The Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor said it will fine Wikipedia up to 4 million rubles (about $49,000) if it doesn’t delete factual information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in its Russian language encyclopedia entries.
That linked page is so full of bullshit it’s hard to skim through. There are some good points: various interest groups using Wikipedia as a platform to promote their worldview, sexist bias leading to important women being denied their page… but there’s also a lot of unsourced or shaky assertions.
it is interesting to see here how easily administrator privileges are given to random users by other administrators, suggesting a widespread problem in the hierarchy
Source? The specific governance varies with every language community, but at least in the French-speaking Wikipedia is administered by a registered non-profit. I can’t say i agree all the time with their positions, but their power is transparent and no power is given to random people.
There have been various examples in the past of administrators who used their privileges to prevent their articles from being edited (therefore presenting their biased opinion as fact), or even asking for payment to let an edit through.
Source? I’ve never heard of either though i don’t consider it impossible, but you have to remember that all admins are all-powerful: a single admin can not control the site, so such allegations imply that the whole staff is on it?
Wikipedia is purposely kept difficult to edit
Source? Wikipedia has been constantly “improving” the participation UX. I personally prefered their old interface but i appreciate the new one is easier to use.
It is not rare for users going against the agenda set out by the administrators to simply be banned on frivolous grounds.
So the source for this is down now, but we can read it on the wayback machine. So it’s an interview from this guy Kohs who denounces that some people writing on wikipedia have an agenda and we should be aware of that and check sources/history. Good advice so far. Oh wait this guy is behind that scandal and was actually paid to do commercial PR on Wikipedia and was banned for that… funny ;)
Since most Wikipedia editors are white, it follows that Wikipedia will promote white supremacist points.
This makes no sense. First, i’d be interested in ethnic/religious/cultural stats on Wikipedia. Second, these stats should be made by language community because every language has its own policies on Wikipedia. Third, in the history and geography of humanity, whiteness is not necessarily linked to white supremacy. White supremacy itself is a rather “recent” phenomenon that started with european colonization and the rise of capitalism. It’s also not present in the entire “white” world: for example racial oppression in France is mostly a form of cultural supremacy, not white supremacy. Or as a french rapper put it, “here they love you when you’re rich and eat pork”.
Although Wikipedia purports to be a reliable and neutral source of knowledge, it has been mangled by several known cases of corruption, involving paid editors hired to whitewash their clients’ reputation.
True. Wikipedia even has a dedicated page on that topic. Why not link to it?
Ultimately, Wikipedia is designed to promote imperialist interests; it naturally follows that Wikipedia will also promote white supremacist, anti-Semitic, fascist and sexist viewpoints in their articles. Not only are most edits made by accounts managed by/for corporations and government agencies, the whole website structure is made to keep this agenda in place and going strong.
Source? I certainly see bias on certain language communities, but arguing that Wikipedia as a whole promotes “white supremacist, anti-Semitic, fascist and sexist viewpoints” is a very far stretch. If anything, the french-speaking wikipedia does exactly the opposite although i disagree with the liberal “rough consensus” that most pages reach.
The article on the genocide that happened in the Congo Free State (…) claims that the term genocide is contested and currently, the article contradicts itself, first making it seem like the Congolese Genocide was caused mainly by disease, later saying it was caused by “harsh economic exploitation, rather than a policy of deliberate extermination”.
The article doesn’t appear to contradict itself. It points out that deaths can be mostly attributed to disease, while still pointing out countless colonial atrocities. It does not appear particularly bad or biased to me.
All in all, that article is full of FUD. Wikipedia has bias and strong debates, but this “prolewiki” article lacks both. In that sense, it’s a lot worse than most wikipedia article that i come across. Too bad for something that’s supposed to show how unreliable wikipedia is…
EDIT: Their page on Anarchism is also hilariously bad, as if it was written by interns working for The Party™.
Anarchism does not go beyond general phrases against exploitation, it does not understand what the causes of exploitation are, nor the class struggle as a creative force for the realization of socialism. The anarchist denial of political struggle contributes objectively to the subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics.
Wow. So much wrong in that sentence. Yes anarchism has some economic analysis: the entire cooperative movement was born from Proudhon’s theories (he can be criticized on many other topics but that’s not exactly the point). There are anarchist unions such as the CNT in Spain and the IWW in USA, both of which have been very involved in revolutionary activity and were the biggest unions of their time. The quoted sentence is an easy dismissal that’s completely disconnected from reality of anarchism as a political struggle.
