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Artistic rendering of an editor adding Holocaust distortions to wikipedia Photo by iStock/Creative Commons/Forward Montage

Shira Klein June 14, 2023

Manipulating Wikipedia is all the rage these days. Companies, governments and even presidential candidates reportedly do it.

Yet we sleep well at night because we trust Wikipedias editors will protect us from blatant disinformation. After all, there are 125,000 active editors on English Wikipedia, 460 administrators and a 12-member Arbitration Committee, often dubbed Wikipedias Supreme Court. Above these volunteers towers the Wikimedia Foundation, with its 700-strong staff. Together, it comprises an entire security system.

This month, we are seeing the system fail. And it is time for the Wikimedia Foundation to get involved.

My colleague and I recently exposed a persistent Holocaust disinformation campaign on English Wikipedia.

The study, which I published with Jan Grabowski from the University of Ottawa, examined two dozen Wikipedia articles on the Holocaust in Poland and over 300 back pages (including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases, spaces where editors decide what the rest of the world will accept as fact).

To our dismay, we found dozens of examples of Holocaust distortion which, taken together, advanced a Polish nationalist narrative, whitewashed the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolstered harmful stereotypes about Jews.

People who read these pages learned about Jews supposed complicity in their own catastrophe, gangs of Jewish collaborators aiding the Gestapo and Jews supporting the communists to betray Poles. A handful of distortions have been corrected since our publication, but many remain.

A fraction of it is true: There were scattered instances of Jewish collaboration in WWII, for example. But Wikipedia inflates their scale and prominence. In one article that remains gravely distorted, alleged Jewish collaboration with the Nazis takes up more space than the Ukrainian, Belorussian and ethnic German collaboration combined.

In one glaring hoax discovered by an Israeli reporter, Wikipedia claimed for 15 years that the Germans annihilated 200,000 non-Jewish Poles in a giant gas chamber in the middle of Warsaw.

Wikipedias ArbCom just released aruling responding to our study, sanctioning several editors. While this may seem promising, in fact, ArbComs actions should concern anyone who cares about disinformation.

The problem is not the individual arbitrators, nor even ArbCom as a whole; the committees mandate is to judge conduct, never content. This is a good policy. We wouldnt want arbitrators, who are anonymous volunteers with no expertise in any particular subject, to control content. Wikipedias strength lies in its enabling anyone to edit, democratizing knowledge like never before.

But this leaves a gaping hole in Wikipedias security apparatus. Its safeguards only protect us from fake information when enough editors reach a consensus that the information is indeed fake. When an area is dominated by a group of individuals pushing an erroneous point of view, then wrong information becomes the consensus.

Wikipedias structure leaves it vulnerable to be exploited by any small group of people willing to spend the time to control the content, whether they are from a government or a corporation or are simply ideologically driven private individuals.

In theory, anyone can edit Wikipedia; no editor has any ownership over any article. Yet over the years, anyone who tried to fix distortions related to Holocaust disinformation faced a team of fierce editors who guard old lies and produce new ones.

These few editors, with no evident ties to any government, sport playful pseudonyms, such as Piotrus (Little Peter in Polish) or Volunteer Marek. But they are a resilient team whose seniority and prolific editing across the encyclopedia give them high status in Wikipedias editorial community. Methodically and patiently, they go from article to article, removing and adding content until it aligns with a Polish nationalist worldview. They misrepresent sources, use unreliable sources, and push fringe points of view.

To be sure, Wikipedia has policies in place to prevent source misrepresentation, unreliable sources and fringe claims. If an editor commits these violations repeatedly, administrators and arbitrators can kick them out.

But administrators and arbitrators lack the expertise to recognize when a source has been misrepresented. Instead, they focus on editors interpersonal conduct. Editors who are uncivil, aggressive or long-winded find themselves sanctioned, while those who are polite and show a willingness to compromise generally emerge unscathed, regardless of the content they author.

This problem is not unique to Wikipedias treatment of the Holocaust. A similar disinformation campaign is taking place in Wikipedias articles on Native American history, where influential editors misrepresent sources to the effect of erasing Native history and whitewashing American settler colonial violence. The Wikipedia article on Andrew Jackson, plagued by such manipulations, attracts thousands of readers a day.

This was the third ArbCom case on the Holocaust to make the same mistakes. ArbCom paid lip service to the importance of tackling source manipulations, while completely disregarding dozens of such problems presented to them by our study and by concerned editors. By ignoring egregiously false content, and focusing only on editors civility, ArbCom sends the message that theres no problem with falsifying the past, as long as you are nice about it.

The results are tragic: The arbitrators have banned one editor who, as our article showed, had brought in trustworthy scholarship to rebut the distortions. They sanctioned another editor for documenting the distortionists whitewashing of current Polish antisemitic figurines (called, tellingly, Jew with a Coin).

Worse still, they have described as exemplary a distortionist editor who has defended Holocaust revisionist Ewa Kurek. Kurek has claimed that Jews had fun in the Warsaw ghetto and that COVID-19 is a Jewfication of Europe. Two additional editors who were banned are indeed distortionists, but the ban (appealable in 12 months) responded to their bad manners, not their manipulation of history.

The Wikimedia Foundation needs to intervene, as it has already done to stem disinformation in Chinese Wikipedia, Saudi Wikipedia and Croatian Wikipedia, with excellent results. It must do so in English Wikipedia as well.

