Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/In the media

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Russia

Interesting to see mention of the Russian businessmen's death article, I commented in the AFD for it this summer. It came close to being deleted and after this attention, it could be nominated again. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:04, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Regarding "Runiversalis, Russia's Wikipedia alternative", it might have been worth mentioning Putin's longstanding plans to replace Wikipedia with the Great Russian Encyclopedia (earlier coverage: September, October, November 2019) or other such announcements (2014 coverage: "A Russian alternative Wikipedia"). Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:44, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

• There is no "Putin's longstanding plans to replace Wikipedia", see Talk:Russian_Wikipedia#Restored_removed_passage --ssr (talk) 05:50, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Speaking of Runiversalis's take on Ukraine ... Currently making the rounds on Twitter is a 2014 (!) article in The Guardian by John Pilger, titled, "In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia – Washington's role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world". Needless to say, the Guardian is publishing nothing like this today, and if it did, it would be accused of spreading Russian propaganda. Pilger, however, still seems quite convinced he got it right then. Andreas JN466 10:09, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Maybe such decisions by the Guardian and other RS have less to do with censorship than with the fact that John Pilger's conspiratorial thinking has been proven so obviously and disastrously wrong earlier this year (see e.g. this summary from March 2022: "Pilger has not once, not twice, not three times, not four times but five times mocked the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine in recent months — as well as spelling out in an article two weeks ago that claims of an imminent invasion were pure hysteria. Indeed, a month ago Pilger claimed “the war mongering of Biden and his UK echoes is exposed, like Blair’s, as a crime”, and followed that up just a fortnight ago with the sneer “the absence of a Russian ‘invasion’ a bitter disappointment to its most avid promoters in London” and compared the Biden administration’s rhetoric to the Bush administration’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.").

Back to the Euronews statement you quoted in the article (that Runiversalis "repeats the Kremlin's narrative that Russia wants to 'denazify' and 'demilitarise' Ukraine"), are you saying it would be wrong to characterize the argument that Russia had to invade Ukraine to topple a neo-Nazi government as propaganda? (cf. Denazification#Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine: "The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem condemned Putin's misuse of Holocaust history; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, with much of his family being victims of the Holocaust, and a native Russian speaker. The organisations described Ukraine as 'democratic' and the Russian claims of Nazism and genocide as 'imaginary'.") Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:08, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Well, have a look at what The Nation reported in 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine – Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. ... These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.

Of course Putin uses this as propaganda to justify his war but I don't agree with your airbrushing any such concerns out of history, dismissing them as nothing but Russian propaganda. It's just not borne out by the pre-2022 historical record.

People like to have things black and white, especially during a war; they rarely are. Best, Andreas JN466 03:41, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

I wasn't expressing my own opinion, but quoting the Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem - it's them that you are accusing of "airbrushing any such concerns out of history." And I find that accusation unconvincing based on the Nation quote that you are offering, which after all stresses the distinction between those far-right gangs and the government ("Kiev").

I sympathize with the notion that it's important to retain a reasonable level of skepticism during wartime, and for sure things aren't always black and white - but they also aren't always the same level of grey. Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:34, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

When I offered the Nation quote and link, I was hoping you'd read the entire article. The Nation piece also mentions, for example, that—

In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation making two WWII paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes of Ukraine, and made it a criminal offense to deny their heroism. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, while the UPA slaughtered thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles on their own volition.

The government-funded Ukrainian Institute of National Memory is institutionalizing the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators. Last summer, the Ukrainian parliament featured an exhibit commemorating the OUN’s 1941 proclamation of cooperation with the Third Reich (imagine the French government installing an exhibit celebrating the Vichy state!).

(This was the government preceding Zelenskyy's.)

When you asked me above whether "it would be wrong to characterize the argument that Russia had to invade Ukraine to topple a neo-Nazi government as propaganda", accompanied by that quote, I understood you to be daring me to disagree with what I assumed was your view, i.e. that it was propaganda, and nothing but propaganda. I agreed it was propaganda but not nothing but propaganda.

English-language mainstream media reports expressing concern about neo-Nazis in Ukraine continued right up until last year: see this January 2021 TIME report for example ("The main recruitment center for Azov, known as the Cossack House, stands in the center of Kyiv, a four-story brick building on loan from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. ... On the ground floor is a shop called Militant Zone, which sells clothes and key chains with stylized swastikas and other neo-Nazi merchandise."), or see the Jerusalem Post's Western countries training far-right extremists in Ukraine, published in October 2021 based on a report from George Washington University. I'd argue that the portrayal in the Wikipedia section you linked to, Denazification#Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine, is substantially misleading when compared to such earlier reports and I wouldn't quote it approvingly. I say this as someone whose sympathies are more with Ukraine than with Russia in this conflict. Best, Andreas JN466 10:57, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Curious about the last sentence here:

