Ksenia Coffman’s fellow editors have called her a vandal and a McCarthyist. She just wants them to stop glorifying fascists—and start citing better sources.

  • TheCaconym [any]
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    1128 months ago

    She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995. Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.”

    lmao

        • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
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          38 months ago

          I might be misreading things, but it’s the fascist apologist wikipedia editor that wrote up a summary of correct things then smugged all over it calling it incorrect.

          • kot [they/them]
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            8 months ago

            The way I interpreted it, the wikipedia writers copied an argument from the book which was apparently glorifying a mass murderer as some sort of hero who tried to save jews and other persecuted people from being murdered, but then the same wikipedia writers omitted the next paragraph, where the author of the book calls the argument he just talked about nonsense.

    • StellarTabi [none/use name]
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      358 months ago

      she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.”

      I’m guessing that “appears to confirm” really means that the book described the claim, but some people can misinterpret stating an argument as the same thing as making or affirming an argument. This is some advanced quote mining/cherry-picking the likes of witch the world has never seen before.

  • SwitchyWitchyandBitchy [she/her]
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    158 months ago

    Thank you for sharing this is a great find! I used to browse wikipedia heavily and trusted it a lot more than I should have but when that trust broke I started to really notice how biased so many pages are.