[HN Gopher] Wikipedia's "Supreme Court" to review Polish-Jewish ...
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Wikipedia's "Supreme Court" to review Polish-Jewish history during
WWII
Author : kurtreed
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-04-06 20:02 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| [deleted]
| advisedwang wrote:
| This example gets to a fundamental reality in group decision
| making: some issues for some people are too important to them for
| them to accept the group deciding against them. That can be
| perfectly legitimate - for example a minority shareholder should
| not accept a majority owner giving a dividend only to the
| minority; or a subset of a population should not accept a
| political process that strips them of rights.
|
| Depending on how a decision system is set up and supported and
| what the people are willing to do, the outcomes can be very
| different. Some possible outcomes are deadlock (where no
| decisions can be made), disintegration (e.g. where people
| unilaterally act and group decision making ends), exception
| (where rules are suspended and some other process makes the
| decision this time) or violence (which could be state power
| enforcing a decision but also can be assassination etc).
|
| It sounds like ArbCom is a managed form of exception to the usual
| consensus decision making. I hope its effective.
| viraptor wrote:
| The interesting part for me is how do other encyclopedias deal
| with this. It's not mentioned in the paper itself (https://www.
| tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) but I'm
| sure this is not the only case and the paper volumes we used to
| buy decades ago dealt with similar issues, just much less
| visibility into the process.
|
| I actually can't find any good writeups about similar issues in
| the past, yet I'm sure various encyclopedias in Europe had a
| very different view on some details. There must've been
| internal editor conflicts too. With Wikipedia, we can just
| observe that in real time.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I'd guess part of it was that people cared less because it
| was their job.
| viraptor wrote:
| I've met librarians and researchers before. Those people
| have some serious opinions. It's extremely unlikely that
| none of the encyclopedia editors cared. There were surely
| some doing this as their 9-5, but I bet this was a small
| fraction.
| [deleted]
| wslh wrote:
| There is a stronger political discussion at country levels
| between Israel and Poland regarding this topic. It is easy
| searchable, you can find articles like this [1]. The author
| doesn't seem to study the topic in all extent.
|
| [1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-06-30/ty-
| article/.h...
| dvt wrote:
| The article that Grabowski[1] wrote seems _extremely_ heavy-
| handed and reeks of having an axe to grind. I am no fan of
| Wikipedia or their incessant edit wars, bad information and
| bickering, but Prof. Grabowski does not seem tempered in his
| criticism (going as far as calling out specific editors, which
| seems unprofessional to say the least).
|
| Looking into his sources is also a bit dubious, occasionally
| providing conclusions as being _prima facia_ obvious, which (at
| least to me) is hard to swallow given an ultra-charged topic of
| discourse like the Holocaust. As an example, the "Jew with a
| Coin" Polish statuette caricature mentioned in the article is
| certainly offensive and insensitive, but calling it blanket anti-
| Semitisim needs some evidentiary work (whereas Grabowski
| considers it an obvious implication).
|
| [1]
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...
| frozenport wrote:
| If they don't call editors it unverifiable.
|
| Sometimes you gotta call the bad actors by name.
| twawaaay wrote:
| The "Jew with a Coin" _is_ antisemitic. The coin is used in
| this case to symbolise greed which antisemites here
| automatically assign to all Jews. (I know, I am a Pole)
| catiopatio wrote:
| I'm curious of your assessment of the Wikipedia article's
| accuracy:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_with_a_coin
|
| It takes a more measured tone than your own, but the practice
| still seems rooted in deeply anti-semitic tropes.
| dvt wrote:
| Hm, yeah, all of a sudden I think I'm more on Grabowski's
| side. This is _extremely_ weasel-worded: "Opinions about
| the motif vary; some cultural studies scholars believe it
| promotes Polish-Jewish dialogue or view it as harmless
| folklore or nostalgia, while others believe it is an
| antisemitic and offensive stereotype."