The overarching pattern here, bearing in mind China's own huge internet encyclopedias, Baike.com and Baidu Baike, is that governments everywhere – unsurprisingly, perhaps – take a keen interest in having user-generated encyclopedias that propagate their respective views of the world. Thank God the United States government has never done anything to mess around with Wikipedia... – AK

Andreas, which actions of the US government "to mess around with Wikipedia" do you think are comparable to the control the Chinese government is exerting over the content of Baike.com and Baidu Baike? Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:08, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

I think he was referring to HB 20 in Texas which is part of the United States last time I checked. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:24, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it seems so from Andreas' wording, but in that case it was a very misguided comparison. A state's legislature creating a bad law that may restrict user-generated encyclopedias from moderating (removing) content posted by individual users is very different from a state's government (executive) forcing such user-generated encyclopedias "to propagate [that government's] views of the world" (which China's case is actually mainly done by requiring them to remove content that is not in line with these government views, i.e. pretty much the opposite of what HB20 does). Regards, HaeB (talk) 23:49, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

I didn't actually write that sentence. It was added here by JPxG: [1] I'm pretty sure he just meant it to function as a bridge to the next piece.

This said, Hillary Clinton's US State Department made an open approach to Wikipedia at Wikimania 2012; a close Clinton associate was chosen to guide the 2017 strategy process, another advises the WMF on PR, etc.; so while there are no government-imposed limits on content here, we can't really say the US government has never expressed an active interest in Wikipedia either. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum for links. Andreas JN466 04:13, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

My bad, I was relying (as did Bri, presumably) on the "– AK" section byline. (JPxG: I think these should be updated when making such additions, I've been trying to do that with the section bylines in RR too in that kind of situation.)

But, to address just the first of your tenuous examples here, if a representative of the hosting country's government offers a brief address at the opening session of Wikimania (on the invitation of the organizing team of volunteer Wikimedians) and reads out a letter from a minister who regrets not being able to attend in person etc., that's not "messing around with Wikipedia". (It's routine at Wikimania and indeed many large international conferences; I guess you are not leveling such charges at the governments of any other past Wikimania-hosting countries. I do understand that Hillary Clinton is unusual as a politician in that there is an exceptionally large amount of conspiracy theories surrounding her, I sincerely hope you are not getting sucked in by them.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:34, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

@HaeB: If you'd like to know what I think of QAnon, please just ask me rather than blowing into a dogwhistle. I have no interest in QAnon, and what little I've read of it makes it fairly obvious to me that it's nonsense. (And for good measure, if I were a US citizen, I'd have supported Sanders over Clinton and Clinton over Trump in 2016.)

Now, I won't repeat the entire argument I made in the Signpost piece last year, but the representative of the Office of eDiplomacy who gave that speech at Wikimania 2012 literally had "advancing US foreign policy interests" in his job description. Tech@State was an official partner of Wikimania 2012 and there was a whole "Tech@State: Wiki.Gov" track at the conference that people could register at via wiki-gov.eventbrite.com. (I recall zero messages from UK politicians or the UK Foreign Office at Wikimania 2014 in London, the only Wikimania conference I went to. If there had been, I would have found them profoundly distasteful.)

I am generally not a fan of government involvement in the media. And Wikipedia to me should be part of the media rather than a "wiki.gov". I have said exactly the same when it was the Azeri, Kazakh, or Iranian government muscling in on communities at Wikiconferences and take exactly the same dim view of the Russian, Chinese or any other government wanting to exercise organisational or editorial control over wikis. Andreas JN466 13:13, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Russia, China and Texas

I made the same error – although I knew the bridge was added during pre-publication workup, I got the authors switched in my mind. I think an editorial insertion for a bridge is pretty harmless, though in this case the geopolitical (?) overtones may have gone a bit too far for attribution to the original author. I had a longer reply prepared but it got discarded in a session reset or something, so I'll just conclude by saying this is a pretty touchy subject and I expected strong opinions to it and understand where people are concerned about upsetting the delicate balance of government-media owners-the public that makes democracy possible. Readers should also understand it's concern over exactly that same balance that led to the adoption of the Texas bill in the first place. Finally, I think normal readers will understand the State of Texas isn't China CCP, editorial injection to juxtapose the two was for interest/impact that is part of newspaper writing, and we should take care with attribution going forward but this isn't really a big deal. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:55, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

J.J.McCullough

I really don't know what we were thinking here. An entire section I spent weeks researching was cut in an attempt to protect McCullogh's Wikipedia username from coming out - while linking all the sources that included it - and then we decided the opening should make it very clear he did edit Wikipedia, while the closing acts as if it's in doubt as to whether he was a Wikipedia admin. That's a lie, and we knew it was a lie when we published, and worse, it didn't even serve a purpose to lie because we link all the sources that show what his account was. In the first sentence, state he was a Wikipedia editor, and state the image was by him. And this can be confirmed by looking at any of the POTD attributions. In fact, the identification is all over early Wikipedia, and I also checked an archived copy of his userpage to make absolutely sure he was self-outed (and, suffice to say, he was very, very open about it). Further, we later link the first J.J. McCullough deletion debate, which starts off calling him out for being an admin writing an article about himself.