After 1917, anarchism in Russia became a counter-revolutionary tendency
LOL. More like Bolshevism in Russia became a counter-revolutionary tendency and slaughtered dozens of thousands of workers who were real revolutionaries.
Anarchism saw brief surges in popularity in Catalonia, the Free Territory in Ukraine and in the Korean Peninsula.
It’s insulting to reduce decades of popular struggles to a dismissive sentence grouping together very different histories under a single umbrella. If anything, anarchism in Catalonia was the driving force of the socialist movement for a long time… many peasants learnt to read in anarchist circles, and the CNT was the biggest union with over 1 million members in Barcelona alone. Wikipedia also has short but good articles on the Ukraine Commune and the Korean Commune.
Examples of anarchist experiments
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
Fun fun fun. If you’d like to name TAZ/ZADs, then let’s name a few more: Standing Rock, Notre Dame des Landes, Hambach… We could also mention anarchist communes, or libertarian communist (anarchist, in my view) territories like the zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas, or the free communes from Catalonia/Korea/Ukraine we mentioned earlier.
SOOOOOOOO after examining two articles on your “source” i’m glad to say it’s entirely bullshit and if you want practical/useful information you should stay away from that “prolewiki”.
anarchists siding with the bourgeoisie against the mean tankies, what else is new? prolewiki is a proletarian encyclopedia, we do not hide the fact that we are marxist-leninists and that we reject anarchism as a petty-bourgeois, counter-revolutionary ideology. You are free to make your anarchist encyclopedia if you want to.
Edit: Zapatistas are not anarchists, and they have been saying that for decades. I know anarchists have nothing else to cling to, but it’s really appropriating to have them keep claiming the Zapatistas are anarchists when the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist.
anarchists siding with the bourgeoisie against the mean tankies, what else is new?
Well that’s new. For example in revolutionary Spain, an anarchist revolution made the bourgeoisie practically disappear overnight (though not via a genocide like Pol Pot has committed, which is laudable in my view), and it is in fact the Nation State apparatus (which the anarchists refused to seize, but unfortunately didn’t abolish formally) controlled by the communist party (supported by USSR) that reintroduced commerce and bourgeoisie in Catalonia as well as dismantled the people’s militias and forced women to drop their guns. This is well-documented in many works, including in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or in Martha Ackelsberg’s Free Women of Spain.
we do not hide the fact that we are marxist-leninists
I appreciate that. I was simply pointing out that your articles are very poor: either no sources or very shaky sources. You could do a better propaganda job if you put your heart to it. Comrade Lenin would certainly be disappointed in your lack of rigorous scientific marxism ;)
Zapatistas are not anarchists, and they have been saying that for decades.
I know zapatistas do not refer to themselves as anarchists, they are “from below on the left”. It just so happens that most anarchists also are “from below on the left” (because that’s the very definition of anarchism) and therefore identify with the zapatistas, rather than appropriate their revolution. I think it’s also important to point out that it’s not me personally drawing this connection: the zapatistas movement has a strong support base in the anarchist circles across Mexico (Mexico itself having a long and complex history of anarchism), and has strong connections to the international libertarian communist (anarchist) networks as outlined recently by the zapatistas delegations visiting communities who struggle across Europe (in the ZADs, in the squats, in the unions, in the popular districts, etc).
EDIT: To be clear, the zapatistas movement does not collectively identify as anarchist, however some people from Mexico involved in the zapatistas movement identify personally as anarchists.
So to be clear: i’m not trying to appropriate the zapatistas revolution which is very specific to their local cultural and colonial context. However, i personally understand their revolution to be based on anarchism because it places the Commune front and center and explicitly refuses to build a Nation State. In making a connection between anarchism and zapatism, i’m not trying to rally zapatistas to a specific political brand because i don’t care about ideology so much as i care about praxis. On the other hand, i am fully trying to get people interested in anarchism to learn more about the zapatistas caracoles because i believe the socialist/communist/anarchist movement in the global north has a lot to learn from these communities and their struggles.
I know anarchists have nothing else to cling to
That’s wrong. Not that we have many successes, but anarchism is rising again on all continents. The corruption of political parties and the rise of dictatorial centralized States have led to more people criticizing the systemic aspects of oppression and how they are enacted/reinforced by Nation States. There’s a lot happening around the world and simply dismissing anarchist activity as “nothing” (just like the prolewiki article does citing only one anarchist example which doesn’t even have a link/source) doesn’t help your point against anarchism. For a major Nation-wide controversy involving anarchism in the past years, i recommend you do some reading on “Exarcheia” and “Rouvikonas” in Greece.
the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist.