|
| Maybe you can argue the trinkets aren't in themselves anti-
| Semitic, but I completely agree with you that they're 100%
| undeniably _rooted_ in anti-Semitic tropes. I mean even the
| word "nostalgia" there is weird. Nostalgia for _what?_
| twawaaay wrote:
| So the way antisemitism here works is pretty much the same
| way it always did. The same way Nazis used.
|
| People assign certain qualities to Jews. They repeat the
| same ad nauseam in jokes, in caricature, etc. Rather than
| treat Jews individually, antisemites tend to treat them in
| a way that dehumanises them -- which is a move that makes
| further antisemitism easier. You see, dehumanising is about
| disconnecting your empathy, about not seeing "them" as
| individuals but as a class of people that you can assign to
| qualities you hate.
|
| Also there is a reason Nazis hated Jews so much. The whole
| goal was to find a way to be able to make people do things
| by finding a common enemy that will be easy to vilify. And
| Jews were already pretty common (everywhere in Europe),
| easy (no own government) target and already with pretty
| poor sentiment. No, Nazis did not invent antisemitism.
|
| The funny thing about all this is that historically Jews
| were prevented here from many trades and, out of necessity,
| they took up certain professions connected with finances
| because they just couldn't do much else. Because of this
| Poles formed this connection between Jews and money and
| greed while completely forgetting that it was the
| governments at the time that caused this.
| rajin444 wrote:
| > Because of this Poles formed this connection between
| Jews and money and greed while completely forgetting that
| it was the governments at the time that caused this.
|
| I don't think they've forgotten. In much of Europe rulers
| that issued crippling taxes or engaged in ruinous
| financial schemes are not remembered fondly.
| dvt wrote:
| I'm not sure even Grabowski agrees, here's what he first says
| about it:
|
| > Anthropologist Erica Lehrer wrote about this phenomenon in
| Kazimierz (a center of Jewish life in Krakow) in her 2013
| book Jewish Poland Revisited, uncovering that some Poles
| collect these odd pieces of art as good luck charms and may
| not consciously attribute sinister meaning to them.
|
| Maybe Wikipedia editors are whitewashing antisemitism, but he
| should really find more clear cut cases.
| twawaaay wrote:
| No conflict here. You can own a piece of art that is racist
| or antisemitic without being racist or antisemitic.
|
| Also, in certain parts of Poland antisemitism is so
| pervasive that it is basically part of local folklore. So
| you try to go read children's book and there will be a Jew
| in it trying to steal kids money... and nobody thinks twice
| about it just like nobody questions stories about a fat guy
| wearing red suit flying around dropping presents.
| tptacek wrote:
| People collect Lawn Jockeys for good luck too, but, like
| the "Jew With A Coin", they're self-evidently bigoted.
| viraptor wrote:
| Those ideas don't oppose each other. The figurine may be
| generally antisemitic and may be collected by some as odd
| piece of art. Similar to Gollywogs.
| epolanski wrote:
| My polish grandmother has it as a painting in her house (a
| jew counting coins). She bought it few years ago. She says
| the jew brings good luck. She is absolutely not racist nor
| antisemitic.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Sure. A person singing a racist song might just be liking
| the song and not thinking twice about it. Doesn't change
| the fact the song is racist.
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| Does she pat the head of young jewish children for luck?
| locopati wrote:
| She might not be, but the notion of "the jew brings good
| luck" is absolutely anti-semetic and dehumanizing
| (associating Jews with money and reducing the people to a
| notion).
| epolanski wrote:
| Well it's hard to not associate Jews with money in
| Europe, especially eastern one, where for cultural and
| religious reasons the minority was heavily involved in
| trade and banking since middle age.
|
| Even today despite global jews being less than 0.2% of
| world population are 20% of Forbes 200 richest, e.g. 5 of
| the 10 richest americans are jews.
| viraptor wrote:
| There's a difference in statistics which don't say
| anything about causality - like the mentioned involvement
| in banking due to religious/cultural restrictions, and
| the association going the other way - this is a Jewish
| figurine with money, therefore it's lucky. That's the
| whole issue with antisemitism, racism, etc. It's like the
| historical connection of black people being banned from
| public pools -vs- associating being black with not being
| a good swimmer.