Given WP:RTV states " It is not a way to avoid scrutiny or sanctions. It is not a fresh start and does not guarantee anonymity." - and given we outed him anyway, and link to pretty much every page I quote from anyway, here's my research, which was cut:

---

J.J. McCullough was in fact a Wikipedia editor and was made an admin in 2003 when the Request for Adminship process was a lot less onerous.

He had at least three (now-former) featured pictures based on vectorised versions of his art. The one next to this article was a featured picture 2004 to 2007, appeared on the Main Page three separate times as Picture of the Day, and proved horribly controversial as to copyright status as everyone - including the copywriters for two of those main page appearances - presumed it was meant to be Snidely Whiplash. Less controversially, File:Mad scientist.svg also appeared on the main page three times, and File:Piratey.jpg only once, but also lasted the longest, only being delisted in 2012. All the main page appearances attributed under his full name, which was never redacted. A check of archive sites confirmed that he was the one who linked his account to his name.

However, around 2008 things soured with two big deletions: Filibuster Cartoons, his website, and J.J. McCullough, following a deletion debate in which Laval stated:

“ This article was created by the subject himself, User:J.J., which is against WP guidelines. It looks like a vanity page as a consequence. [...] He claims to be a politician but has not run for public office - university positions don't count. Anyway, with respect to WP guidelines, strong suggestion for delete. User:J.J. has also edited Filibuster Cartoons, a vanity page about a website he runs, and he created and has edited Citizens for a Canadian Republic, a non-notable organization which he represents. In my opinion the user in question should be sanctioned about this behaviour. ”

This led to four further attempts to recreate his article, either as J.J. McCullough or J. J. McCullough (note the extra space). After the last of these was deleted in 2020, the creation of new articles by those titles was blocked. His contributions, at least the ones that haven't been deleted, slowed after 2008, finally stopping in 2011.

The video has attracted a lot of speculation at the Village Pump, which has proven a valuable source for this article, and where it is speculated that McCullough is angry that the biographies of him have been deleted. As previously mentioned, he claims in the video that "well over a decade ago" he set up a website-blocking app to stop him from being able to go to Wikipedia, which, if accurate – humans are not good at remembering exactly when they did things – would be just after his last known contributions. Given the second of the deletion discussions happened in 2017, this might absolve him of the article recreations, at least. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.1% of all FPs} 04:57, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Hearing him repeatedly say "aboot" I thought, "Eh? How does this fellow know this cartoon character? Wasn't Snidely Whiplash banned in Canada?" Anyway despite his polite demeanor the video is mostly a rant, presumably trying to stand out in the noisy Youtube marketplace. However, it contains a few valid points, such as that the prose in our articles tends to an awfully leaden style, laden with jargon and failing to organize paragraphs and sentences for readability. I recall that many years ago our biographies of Audrey Munson and Truman Capote had bits of sexual innuendo that actually contributed to understanding but were edited out as POV or some such thing. And look into articles about education in the United States. Most are eager to use a long paragraph to express an idea that could be handled by a short sentence. So, swept along with our foe's flood of foolishness we can find wisps of wisdom. Jim.henderson (talk) 15:15, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Surprisingly, the comment section for that video is overwhelmingly in Wikipedia's favor; usually on Wikipedia criticism videos it's much less complimentary (and boils down to "NPOV is a fucking sham, everything is wrong"). I suspect it both has to do with his existing viewer base, and the video's acrimonious title. But even with all the flaws of YouTube's comment system, I think it's still a net positive for honest discussion. Ovinus (talk) 19:30, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

• I added Template:User TINC in my userpage in reponse to that video because a lot of his complaints sound like he believes there is a cabal and it's ironic to learn he drew the illustration featured in that userbox, but even more hilarious is the possibility that his disdain for wikipedia stems from the fact he had his pages deleted, anyway they're not a real country -Gouleg🛋️ ^harass/_hound 13:31, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Fox

Must say, the Slate article on the Fox News RfC is pretty nice. Good to see well-researched articles in the wild. And props to Kevin for being a good representative. Ovinus (talk) 11:10, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, brilliant work from Breslow and well done to Kevin. Some of the kudos has to go to Slate for publishing accurate accounts of Wikipedia, a rare thing even in the RSP-green press. — Bilorv (talk) 18:45, 1 October 2022 (UTC)