Wikipedia may have begun life as an open-source utopia of free knowledge, but it has devolved into a repressive oligarchy run by unaccountable petty tyrants. It is a punitive system that targets those who refuse to toe the line. Anyone who represents a threat to the establishment can become a victim, and once an ideologically-motivated cabal of editors sinks its teeth into your article, there is no way to remove them.

Edit: apparently the author went full QAnon in 2020. This article is from 2018 and is reasonably well-researched, though it downplays the participation of the USA agencies and corporations in the astroturfing campaigns, but I needed to put forward this disclaimer regarding all her other content.

  • albigu@lemmygrad.mlOP
    4·
    7 months ago

    The paragraph right before the alternative medicine section. Edited for better display.

    The Croatian language Wikipedia exemplifies one danger of a consensus-focused model. Over the past decade, a group of far-right ideologues gradually seized control of the site in an internet putsch so thorough that the Croatian Minister of Education now actively discourages students from using it, warning “that a large part of the content of the Croatian version of Wikipedia is not only dubious but also [contains] obvious forgeries, and therefore we invite them to use more reliable sources of information.”

    Somehow, he still includes “Wikipedia in English and in other major languages of the world” in “reliable sources,” clearly not grasping the reason Croatian Wikipedia went so far off the rails.136 In 2009, fewer than 10 conservative administrators began consolidating their hold on power, banning and suspending certain editors for their liberal or moderate views on hot-button topics. Much of the controversial material centers on the Ustaša, a fascist group that operated from 1929 to 1945, serving as a puppet government under the Third Reich and massacring hundreds of thousands of political dissidents, Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other racial and ethnic minorities. Their crimes have all but disappeared from Croatian Wikipedia, and other articles have also been changed to reflect a strong bias against Serbs and LGBT people.137

    The situation remains unresolved because to “fix“ it would require rewriting the rules of Wikipedia, in which consensus – not truth – is the goal. If Croatian Wikipedians find “collection camp“ more accurate a term than “concentration camp“ to describe the wartime prisons of Eastern Europe where racial and ethnic minorities and dissidents were rounded up and worked to death, Wikipedia can’t step in and change that consensus without running afoul of its entire ecosystem of rules. Ultimately, politically-motivated historical revisionism is no different than scientific Skepticism, except one is considered permissible in polite company.