An article appeared in Washington Post's opinion section praising Wikipedia's service to democracy by providing objective information on the history of Russia and Ukraine and related issues.
Russian President Vladimir has made claims that Ukraine is run by Nazists and they need to be eradicated. He also believes that Ukraine should not be independent from Moscow. Upon hearing such statements many people in democratic societies headed to Wikipedia to examine their veracity. Relevant articles saw a sharp increase in page views. --- Wikipedia acts as a check on Putin's false view of history https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/31/wikipedia-hitler-putin-lavrov/ Perspective by Noam Cohen ... Since the Russian invasion, the English Wikipedia articles about the historical figures and topics Putin invoked have been racking up pop-star numbers. The article about Stepan Bandera, a far-right leader of Ukrainian nationalists before and during World War II - whom Putin sees as an evil force guiding Ukraine even today - has been viewed a million times since the invasion. The one about the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an obscure entity within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that Putin sees as having enabled Ukraine's current separate political identity, has had more than a half-million views since the invasion. Also with Bandera-type numbers is the article about Kievan Rus' (just under a million views), the ancient kingdom led by Vladimir the Great (225,000). ... --- A world with an impartial source of information is far healthier than one in which only disparate narratives from two competing entities are heard. However, my personal observation of Wikipedia makes me doubt whether it deserves as much praise as Noam Cohen suggests. Occasionally I take a look at the Wikipedia article on the "Linux" operating system. It is constantly edited. At times I have seen efforts to eradicate or minimize the role of GNU. Here are the first two paragraphs of the current version of the article: Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution. Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy. It is true that FSF uses the name "GNU/Linux" but the way it is phrased gives people the impression that FSF is but an isolated voice among computer specialists. This is a factual error. For example there is "Debian GNU/Linux" developed by an organization independent from FSF. Moreover in numerous technical documents I encounter the term "GNU/Linux" used by people who are obviously not affiliated to FSF, in contexts where it is necessary to distinguish between the kernel and the operating system. Wikipedia, while putting emphasis on the desires of FSF, fails to make clear that people have practical reasons for saying "GNU/Linux." Failure to say that not everybody who says "GNU/Linux" is prodded by FSF is a factual error. Failure to mention that people need to distinguish the kernel from the OS is yet another. Wikipedia may have helped thwart Russian President Putin's efforts to rewrite history but it has been less successful in getting operating system history straight. I know of other instances of questionable quality. Certain articles on WW2 subjects exhibit stark differences in the Japanese page and the English page. It is easy to imagine this happening where disputes surround the subject matter. But I have also seen contradictions in figures for which controversy is not known to exist. Japanese and English Wikipedia pages on Japanese capital warships at times disagree on the number of casualties at the time of sinking. For the Shinano, the world's largest aircraft carrier at the time, the difference is 644. Nowadays machine translation is widely available and Wikipedia encourages its use. If people who edit Wikipedia articles don't always check the facts with the help of machine translation, it may well be that they do not examine available references either. --- Discussions of free software often presume that promotion is a good thing. The eagerness to promote may shove other aspects aside. Even in a world with no proprietary software, people may suffer from lack of freedom. Computers are useful because they are accurate. When fed false data, computers produce misleading output. Imagine the captain of a sinking ship who is not sure how many passengers are on board, or the capacity of each lifeboat. Delays in evacuation may put lives at risk. An accurate computer running free software won't help the captain if he does not have faith in the data therein. And when a person dies, loss of freedom is total and irreversible. The survivors are better off but also suffer from dimininished freedom caused by physical and mental injuries and loss of belongings. Now consider an industrial setting. False figures lead to defects. Money, effort and time are spent dealing them instead of production or development. False figures take away the organization's freedom. As important as the promotion of free software are efforts to ensure that false facts and figures are not supplied as input to the systems. --- Has anybody been monitoring the Wikipedia article on the "Linux" operating system? As stated above I notice that it is constantly evolving. I see the need to examine the article and the "GNU/Linux" naming ordeal from an objective perspective. _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss