On Thursday I was looking at the Gulf of Tonkin incident article, which if you don’t know went like this:
August 2: US ships open fire on Vietnamese ships, US reports the US ships were attacked
August 4: Nothing happens, US reports that US ships were attacked, the US goes to war with Vietnam.
This was leaked by a former NSA staffer in the early 2000s. In response the NSA eventually released a heavily redacted and manipulated report a few years later (the US ships really were attacked on August 2, but after the US fired ‘warning shots’). After an apparently long wikipedia edit war, the government propaganda can be cited, hurray, but not the original report, of course. Reading through the talk page was full of ‘war history experts’ (cough nazis cough cough) calling people conspiracy theorists and saying “the men who served on the Maddox knew they were attacked”.
Yep, Wikipedia is propaganda, very subtle propaganda, and it masks itself as ‘the world’s encyclopedia’, it also intelligently drew all traffic to it (so that now sources barely matter and all you look up you look up there because Google too).
Not really in practice no, the culture is very insular with a small number of admins and editors controlling the majority of articles (the ability to lock articles was made expressly for this purpose). That’s before getting into some of the more notorious editor accounts like Philip_Cross, an account that never sleeps and consistently edits articles relating to western foreign policy targets, players in the military industrial complex, human rights industry and independent journalists critical of establishment narratives. Wikipedias founder is also a randian ideologue, who seems to offer his site up to the security state and has board members who served on the atlantic council. Finally wikipedia regularly breaks its own rules about transparency, using them to silence alternative media voices on the left, while never critiquing establisment media and often citing straight up propaganda as fact.
I have completely dropped them as sources for any political conflicts to the point where I can’t even use them as background information.
Yes, but there are Mods who ultimately have the last say. The articles, especially controversial ones, usually end up edited and redacted by these guys who base off their stuff on USA propaganda and shitty sources (they are on the imperial core, after all), and you can get banned or stop being able to edit if you push on. Of course, not all articles are like that and it’s an ongoing battle. I think there was a good documentary on this but I can’t seem to find it. There’s also the fact that—and here I can only speak for Spanish wikipedia—English sources and the English articles end up translated (and badly) to other languages, and they also carry the Western-English point of view with them.
No, there were pogroms during the USSR’s regime. It was the communists that made the pogroms in Russia. Poor Nicholas was just an innocent baby boy.
A prominent wikipedia contributor was recently revealed to be a ICE agent. It 100% sucks and should only be use for a cursory glance and maybe looked at as a resource launching off point
This will be fun for you then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/967480645
revealed to be a ICE agent
do you have a link by chance? searched and didn’t find anything
