[Wikipedia-l] Sensitive subjects on some Wikipedias

[Steven Walling]

Actually Bop, I'm not sure if all wiki articles reflect this, but the
Armenian Genocide was aboslutely the first event described as a genocide.

On 7/13/07, Ronald Chmara <ron at opus1.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 13, 2007, at 4:53 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> > There's always idiocy, on every wiki. But Turks being allowed to
> > use a WMF
> > wiki to continue to deny what was, lexicographically, the world's
> > first
> > genocide isn't simple stupidity...it's evil. If such a word carries
> > any real
> > meaning.
>
> FWIW, the word "genocide" didn't enter the lexicon until 1943,
> according to several articles on en:wp....
>
> But that's not really the point/problem, per se.
>
> Since I know my own culture the best, I'll use articles from its
> space, to demonstrate that this is possibly a universal human failing.
>
> The english language wikipedia, for example, doesn't really take the
> perspective that the biggest number of civilians ever outright
> slaughtered by an external  government in *one single event* is
> really a nightmarishly terroristic, immoral, and wrong thing,  to do.
> Instead, it equivocates and quibbles, repeating old party lines
> *justifying* the action, and combines articles on two separate events:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
>
> How about the United State's first major genocidal policy? Is it
> called a genocide? Nope. Again, Quibbling and equivocation, and an
> "official policy name":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal
>
> How about the deplorable white supremacist, ignorant, racism, of a
> man who said he was "not in favor of bringing about in any way the
> social and political equality of the white and black races" and "If I
> could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it"? Is he
> condemned for it? Nope. Instead, there's non-stop hagiography and
> justification for his blatant racism, and a blatant cultural white-
> washing (*cough*) of both his character and actions:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_on_slavery
>
> I could keep going on, but I'd better get to my point. Within
> cultures, there is usually a dominant language (and languages is
> where wikipedia divides), and those cultures each carry their own
> narrative style, and with it, their own perspectives on history.
>
> Where wp is *very good* is that those narratives actually get stored,
> and carried forward, to future generations.
>
> Where wp can be argued as 'bad' (on these kind of topics) is that
> different cultures, through their language spaces, are allowed to
> actually display their different perspectives.
>
> This tends to upset folks who want *their* perspective, *their*
> cultural narrative, to dominate the narrative landscape *across all
> cultures and languages*. That's not gonna happen until we have one
> global mono-culture, and whoo boy, we are nowhere near that.
>
> -Bop
>
>
>
>
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