Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 February 11

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February 11

File:18920000-gori-church-school-students-and-teachers-including-stalin.jpg

Please, can you edit in description the names of students and teachers? There is also that for some more details. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.15.2.41 (talk) 11:03, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

I've converted both the section title and the external link to Wikilinks for convenience: you can link to a File (as opposed to displaying it) by starting the wikilink with a colon (":"). --ColinFine (talk) 12:32, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

The Wayback Machine, American Renaissance, and other troublesome websites?

Is there a particular reason that one can no longer access the American Renaissance website on the Wayback Machine? It previously used to be accessible on the Wayback Machine, I believe.

Also, is the same also true for MUCH more troublesome content, such as child porn? I'm obviously WAY too scared to personally check this, but if the Wayback Machine actually has anything such as child porn stored on it, then this should obviously be reported to the authorities–hence me asking this question about this topic. Futurist110 (talk) 20:13, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps because it is a vehicle for hate speech? --Viennese Waltz 20:26, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

But it does occasionally have some things of value; for instance, a 1992 interview with Arthur Jensen, which I had previously read. Futurist110 (talk) 21:53, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

How valuable is a racist philosophy pretending to be science? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:26, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

What racist philosophy? Hereditarianism? Or are you talking about scientific racism here? Because there are some scientists who are open to the possibility of genetic average human group differences on important traits; James Flynn was one such scientist, in spite of his environmentalist views on this question (as in, in spite of these views of his, he was nevertheless open to other points of view and arguments): https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Flynn-2018.pdf The mistake that people make is automatically equating openness to this hypothesis with support for racial discrimination, which isn't necessarily the case (certainly not always); Arthur Jensen, for instance, to my knowledge, opposed racial discrimination while nevertheless, of course, being very open to the possibility that there could be genetic average human group differences on IQ, especially between white Americans and black Americans. Futurist110 (talk) 23:12, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

If I remember correctly from that 1992 American Renaissance interview, Arthur Jensen also talked about the risk of dysgenics and about how smarter people should be encouraged to have more children than duller people should have; as in, voluntary eugenics. Whatever you might think of this, there is a HUGE difference between this and, say, forced sterilization, which was a form of non-voluntary eugenics. Futurist110 (talk) 23:18, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Website owners can choose to exclude their own pages from the Wayback Machine: see for example the entry for the National Post (a mainstream newspaper): https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nationalpost.com/ . I know that archive.today (a similar archiving website) removes illegal content at the request of law enforcement and other authorities (see the answers here). The archive.org terms of use do mention some related considerations, though it's not clear to me whether or not they'd, say, comply with a request to take down bomb-building instructions. Cheers, gnu57 21:25, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. Maybe I will eventually ask them about this. Thank you very much! Futurist110 (talk) 23:19, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

As discussed in our article (note I wrote this before checking our article), archive.org used to respect robots.txt to the extent any old archives would be removed or I suspect more likely made unavailable if the robots.txt changed to exclude their archiver, or all bots. I believe their policy has changed a bit over the years, for example they started to ignore it for government websites and I think (and our article suggests) they also ignored it in some other cases because sites where the domain was taken over by spammers started to use robots.txt to exclude bot effectively meaning often someone completely unrelated to the copyright holder or at least hoster of the old content was deciding to exclude it. However I think they still respect it in other cases and in any case as noted by gnu57 generally still respect a direct request. I have no idea if American Renaissance made such a request, but their robots.txt explicitly exclude their bot [1]. Note also I'm not sure if their movement has always been towards inclusion. I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to ignore robots.txt (or even a direct request) at some stage in certain cases but then because of legal advice or simply pushback they decided against it. (Notably a website may take action to block any visitor including bots who's actions they don't like, but may be less likely to do so if the traffic wasn't excessive and they're simply crawling without making the content available.) Nil Einne (talk) 01:42, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, my understanding is that they either don't respect robots.txt anymore or don't apply it retroactively or something to that effect, but that they still honor explicit requests to take the website off the Wayback Machine. If this website was available on Wayback in the last few years it's likely that they've since requested not to be archived. Why they did that is anyone's guess. I do not think IA has a policy of not archiving hate speech. On the contrary, my impression has long been that one of the intended uses of Wayback is to prevent the memory holing of such content by bad actors who decide to reinvent themselves as more mainstream. 69.174.144.79 (talk) 17:47, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeltsin as Russia's first popularly elected leader

Per my quick research, Boris Yeltsin was Russia's first popularly elected leader since the Novgorod Republic, i.e. in at least 513 years. However, I couldn't find a reliable source for that. In any case, there seems to be centuries-long democratic gap until he was elected. Could someone drop a relevant source? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 21:04, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

What about this?: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_with_Big_Brother/BXoxAAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=yeltsin+russia%27s+first+popularly+elected+leader+half+a+millennium&pg=PA384&printsec=frontcover It's not completely the same information that you're looking for, but it should be sufficiently close to it. There's also this, for what it's worth: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Chase_s_Calendar_of_Events_2016/tgDHCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=yeltsin+russia%27s+first+popularly+elected+leader+500+years&pg=PA29&printsec=frontcover Futurist110 (talk) 22:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

The Russian Constituent Assembly might have chosen a leader if Lenin hadn't destroyed it after one day. AnonMoos (talk) 00:42, 12 February 2021 (UTC)