|
| It's actually pretty easy to not do associations the
| other way... just need to be aware and care. It's easier
| for us now than for previous generations to be aware at
| least, but being open-minded in general always helped.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Just because a stereotype has a historical basis doesn't
| make it not racist. In the Americas black people were
| slaves for hundreds of years, but if I carry around a
| little statue of an African slave because that's what I
| still associate with black people, that's definitely
| racist and dehumanizing.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| [flagged]
| feoren wrote:
| A "normal" (whatever that means to you) person is stingy
| with money: "Wow, that guy is really stingy!"
|
| A Jewish person is stingy with money: "Wow, Jews are really
| stingy!"
| tptacek wrote:
| A normal person is careful with money.
|
| "Jews" are "stingy".
| chx wrote:
| Eastern European history topics insidiously edited by the far
| right? Where did I hear _that_?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747388
|
| So far we have Wikipedia admitting Croatia and Poland and if they
| were to look I am sure they would find interesting things in
| Hungary as well as I pointed out.
| the_af wrote:
| Anyone who has tried to deal with Wikipedia on any remotely
| controversial topic knows this is true (from the article):
|
| > _Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying
| to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or
| energy to fight._
|
| This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my
| single most visited website ever. But in the end, what stays
| there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their
| hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to
| fight for. It can be exhausting to try to correct something if
| you don't have limitless time or don't "know" the right people,
| which makes Wikipedia way less open than it pretends to be.
|
| Then again, I wouldn't be able to edit an article on the
| Encyclopedia Britannica...
| [deleted]
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Sometimes that abuse is relatively easy to identify. In 2019,
| ArbCom disciplined the two editors most involved in this subject
| area, instituting a topic ban for their "incivility and
| inflammatory rhetoric." But what about the more insidious cases
| when there are no blatant signs of harassment? Wikipedians told
| me that these "civil" disputes are much more challenging to
| resolve because of a key jurisdictional issue: ArbCom has
| authority to decide on user conduct disputes but is not permitted
| to rule on article content.
|
| Also Wikipedia's toxic culture often refuses to call a spade a
| spade, and gives some favored problematic editors a long leash to
| be uncivil, so long as they learn to avoid a few of the most
| blatant unacceptable behaviors. IMHO, they need to be more
| consistent and more final with their bans, because a community
| with a lot of individuals who've been taught how to obscure their
| misbehavior and/or expertly push it right up to the line is still
| a shitty community.
| the_af wrote:
| This is a problem with any community, right? Regardless of how
| open it purports to be, if you don't belong to the trusted
| circle you are at a disadvantage. And you can only belong to
| that circle if you were there from the beginning or you spend a
| lot -- and I mean, _a lot_ -- of time making yourself known so
| that they accept you. Most people don 't have that kind of
| time.
|
| I don't know if this can be avoided.
| baybal2 wrote:
| [dead]
| epolanski wrote:
| Politics, history, economics and many other fields will always
| spur debates. Little can be done here and there is no such thing
| as truth.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| _To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true,
| then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon
| which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The
| biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights._ -- Timothy
| Snyder, Yale professor of history.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHkkfB_7X0
| worik wrote:
| The very best way to lie, is with facts.
| viraptor wrote:
| > there is no such thing as truth.
|
| There is truth - sometimes we just don't know what it is. But
| that means we can talk about the truth of A claiming X because
| of (...) and B claiming Y because of (...). (this is basically
| what every real research paper is - claims and their
| justifications, not "truth") There's nothing good about the
| defeatism and saying "well, we'll never know, just ignore it".
| nelox wrote:
| You did not write this.
| karaterobot wrote:
| If you mean "in matters of opinion, there is no such thing as
| truth" I'd be with you, but clearly some things -- such as the
| proposition that there is no such thing as truth _in general_
| -- are incorrect.
