
The curious case of Croatian wikipedia - dsego
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-08-30/Opinion
======
senko
For those outside Croatia, the drama perfectly reflects the politics of the
country. You have the left and right still bickering over WWII events and
shaping the "conversation", while the moderate majority is apathetic about the
whole thing ("don't use hr wikipedia" in this case, "emigrate" in real life).

Politics is getting extremely polarized in a lot of the western world. In
Croatia, we never had non-polarized politics.

~~~
pyuser583
This makes me feel weird about the problem. It’s one thing when a very small
minority takes control of an open projects. But when it’s simply a reflection
of larger social dysfunction ... what then?

You can’t expect an open project to be healthier than the culture that fosters
it.

You either restrict it, shut it down, or live with the dysfunction. Or, if you
have the time and resource, create tons of red tape and the illusion of
openness (i.e. Reddit).

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haunter
Tbh that just sounds like the regular Wikipedia editing drama.

"Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group
of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda.
This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with
Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.

~~~
duelingjello
Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative
expertise/oral history. I had a _guitarist_ Wikipedia editor tell me that a
niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and
places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that
industry. Smh. History lost forever.

~~~
FillardMillmore
I sympathize with your situation. People are fallible arbiters of truth and
relevancy. But why was the fact that this editor was a guitarist have
relevance? Was that his/her stated profession (and so by implication you're
saying they overestimate their ability as an editor in this particular field
of science industry ala Dunning-Kruger effect)?

~~~
ssss11
I think they’re saying the editor had expertise in, and had only edited,
guitar related Wikipedia pages previously.

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FillardMillmore
As others have noted, I don't think this is an entirely unique situation. The
decentralized nature of Wikipedia's editorship results in these kind of
situations with fair frequency.

> Something can be factually true, but where there is a number of facts,
> choosing the less important ones and omitting the more important ones tends
> to lead to wrong conclusions. According to sources, Tito was both an
> autocrat and a dictator, and stating only the milder qualification is an
> unacceptable act, an act of vandalism.

I think the above quote from the article gets to the root of the problem -
when it comes to politics and history (especially on Wikipedia), the game of
framing can always be played where something can be made to look either good
or bad by the accentuation of certain facts and the omission or downplaying of
other facts.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
It's the same game you play if you're a 'journalist' with a pre-decided
narrative. Let that narrative filter what gets reported, and what gets
emphasised, and you don't even have to lie.

~~~
ta09876
Not sure why the parent is gray, except maybe the scare quotes around
"journalist". You absolutely can influence the narrative with your choice of
which 10 stories to run of the 100 you have.

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scarejunba
I think I’d be suspicious of articles about a country edited by nationals of
that country if Pew Research shows that country as having relatively high
national pride. Usually, that manifests in an attempt to avoid shame by
altering representations of reality rather than being secure enough to handle
reality.

An example of something I encountered was that many articles on India in
Wikipedia were written in a manner that is sort of child like, aiming at
grandiose claims and conspiracy theories. It was obvious, reading from the
outside, that it was nonsense.

Anyway, in general I find a English language Wikipedia pretty good where there
is a lot of traffic but it looks like the rarer articles are where random
people assert their propaganda.

------
brna
>There is no tangible evidence of mass executions [taking place in the
Jasenovac concentration camp]

Shame that there are no links in the article pointing to the Croatian wiki
articles in questions, the one on Ante Pavelić, for instance, states that the
estimated number of victims in Jasenovac is 70 000 - 80 000 people. "Među
ustaškom logorima najpoznatiji je Sabirni logor Jasenovac, gdje je, prema
pretpostavkama, stradalo od 70 000 - 80 000 ljudi."
[https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87](https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87)

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billiam
Clearly the system is not working, and this isn't about editor/ideologues
taking over the Wikipedia entry for a favorite game or public figure, but an
entire nation. I'm Croatian, and while I've never used the site, I could see
my kids going there for a school assignment and getting horrible ahistoric
nonsense in the their heads.

------
lolc
Looks like it's time to fork. And this seems to have already happened:

> Many editors, including some of the dissenting admins, have left Croatian
> Wikipedia. Those who haven't abandoned Wikipedia altogether are resigned to
> edit elsewhere, chiefly at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia.

All that's left now is for Wikipedia to drop Croatian.

------
duelingjello
Steering clear of the underlying, complicated regional politics:

The survivor (victim/perpetrator/some of both/neither) writes history,
descendants rewrite it. (How else would we get _" Whalers on the Moon?")_ Yet,
the web complicates it as a living organism of impermanence/bit-rot, fiefdom
platforms and essentially unaccountable anonymity.

Further complicating reality, bias is as inescapable as the human condition,
the unconscious variety being somewhat irreducible; while the integrity of the
amateur copywriter (fairness, completeness, quality, accuracy and correctness)
is implicitly (if not explicitly) socially-contracted to deliberately aspire
to such ideals in each task.

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rospaya
Interesting, I mentioned this a few days ago in an HN comment. I'm a big fan
of Wikipedia and donate regularly, but it's nearly unusable in my mother
tongue.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702939)

------
Grue3
Wikipedia articles on any controversial topic are bound to be utterly useless,
because they tend to attract admins with a strong opinion on the topic who
proceed to ensure the article agrees with their POV. If there are admins with
different POVs, they don't attempt to reach the consensus, but rather try to
ensure the other one is banned or at least topic-banned.

------
dr_dshiv
Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone
seems to have no values.