Orwell was a colonial cop who later on kept a list of “crypto-communists” and “anti-white” personalities that he gave to the British gov. It’s come to a point where there are serious allegations he was an informant even during his time in Catalonia. That’s the kind of thing I mean by siding with the bourgeoisie. But I am not talking about the Spanish revolution, I am talking about you as an anarchist in this comment section, and more generally all anarchists I’ve met.
I appreciate that. I was simply pointing out that your articles are very poor: either no sources or very shaky sources. You could do a better propaganda job if you put your heart to it
What sources should we have decrying anarchism as what it really is? Any marxist analysis of anarchism will ultimately lead to that same conclusion, quoting someone about it would only be a formality. This backhanded compliment does not faze me or any of our editors; we are not here to appeal to anarchists, we are here as a proletarian encyclopedia. We are a handful of volunteer editors and do not have the means Wikipedia (which you seem to be fond of) has, nor do we claim to. Our recent changes page is filled with edits every day, we’ll get around to adding things to the article on anarchism when we get to it. Decrying it as imperfect and thus faulty does not solve anything; it is better to publish something viable than not publish at all.
Orwell was a colonial cop who later on kept a list of “crypto-communists” and “anti-white” personalities that he gave to the British gov.
I don’t know much about Orwell but he was a marxist not an anarchist so i don’t see the point.
But I am not talking about the Spanish revolution, I am talking about you as an anarchist in this comment section, and more generally all anarchists I’ve met.
Can you name one example in these comments where i’ve “sided with the bourgeoisie”? Or other anarchists for that matter? It’s funny to me because in the french political context the communist party is derided for being too lenient and siding with the bourgeoisie (the PCF is often working hand in hand with housing developers to gentrify neighborhoods, and as a whole they don’t promote abolition of private property anymore).
Any marxist analysis of anarchism will ultimately lead to that same conclusion, quoting someone about it would only be a formality.
So are you suggesting that anti-authoritarian marxism or libertarian communism does not exist? There’s plenty of those so why are you suggesting you have the only and ultimate truth?
we are not here to appeal to anarchists, we are here as a proletarian encyclopedia
Does that mean you can only get an account if you’re a unionized worker? Disclaimer: I wouldn’t fit in that category personally. I mean i don’t know about you but in my neighborhood/circles marxists are usually intellectuals from the universities while actual workers/proles tend to be of the “burn everything down” anarchist type who don’t care for leaders and nice words like they care for actual change. But maybe that’s because in France we have a much stronger history of anarcho-syndicalism with the CGT in early 20th century being the biggest union, all the while promoting sabotage, direct action and general strike.
Oh yes i read that one a few years back but it’s really far off from “the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist” (quote from you). It’s a piece asking western leftists to not try and fit zapatism into narrow categories including “anarchism and communism”, which would fail to capture the specificity of the struggle and would divide the movement on brand not practical concerns.
In that sense, i agree with that link: i personally don’t care if you’re a marxist or an anarchist (or whatever else really) as long as you are building power for the people, not “dictatorship of the proletariat” (or any other dictatorship really). That approach is common to the zapatistas who build/promote power from below no matter what your ideology/religion is, as the article argues.
Also worth noting: the article is an answer to an post saying we global north anarchists should not support zapatism because it doesn’t fit in a narrow understanding of anarchism. We could even say it does defend anarchist principles, or to quote the article:
In this light, revolutionary solidarity needs to take up the weapon of unflinching, merciless critique of all reformist, nationalist, hierarchical, authoritarian, democratic or class collaborationist tendencies that could undermine the autonomy and self-activity of those in struggle and channel the struggle into negotiation and compromise with the present order
That linked page is so full of bullshit it’s hard to skim through. There are some good points: various interest groups using Wikipedia as a platform to promote their worldview, sexist bias leading to important women being denied their page… but there’s also a lot of unsourced or shaky assertions.
Source? The specific governance varies with every language community, but at least in the French-speaking Wikipedia is administered by a registered non-profit. I can’t say i agree all the time with their positions, but their power is transparent and no power is given to random people.
Source? I’ve never heard of either though i don’t consider it impossible, but you have to remember that all admins are all-powerful: a single admin can not control the site, so such allegations imply that the whole staff is on it?
Source? Wikipedia has been constantly “improving” the participation UX. I personally prefered their old interface but i appreciate the new one is easier to use.
