• Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I was more specifically referring to the part in the table portion (whatever that’s called. The very top first area) that says something like “recognized as a genocide by X number countries”. It’s just putting that out there right off the bat for the average person going “wait a second… I thought this was… ah! Yeah! I knew it! Genocide denier!” My faith in humans to read beyond that table is… low.

    But even if they scroll to the intro that you quoted, I mean, that is such a lightly veiled accusation. Like if a neutral statement is a 5/10, I’d say that’s 7/10 towards accusatory. Maybe that’s my bias. Including “man-made” in the intro, I dunno, I wouldn’t do it ESPECIALLY when it’s now become a hot issue for liberals and right wingers to call the Holodomor a genocide. The author is just fueling their beliefs, imo.

    I suppose this delves into ethics and such around authorship of pages like this and their responsibility to limit misunderstandings and false narrative propagation. I personally believe science and history writers, even if writing a summary for a wiki, do have this responsibility to make clear that while there might be controversy on a subject, it’s manufactured controversy. Like a Wikipedia on abortion I would expect (I haven’t looked) to NOT mention anything about pro-life, God, etc. until some later section specifically labeled “Controversies” and then lay out why people have an issue with it from purely non-scientific, non-medical, purely theological and ideological bases. The same should be done regarding the Holodomor. It can be in the introduction even, but briefly mentioned with something like “some far right coalitions in certain countries have attempted to classify the famine as genocide for ideological reasons.” That’s a factual statement. I’m sorry if that hurts right wingers feelers when they read it on Wikipedia BUT ITS TRUE and putting up vaguely worded things and starting off the article by saying “all these countries call it a genocide!” is representing the right wing narrative.

    There’s other examples on Wikipedia of doing misinformation or “kinda true if you ask the right wingers” shit. The Korean War is an easy one. It says the DPRK started the war when it crossed the border (they mean the US-created 38th parallel which neither side considered significant or a border). History shows that the US and US controlled SK instigated the war and the DPRK was defending its fledgling democracy. See a problem with accusing defenders of being attackers? I do. And it just happens to be the US’s official stance on the war… which… do I need to say the US is lying? Does that need to be said?

    Anyway, this was a bit scattered, but my point summarized is Wikipedia tends to always take pro-US stances and anti-USSR (and adjacent countries) stances, which is a big fucking problem considering the US constantly lied during the Cold War making these narratives up and now they’re repeated forever on Wikipedia. I’m not a fan.