• notceps [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    No that kind of language is dangerous and also false, it’d be like saying that evolution/young earth creationism is disputed. Like technically it is but the people that are disputing are arguing it out of purely ideological reasons. The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 is no longer disputed since the opening of the Soviet archives, even Robert Conquest a person that was a huge anti-communist, so anti-communist that he was in support of the contras, has walked back his Cold War language since then and has said that the soviets didn’t purposely cause it.

    It’d be like if wiki had an article up about abortion and starts with “Abortions are considered illegal in x countries” and " […] whether abortions constitute murder remains in dispute", and the article listing like abortion numbers and stuff like that.

    The article is not written from a neutral position because the average american has consumed a ton of cold war propaganda and a lot of Wikipedia has really bad slants because the overwhelming majority of its user base identifies as male (80+%), and works in STEM and/or are a white-collar worker, on top of that people from the USA are the biggest user group so their biases will dominate, like I say that as someone that managed to edit some articles on Wikipedia in the past and has given up because it is incredibly tedious if you are going against the STEM/USA/Male biases that come up over and over again.

      • notceps [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I mean thanks for making my point I guess? Creationism doesn’t come up during the first few paragraphs at all because it’s not a relevant theory, people read the first couple of paragraphs and usually just skip the rest and that’s completely fine, so let’s see what the first few paragraphs are about:

        1st Paragraph: What evolution is 2nd Paragraph: Who came up with the theory of evolution. 3rd Paragraph: Competing ideas of evolutions and models and such. 4th Paragraph: LUCA, fossile records and general stuff 5th Paragraph: Ongoing study of various aspects of evolution.

        So ‘dispute’ comes up after long and very good and thorough explanations of evolution like people need to scroll through a ton of other stuff before they get to creationists. Creationism isn’t presented as this grand other theory it’s waaaaay down and presented as ‘[…] but it returned in pseudoscientific form as intelligent design (ID), to be excluded once again in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.’

        Which article do you think addresses their topic better, which article do you think has a higher overall quality? Again Wikipedia will have a generally good quality if it’s in the STEM field but once they get to the ‘soft sciences’ the quality drops like a ton and many wikipedia users will go “I know how to do physics let me just write a short article about this event I learned about in high school”.

        The article in question is of a poor quality and it pushes the idea “The Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis” and we can see that effect all over the world now with the Canadian government giving a standing ovation to a SS-Nazi, Söder in bavaria being ok with ‘ex-nazi’ Aiwanger and any other place I haven’t heard about but I’m sure someone will tell me about nazi normalization happening in other ‘civilized nations’.