| msla wrote:
| > there is no such thing as truth.
|
| Motte and bailey alert.
|
| This can mean either:
|
| 1. There is no such thing as a final analysis completely free
| of bias.
|
| 2. There is no such thing as facts.
|
| It's related to the old "social constructionism" example, where
| "reality is a social construct" can either mean that our
| perception of reality is influenced by society or that there is
| no such thing as objective reality therefore quantum woo
| ayurveda ESP dowsing astral projection Raelian spaceships in
| the Medway.
| feoren wrote:
| > there is no such thing as truth
|
| This is exactly what people say when they want to re-write the
| truth to fit their ends. It may be hard to find out what the
| truth really is, it may even be impossible to get it 100%
| right, but there _is_ an actual truth of what happened. Denying
| that gives power to liars.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but there is an actual truth of what happened._
|
| In terms of cold hard quantifiable facts -- "X happened" --
| yes.
|
| But history isn't made of facts. History is made up of
| _interpreting_ facts to form larger coherent _narratives_
| that _mean things_. It 's saying "X happened _because Y_ ".
| It means seeing motivation and goals and in the behavior of
| people and organizations -- all of which is ultimately
| subjective. It means making judgment calls about which events
| can be explained as inevitable given historical forces,
| versus which were essentially random. History isn't about the
| what, it's about the _why_.
|
| And no, there is no "actually truth" there. There is
| hopefully a gradually forming consensus, which then sometimes
| gets overturned decades later in a paradigm shift, then
| overturned again.
| Avicebron wrote:
| There might be objective fact, but without a time machine..
|
| Remember when that meme about the dress went around circa
| 2015? Whether the dress was gold/white, black/blue?
|
| People looked at the same thing and saw different things. In
| a philosophical sense, history is a lot like that.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't want to rewrite anything, but at the end of the day
| history isn't a mathematical formula whose properties can be
| definitely verified.
|
| History is written by winners, its rewritten and
| reinterpreted by their descendants and most things cannot be
| trusted besides some very simple and widely documented "cold
| facts".
| rzlemidsq wrote:
| Based on the editors involved and the subject matter, this is a
| re-run of one of Wikipedia's most famous scandals: the Eastern
| European Mailing List (EEML).[0]
|
| The EEML was a group of Eastern European editors who set up a
| secret mailing list to coordinate their activities in their
| never-ending nationalist edit wars, primarily (but not only)
| against Russian editors.
|
| Secretly coordinating over a back channel is a real no-no in
| Wikipedia culture, because it allows a group of editors to
| completely subvert the rules. For example, one of Wikipedia's
| bright red lines is that no editor may revert the same page more
| than three times in 24 hours.[1] If you have a secret mailing
| list with all your like-minded editors, you can always just send
| out a request for someone else to revert on your behalf. That's
| exactly what the EEML did.
|
| Two things made the EEML special. First, they had an admin in
| their ranks (Piotrus, who is also a party to this latest Arbcom
| case about Polish-Jewish history), who was actively scheming with
| them to sideline and ban their enemies. That gave them
| significantly more power than a random group of editors would
| have had.
|
| Second, their entire mailing list was published by Wikileaks.
| Yes, Wikileaks, not Wikipedia. The speculation is that there was
| a mole in the EEML, who eventually passed their correspondence to
| Wikileaks. You can read a sample of the messages from the EEML
| here: [2].
|
| There was a big argument over whether Arbcom should even consider
| the evidence from Wikileaks, or whether that would violate the
| privacy of the EEML editors. But Arbcom did end up taking the
| emails into account, because how could it not? The emails were
| pretty spectacular, showing all sorts of underhanded scheming:
| things like, "You, you and you will push editor X's buttons, and
| when he responds, I'll report him for incivility."
|
| The EEML editors mostly got off the hook with a slap on the
| wrist. You would think they would have gotten permanently banned,
| but somehow, they weren't. Several of them have remained
| extremely active in Eastern European nationalist edit wars, and
| are in fact now parties to this new case.
