want to consider when it was added to the article (in August 2020, about two weeks after Harris was selected to be the vice presidential nominee): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...

You say it was added in August 2020, but the article was created in August 2020.

Not much of an indictment that additional information was added sometime shortly after the article was created.

Did you look into why? They always list the reasons. How long had it been on the page?

It had been at least 2 years. [] Never became much of a contentious issue until Kamala was looking at the presidential nomination, from what I can tell, then suddenly there was a vicious fight to remove it based on reasoning that mysteriously didn't exist for years and years before that.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...

Edit: at least ~4 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...

Or, it wasn't important enough to merit editorial discussion prior to that.

Flipping

>Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.

>A controversial topic will become important enough to merit editorial discussion

Is an interesting point. I think I will vouch you just for the genius of flipping it.

Another great example is when the "Cultural Marxism" article was converted into "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory", an entirely different article claiming that the concept of cultural marxism was actually always a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory", complete with a section relating it to Gamergate. It's so ridiculous, it's almost funny to read.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped...

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

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