~~~
lolc
To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows:
It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that
technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just
too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by
default.

~~~
FillardMillmore
I'm not sure if I'm convinced that technology leads to transparency by
default. I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record
or table from a database if the incentive was there. Of course, when you
consider distributed systems in which data for an entity or transaction is
spread across many different systems and infrastructures, it would be too
expensive to track down and eliminate all traces of the data.

But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?

~~~
lolc
> I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table
> from a database if the incentive was there.

Copying is so cheap these days that it often becomes intractable to erease it
all.

> But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?

I often observe that we think that some things should be private but that we
do not spend the effort to keep them that way.

------
RenRav
There are always skirmishes between ideologies on Wikipedia.

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stebann
In Argentina we have the other problem: the right media accuses Wikipedia to
be hijacked by leftists or peronists, because they don't like that biographies
of genocides of our last dictatorship and their civil accomplices (now in
politics) being exposed. The Right is the problem of our modern world.

------
znebby
For some background on the history in English Wikipedia:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Serbs_in_the_Ind...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Serbs_in_the_Independent_State_of_Croatia)

------
bobthechef
It’s difficult to tell how pervasive this problem is in the Croatian edition
as opposed to others (even this narrative may be “partisan”, but I don’t know
how the cited sources lean or who owns those media outlets). In any case,
there are some rather blatant examples in the English language version that
demonstrate the phenomenon, or at least half-assed solutions to neo-Nazi
distortions via special pleading (the article on Copernicus is a nice piece of
revisionism; in every historical reference I have ever come across, Copernicus
is referred to as a Polish astronomer, but because the editors where either
too foolish, cowardly in the face of German nationalism, or count neo-Nazis
among their ranks, they decided to remove the national adjective altogether.
Most articles do not conform to this practice which is why it’s a piece of
special pleading and a pernicious concession. Shame on them.)

~~~
Udik
I've checked that page and it seems pretty balanced to me- though I don't know
the subject and might be mistaken. As far as I understand, Copernicus was born
in a mixed German and Polish speaking area that had joined the Kingdom of
Poland only seven years before his birth. He was fluent in both German and
Polish. So I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be
inappropriate.

~~~
acqq
> joined the Kingdom of Poland only seven years before his birth.

> I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.

By the same logic, for Thomas Jefferson, born 1743 in a British colony, it
would be even more inappropriate to call him American, as that country didn't
exist until 1776.

What's true however is that, historically, the ideologies of current nation
states didn't exist in 1473, and that some categorizations used today are
really ahistorical. Still, people knew which language their ancestors and
family spoke, and there is some information about that in Wikipedia regarding
Copernicus. That's something that means something even to us today, where we
could live in one country and mostly speak one language but still don't deny
that our family speaks another, or that we don't speak the language of our
ancestors. E.g.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans)

"With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans
are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau
in its American Community Survey."

