Are these “facts of the matter” available for evidence focused rational consideration?
Cheers, Peter From: Mike Godwin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 30 August 2021 02:30 To: Andreas Kolbe Cc: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia issues in UNDARK.org #Opinion article to check... Andreas writes On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 11:12 AM Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote: But unless I am totally misreading you, your attitude sounds a lot like "Why should anyone care (or have cared) about Croatian and all these other languages spoken in some countries at the other end of the world?" If that does reflect your sentiment, then your mindset seems very much out of tune with WMF thought today. The most generous assessment of this gloss is that you are, in fact, totally misreading me. The less generous assessments I leave to the rhetorically inclined reader. I am not sure you are actually interested in an answer here, but what I did do, for what it's worth, was to make sure that the WP Signpost and WP Kurier covered the story when it first broke, mention it repeatedly over the years in my writing on WO and in the Signpost, as well as in correspondence with journalists and academics, and submit the aforementioned idea to the WMF – to have experts review human rights topics' coverage in Wikipedia language versions that may be subject to undue political influence, and publicly report the results. I think that's about all you could have reasonably expected me to have done here. I also think it is reasonable to expect you not to default to presuming things about the motives of WMF personnel in the absence of evidence. But that's me--I'm evidence-focused. The fact of the matter is that for about a decade, one of Wikipedia's top-50 language versions promoted extremist content, with the WMF's full knowledge. That is Not A Good Thing, whether you work for the WMF or not, and you have given no discernible reason why what was done this year could not have been done years ago, when the WMF was first made aware of the situation. Your characterization of "the fact of the matter" is morally confused. To wit, you want to imply that if some people at WMF knew something about what was happening in the Croatian Wikipedia, it follows that WMF institutionally decided, as a matter of policy, not to do what you wish they might have done. You do not have "the facts of the matter" that demonstrate such an institutional decision took place. Once again, you default to moral condemnation, and it seems self-evident that you're doing so because it's cheaper and easier than understanding what might actually have happened. Mike Godwin <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> Virus-free. <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient> www.avg.com
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