So the source for this is down now, but we can read it on the wayback machine. So it’s an interview from this guy Kohs who denounces that some people writing on wikipedia have an agenda and we should be aware of that and check sources/history. Good advice so far. Oh wait this guy is behind that scandal and was actually paid to do commercial PR on Wikipedia and was banned for that… funny ;)
This makes no sense. First, i’d be interested in ethnic/religious/cultural stats on Wikipedia. Second, these stats should be made by language community because every language has its own policies on Wikipedia. Third, in the history and geography of humanity, whiteness is not necessarily linked to white supremacy. White supremacy itself is a rather “recent” phenomenon that started with european colonization and the rise of capitalism. It’s also not present in the entire “white” world: for example racial oppression in France is mostly a form of cultural supremacy, not white supremacy. Or as a french rapper put it, “here they love you when you’re rich and eat pork”.
True. Wikipedia even has a dedicated page on that topic. Why not link to it?
Source? I certainly see bias on certain language communities, but arguing that Wikipedia as a whole promotes “white supremacist, anti-Semitic, fascist and sexist viewpoints” is a very far stretch. If anything, the french-speaking wikipedia does exactly the opposite although i disagree with the liberal “rough consensus” that most pages reach.
The article doesn’t appear to contradict itself. It points out that deaths can be mostly attributed to disease, while still pointing out countless colonial atrocities. It does not appear particularly bad or biased to me.
All in all, that article is full of FUD. Wikipedia has bias and strong debates, but this “prolewiki” article lacks both. In that sense, it’s a lot worse than most wikipedia article that i come across. Too bad for something that’s supposed to show how unreliable wikipedia is…
EDIT: Their page on Anarchism is also hilariously bad, as if it was written by interns working for The Party™.
Wow. So much wrong in that sentence. Yes anarchism has some economic analysis: the entire cooperative movement was born from Proudhon’s theories (he can be criticized on many other topics but that’s not exactly the point). There are anarchist unions such as the CNT in Spain and the IWW in USA, both of which have been very involved in revolutionary activity and were the biggest unions of their time. The quoted sentence is an easy dismissal that’s completely disconnected from reality of anarchism as a political struggle.
LOL. More like Bolshevism in Russia became a counter-revolutionary tendency and slaughtered dozens of thousands of workers who were real revolutionaries.
It’s insulting to reduce decades of popular struggles to a dismissive sentence grouping together very different histories under a single umbrella. If anything, anarchism in Catalonia was the driving force of the socialist movement for a long time… many peasants learnt to read in anarchist circles, and the CNT was the biggest union with over 1 million members in Barcelona alone. Wikipedia also has short but good articles on the Ukraine Commune and the Korean Commune.
Fun fun fun. If you’d like to name TAZ/ZADs, then let’s name a few more: Standing Rock, Notre Dame des Landes, Hambach… We could also mention anarchist communes, or libertarian communist (anarchist, in my view) territories like the zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas, or the free communes from Catalonia/Korea/Ukraine we mentioned earlier.
SOOOOOOOO after examining two articles on your “source” i’m glad to say it’s entirely bullshit and if you want practical/useful information you should stay away from that “prolewiki”.
anarchists siding with the bourgeoisie against the mean tankies, what else is new? prolewiki is a proletarian encyclopedia, we do not hide the fact that we are marxist-leninists and that we reject anarchism as a petty-bourgeois, counter-revolutionary ideology. You are free to make your anarchist encyclopedia if you want to.
Edit: Zapatistas are not anarchists, and they have been saying that for decades. I know anarchists have nothing else to cling to, but it’s really appropriating to have them keep claiming the Zapatistas are anarchists when the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist.
Well that’s new. For example in revolutionary Spain, an anarchist revolution made the bourgeoisie practically disappear overnight (though not via a genocide like Pol Pot has committed, which is laudable in my view), and it is in fact the Nation State apparatus (which the anarchists refused to seize, but unfortunately didn’t abolish formally) controlled by the communist party (supported by USSR) that reintroduced commerce and bourgeoisie in Catalonia as well as dismantled the people’s militias and forced women to drop their guns. This is well-documented in many works, including in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or in Martha Ackelsberg’s Free Women of Spain.
I appreciate that. I was simply pointing out that your articles are very poor: either no sources or very shaky sources. You could do a better propaganda job if you put your heart to it. Comrade Lenin would certainly be disappointed in your lack of rigorous scientific marxism ;)
I know zapatistas do not refer to themselves as anarchists, they are “from below on the left”. It just so happens that most anarchists also are “from below on the left” (because that’s the very definition of anarchism) and therefore identify with the zapatistas, rather than appropriate their revolution. I think it’s also important to point out that it’s not me personally drawing this connection: the zapatistas movement has a strong support base in the anarchist circles across Mexico (Mexico itself having a long and complex history of anarchism), and has strong connections to the international libertarian communist (anarchist) networks as outlined recently by the zapatistas delegations visiting communities who struggle across Europe (in the ZADs, in the squats, in the unions, in the popular districts, etc).