|
| This latest case centers around the history of antisemitism in
| Poland, and particularly around the involvement of Polish
| collaborators in the Holocaust. One of the biggest flashpoints
| was an article about a supposed concentration camp for non-Jewish
| Poles.[3] The camp never existed. It's an urban legend, invented
| in order to claim that non-Jewish Poles were equal victims as
| Polish Jews. But there was a big fight between Polish nationalist
| and Israeli editors over the article. Ah, Wikipedia, what a
| miserable place.
|
| 0.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:3RR
|
| 2.
| https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr...
|
| 3. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-10-04/ty-article-
| ma...
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| There was alot of horrific things that went on in those "in-
| between-empire" countries, that got steam rolled regularly,
| reappeared half digested during defeats and either imitated there
| old masters, hoping to keep independent by mimicry or in re-
| aligning with new empires, imagining those who suffered the wrath
| of other empires, to be more sympathetic.
|
| Those trying to transcend nationalism and imperialism of course
| were there mortal enemies, as they subverted the endeavor for
| freedom and independence. Im pretty certain some dreamed aloud
| about becoming the muscovites instead of the muscovites.
|
| The bandera activities on polish jews come to mind
|
| https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778
|
| and the formation of collaborator legions
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaboration_with_N...
|
| and the sovjet union punished them severely, after hitler fed
| them into the churning war. There was a corner house
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_House_(Riga)) in every
| occupied city, and a room with swiss-cheese walls in ever one of
| those houses.
|
| The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of
| misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for,
| willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has
| infected the us at the core and is slowly eroding its values
| away. It has put up a good fight though, allowing for example
| other cultures, languages, ideas and countries to flourish
| relatively free in its influence sphere.
|
| And there are still competing traditional empires, yearning for
| the g(l)ory days, of mercantilism and neverending sunsets or
| worse still revenge, for imagined slights received aeons ago.
|
| I honestly do not know how to overcome it, but it certainly
| seems, that people who experience empires in there daily lifes,
| suppressed by hierarchies into miserable servitude with no actual
| control & freedom, are more susceptible to projecting there pride
| upon these expansionists behemoths.
|
| Is all this past any justification for the atrocities of russia
| against ukraine today? No. Never was. Never will be.
| nivenkos wrote:
| > The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain
| source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn
| for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by
| now has infected the us at the core
|
| I think the Guatemalans, Chileans, Indonesians, Vietnamese,
| Iraqis, Libyans, etc. could tell you that the US has been an
| empire for quite a long time...
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't understand the point you're trying to make and its link
| to the news.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Jew.. not news. I try to give the historic background, and
| the cause for many of the progroms.
| lynguist wrote:
| Interesting. It reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia
|
| Croatian Wikipedia was used to deliberately and succesfully
| instill nationalist and neo-fascist points of view onto the users
| of the page, young people in Croatia. The really odd thing is
| that literally 4 Wikipedias were started in the Serbo-Croatian
| language: the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, the Serbian Wikipedia,
| the Croatian Wikipedia, and the Bosnian Wikipedia. The Croatian
| one is often the most biased one.
|
| --
|
| I often read the English and the German Wikipedias. I found that
| I can edit the English Wikipedia and my changes are accepted, my
| changes on the German Wikipedia however are rejected.
|
| The English Wikipedia is up-to-date. In topics such as computers
| or science or popular culture, it is very accurate. The German
| Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don't have
| any of the recent developments, and the information is very
| outdated.
|
| If I read history, English and German Wikipedias present
| completely different articles, where the German one tends to be
| better and unbiased. Only in these topics (history and the like)
| the easy editability of the English Wikipedia makes it a target
| and victim of misinformation and bias.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many
| pages don't have any of the recent developments, and the
| information is very outdated.
|
| There are a lot of English Wikipedia pages like that, too.
| Sometimes it's pretty blatant, like super-comprehensive list of
| something that just stops in 2013 or something.
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