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[Marxism] Wikipedia Lance Murdoch lancemurdoch at gmail.com Thu May 5 09:52:46 MDT 2005
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On 5/5/05, Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> wrote: > http://slate.msn.com/id/2117942/ > Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise. > > LA Times, May 4, 2005 > Wikipedia: See 'Information,' 'Amazing,' 'Anarchy'
Wikipedia is run by a conservative Ayn Rand worshipping millionaire, Jimbo Wales. Leftist users, and even administrators, are regularly purged one way or another. Long-time left-wing administrator 172 just left after frustration and multiple "trials". As far as users like the British Trotskyist Secretlondon, she was personally driven off by Jimbo Wales himself. Which is not to mention all of the left-wing users regularly kicked off.
It's a judgement whether it's worth it to contribute to Wikipedia, and from my long and involved experience with it, I'd say it usually is not worth the effort. One sign of this is the cliques - there is a well-organized right-wing clique, including many admins, while there is no left-wing clique at all, because the left-wing users who become well known get driven off by isolation and frustration. Your best hope is being ignored.
I've been fighting on the Khmer Rouge page since 2003 and it still looks like garbage. Wikipedia has a "neutral point of view" clause which one can appeal to when one is trying to make a neutral article. In my mind neutrality would be the same act done by different actors being portrayed in the same light. In practice this rarely is adhered to.
If one looks at the page despite the fights - first of all Khmer Rouge isn't even the name of an organization, it's a slur like Vietcong or zipperhead or Charlie or Shining Path or commie.
Then the second paragraph begins "The Khmer Rouge regime is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people, through execution, starvation and forced labor." As someone familiar with this I'd say the key word is estimate. The main method scholars have used to get this number is going by censuses - subtract the 1979 population from the 1975 one and there you go. Problems arise though - no census of Cambodia had been taken since 1962. Then, on top of trying to base the 1975 number on the 1962 one, the question of how many Cambodians were killed directly or indirectly due to American bombs up until 1975 has to be answered. Thrown into this is subtracting the 1979 number from the 1975 one doesn't work because there were a lot of refugees from Cambodia in neighboring countries, so that has to be estimated as well. Along with the possibility that the birth rate dropped between 1975 and 1979 (or even 1970 and 1975, since the 1975 population is a wild guess).
Let's look at the lead sentence in the first parapraph: "The Indochinese Communist Party was founded in 1931, and a separate Cambodian Communist Party was founded in 1951, although later the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, insisted that the party was founded in 1960." So it is stated encyclopediacally, that 1951 was when the party was founded, not 1960. Thus it takes one side over the other in a dispute about what happened in that Phnom Penh train station in 1960, although clearly the person who does this has no direct insights into which side is telling the truth.
And it goes on - I use this page as an example since I've been fighting about this on this page since 2003 and this is the result. That's why I like Anarchopedia, I've put the page I want at
http://eng.anarchopedia.org/index.php/Communist_Party_of_Kampuchea
In a short time I had the page I wanted, instead of wasting two years fighting to get a mess. It's probably more worth it to contribute to wikis like Anarchopedia, and Infoshop's OpenWiki (as well as Sourcewatch, Demopedia and Dkosopedia) than Wikipedia. I would love to translate an uncopyrighted Great Soviet Encyclopedia to one of these left-wing wiki encyclopedias. And of course, in the wiki format, erase all of the "The Communist party of Greece, following the shining example of the leader of the communist world, the great Communist Party of the Soviet Union" and all of that nonsense. The GSE gives a good basis for articles though, which one can then work on.
I tell left-wing Wikipedians they should at least partially contribute to Anarchopedia and/or Infoshop's OpenWiki. They usually don't, and instead get into fights they're going to lose on Wikipedia, and after a few months give up in frustration and don't contribute to any wiki encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a great mechanism for wasting the time of left-wingers, it's sort of like the Democratic Party.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050328/006504.html
On 7/9/05, Jurriaan Bendien <E-mail Protected> wrote: > I cannot rmember them all but here is some > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_value > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_labour > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_product > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_product > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added >
As I said before, I'm very down on Wikipedia.
There is a new wiki that people here might like - Red Wiki
There are two anarchist wikis ( http://www.infoshop.org/wiki and http://eng.anarchopedia.org ). Then there's two liberal/socdem wikis - Demopedia and Dkosopedia.
I do most of my contributions to the radical wikis because after a long time of experience I have given up on Wikipedia. Look at the Khmer Rouge page for an example. I have been fighting on it since 2003 and have gotten nowhere. To spite me they have made it worse - they put a picture of a dozen people the CPK was going to execute - if Wikipedia is a "neutral point of view", how come the US Republican (or Democratic for that matter) party doesn't have a similar picture? It's ridiculous. I'm not even a fan of the CPK's political line, I just think the CPK "atrocities" were overdone in the US media, just like the western media talks about how the evil Vietnamese are still holding and torturing US soldiers for some reason. I see the KR atrocity, POW/MIA thing as some kind of collective hysteria due to the loss in Vietnam. Maybe something similar happened in Germany after World War I with the Dolchstosslegende.
Since no one on Wikipedia who disagrees with you knows what surplus value is, you'll probabyl get away with it. But you won't get away with being able to edit "profit" or "Economy of the United States" or "capitalism" or other pages.
The problem is instead of lots of people collaborating on economic articles on Wikipedia, you'll spend most of your time defending your work against reactionaries on Wikipedia - and losing. Of course, most of these encyclopedias have similar licenses, so you can add your work to multiple encyclopedias, and work on more than one of them. So I suggest that to all, check out the different wiki's. If you start fighting with reactionaries on Wikipedia - don't fight them until you get frustrated and then swear off wiki's altogether. I've seen it happen time and time again. If you start running into problems, have the "Red Wiki" as your home base for your articles, where you can collaborate with people, and then venture into Wikipedia when you want to fight over articles. I have more peace of mind knowing after working days at an article, half-witted reactionaries will not descend on it and destroy it, questioning whether everyone who said Americans killed people at No Gun Ri, Korea was lying and so forth. On Wikipedia they may tear it apart, but on Red Wiki, I can work with others and collaborate.
Lance