EDIT: To be clear, the zapatistas movement does not collectively identify as anarchist, however some people from Mexico involved in the zapatistas movement identify personally as anarchists.
So to be clear: i’m not trying to appropriate the zapatistas revolution which is very specific to their local cultural and colonial context. However, i personally understand their revolution to be based on anarchism because it places the Commune front and center and explicitly refuses to build a Nation State. In making a connection between anarchism and zapatism, i’m not trying to rally zapatistas to a specific political brand because i don’t care about ideology so much as i care about praxis. On the other hand, i am fully trying to get people interested in anarchism to learn more about the zapatistas caracoles because i believe the socialist/communist/anarchist movement in the global north has a lot to learn from these communities and their struggles.
That’s wrong. Not that we have many successes, but anarchism is rising again on all continents. The corruption of political parties and the rise of dictatorial centralized States have led to more people criticizing the systemic aspects of oppression and how they are enacted/reinforced by Nation States. There’s a lot happening around the world and simply dismissing anarchist activity as “nothing” (just like the prolewiki article does citing only one anarchist example which doesn’t even have a link/source) doesn’t help your point against anarchism. For a major Nation-wide controversy involving anarchism in the past years, i recommend you do some reading on “Exarcheia” and “Rouvikonas” in Greece.
I’m interested if you have a link to that! :)
Orwell was a colonial cop who later on kept a list of “crypto-communists” and “anti-white” personalities that he gave to the British gov. It’s come to a point where there are serious allegations he was an informant even during his time in Catalonia. That’s the kind of thing I mean by siding with the bourgeoisie. But I am not talking about the Spanish revolution, I am talking about you as an anarchist in this comment section, and more generally all anarchists I’ve met.
What sources should we have decrying anarchism as what it really is? Any marxist analysis of anarchism will ultimately lead to that same conclusion, quoting someone about it would only be a formality. This backhanded compliment does not faze me or any of our editors; we are not here to appeal to anarchists, we are here as a proletarian encyclopedia. We are a handful of volunteer editors and do not have the means Wikipedia (which you seem to be fond of) has, nor do we claim to. Our recent changes page is filled with edits every day, we’ll get around to adding things to the article on anarchism when we get to it. Decrying it as imperfect and thus faulty does not solve anything; it is better to publish something viable than not publish at all.
Here is the link you were interested in: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist
I don’t know much about Orwell but he was a marxist not an anarchist so i don’t see the point.
Can you name one example in these comments where i’ve “sided with the bourgeoisie”? Or other anarchists for that matter? It’s funny to me because in the french political context the communist party is derided for being too lenient and siding with the bourgeoisie (the PCF is often working hand in hand with housing developers to gentrify neighborhoods, and as a whole they don’t promote abolition of private property anymore).
So are you suggesting that anti-authoritarian marxism or libertarian communism does not exist? There’s plenty of those so why are you suggesting you have the only and ultimate truth?
Does that mean you can only get an account if you’re a unionized worker? Disclaimer: I wouldn’t fit in that category personally. I mean i don’t know about you but in my neighborhood/circles marxists are usually intellectuals from the universities while actual workers/proles tend to be of the “burn everything down” anarchist type who don’t care for leaders and nice words like they care for actual change. But maybe that’s because in France we have a much stronger history of anarcho-syndicalism with the CGT in early 20th century being the biggest union, all the while promoting sabotage, direct action and general strike.
Oh yes i read that one a few years back but it’s really far off from “the movement themselves have had to put out press releases and articles explaining to please stop calling them anarchist” (quote from you). It’s a piece asking western leftists to not try and fit zapatism into narrow categories including “anarchism and communism”, which would fail to capture the specificity of the struggle and would divide the movement on brand not practical concerns.
In that sense, i agree with that link: i personally don’t care if you’re a marxist or an anarchist (or whatever else really) as long as you are building power for the people, not “dictatorship of the proletariat” (or any other dictatorship really). That approach is common to the zapatistas who build/promote power from below no matter what your ideology/religion is, as the article argues.
Also worth noting: the article is an answer to an post saying we global north anarchists should not support zapatism because it doesn’t fit in a narrow understanding of anarchism. We could even say it does defend anarchist principles, or to quote the article: