[Foundation-l] svwikis evil twin, Metapedia

[Lennart Guldbrandsson]

Hello,

(I´m new to this emaillist so please forgive any mistakes I make.)

I´m the press contact for the Swedish Wikipedia (
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal). Recently I was
contacted by a journalist who pointed out a fairly new wiki called
Metapedia, at http://www.metapedia.se, which was founded by a known racist
and leader of a small nationalistic (and antidemocratic) party in Sweden (I
can give several newspaper articles to back up that claim.). I checked it
out and discovered several things:

1. It used MediaWiki and thus look *very* similiar to Wikipedia. Even their
logo is in the same colour range. One could easily mistake one for the
other. This is one spinoff effect of the free MediaWiki, and probably one we
will see again. But the site uses the same phrases as svwiki, such as
Läsvärd artikel (featured article) and so on.

2. It has around 1300 articles, but the majority is about either a) people
connected to nazism, holocaust denial or critics of the Jewish conspiracy
(and their works), or b) their opponents, often citing them as Jewish or any
other race they might belong to, see for example
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Ernst_Klein&oldid=9247. They do not
appear to have any NPOV policy, and indeed claim to be a "metapolitical"
encyclopedia. A quote from their users' portal instead urges writers to
"make an effort to use an unbiased and low-key language. To avoid powerful
words and hard points of view is critical for being credible. Look at other
encyclopidias to get an idea how the texts should look stylistically" (My
translation of
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Metapedia:Deltagarportalen) This
seems to indicate that the appearence of NPOV is more important than actual
NPOV.

3. Their articles are often copied and edited versions of the svwiki
counterparts, with apparent POV-slant in their favour. But they have been
very careful not to give their game away. Their article on Hitler for
example is very short: ("Adolf Hitler, born April 20th 1889, deceased April
30th 1945. Known as among other things as the leader of the NSDAP party and
Reichschancellor for the German state during 1933-1945. Author of Mein
Kampf, one of the best selling books in the world." (my translation of
http://www.metapedia.se/index.php?title=Adolf_Hitler&oldid=5332) Compare
this to svwiki's
http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adolf_Hitler&oldid=3639920). Not
particularly the absence of any mention of genocide or his part in WWII.
Since Wikipedia is GFDL they could easily have borrowed that article. (But I
guess it didn´t suit their purposes.)

4. They have given the licence *both* as GFDL *and* have what in Swedish is
called "ansvarig utgivare" (roughly "legally responsible publisher"). Does
this makes sense? Also, they have not given the full text of the
GFDL-licence. Don´t you have to do that?

5. Right now Metapedia have around 1.300 articles. This is to be measured
against svwikis more than 200.000 articles. This does not appear to make any
kind of threat, but why wait until every other search on Google has a
Metapedia hit on second place (after Wikipedia, of course)? A random Google
user probably can't be expected to know that Metapedia is run by people who
claim that millions of Jews *didn't die* in the concentration camps.

Worth noting is also that they have a Danish version since December 3rd
2006. The Swedish version has been online since August 3rd 2006.

My question is how to handle this. Can we do anything else beside complain
and try to outdo Metapedia by being sooo much better? Unfortunally, I
suspect that this may be the price of free software and free content, but
shouldn't Wikipedia be able to protect its reputation somehow? The
journalist who called me seemed to hold Wikipedia in high esteem and seemed
also to want to know what would be our reaction to this "evil twin"-version
of Wikipedia. I hope you can help me with your opinion.

I await your answers.

Best regards,

Lennart, aka Hannibal