In a statement they issued last week in response to press inquiries about our study and the recent ArbCom decision, the foundation said, Wikipedias volunteer editors act as a vigilant first line of defense.

But what is the second line of defense? What happens when cases keep bouncing back to ArbCom, as has occurred with the Holocaust in Poland, India-Pakistan, Armenia-Azerbaijan and gender and sexuality, to mention just a few controversies?

The Wikimedia Foundation must harness subject-matter experts to assist volunteer editors. In cases where Wikipedias internal measures fail repeatedly, the foundation should commission scholars mainstream scholars who are currently publishing in reputable peer-reviewed presses and work in universities unencumbered by state dictates to weigh in.

In the case of Wikipedias coverage of Holocaust history, there is a need for an advisory board of established historians who would be available to advise editors on a sources reliability, or help administrators understand whether a source has been misrepresented.

The foundation certainly has the resources to build more bridges with academia: It boasts an annual revenue of $155 million, mostly from the publics donations. The public deserves a Wikipedia that provides not just any knowledge, but accurate knowledge, and asking for academics help is a necessary next step in Wikipedias ongoing development.

This is no radical departure from Wikipedias ethos of democratized knowledge that anyone can edit. This is an additional safeguard to ensure Wikipedias existing content policies are actually upheld.

Academia must also play its part to keep Wikipedia accurate. Scholars should uncover Wikipedias weaknesses and flag them for editors to fix, instead of snubbing Wikipedia as unreliable. Wikipedia is the seventh-most-visited site on the internet, most peoples first and last stop for information. All the more so with ChatGPT, which amplifies online content to a deafening pitch.

Volunteer editors and professional experts need to work together to get it right.

To contact the author, email [emailprotected]

Shira Klein is an associate professor of history at Chapman University in California and co-author of the study, Wikipedias Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust in The Journal of Holocaust Research.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspective in Opinion.

Read more from the original source:
The shocking truth about Wikipedias Holocaust disinformation - Forward

Despite a recent industry-wide department store downturn that fueled online speculation regarding the future of the company, the newest Kohls entity may not be the last.

This article is based on corporate postings and accredited media reports. Linked information within this article is attributed to the following outlets: Wikipedia.org, ScrapeHero.com, and EchoPress.com.

Wikipedia features a comprehensive and highly-attributed overview of the Kohls chain: Kohl's (stylized in all caps) is an American department store retail chain, operated by Kohl's Corporation... The company was founded by Polish immigrant Maxwell Kohl, who opened a corner grocery store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1927. It went on to become a successful chain in the local area, and in 1962 the company branched out by opening its first department store.

Regarding location count, ScrapeHero.com features the most recently-updated number: There are 1,157 Kohls retail stores in the United States as of December 11, 2022. The state with the most number of Kohls locations in the U.S. is California, with 117 retail stores, which is about 10% of all Kohls retail stores in the U.S.

It should be noted NewsBreak has published several articles of mine on the Kohls franchise, most detailing issues of a sale that was expected industry-wide in 2022 and the anticipated repercussions thereof.

That expected sale, however, did not happen.

See here for Plans For Kohls Closings in 2022, and here for Plans For Kohls Closings in 2022 Update: Sales Negotiations Terminated for further information.

Regardless, a new Kohls entity will be opening in 2024.

Let us explore.

According to a report from EchoPress.com, entitled Kohl's to Open in Alexandria's Viking Plaza Mall Next April, the identity of the malls new tenant had been closely guarded until recently.

As excerpted from the article: National retailer Kohls is coming to the west wing of the Viking Plaza Mall in 2024. The mall is owned by New Jersey-based company, Lexington Realty International , and managed by a regional team led by Nicki Martineau, Midwest Portfolio Manager in Minnesota. The Viking Plazas Senior Facility Manager is Sergio Rolfzen.

The new restaurant is reportedly scheduled to open next April.

The EchoPress.com piece goes on to state: The Viking Plaza Mall, along with Lexington Realty International, is excited to bring Kohls to the Alexandria community. We appreciate the hard work and collaboration of staff at Lexington, Viking Plaza Mall, Tradesmen Construction , and the City of Alexandria, Martineau said in a news release.

In the event of pertinent updates to these matters, I will share them here on NewsBreak.

Thank you for reading.

Original post:
New Mall-Based Minnesota Kohls Store Coming in 2024 | Joel ... - NewsBreak Original

from the share-the-knowledge dept

Open access has been discussedmany timeshere on Techdirt. There are several strands to its story. Its about allowing the public to access research they have paid for through tax-funded grants, without needing to take out often expensive subscriptions to academic titles. Its about saving educational institutions money that they are currently spending on over-priced academic journals, and which could be better spent elsewhere. Its about helping to spread knowledge without the friction that traditional publishing introduces, ideally moving to licenses that allow academic research papers to be distributed freely and without restrictions.

But theres another aspect that receives less attention, revealed here by a new paper that looks at how open access articles are used in a particular and important context that of Wikipedia. There is a natural synergy between the two, which both aim to make access to knowledge easier.The paper seeks to quantify that:

we analyze a large dataset of citations from Wikipedia and model the role of open access in Wikipedias citation patterns. We find that open-access articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia. What is more, they show a 15% higher likelihood of being cited in Wikipedia when compared to closed-access articles, after controlling for confounding factors. This open-access citation effect is particularly strong for articles with low citation counts, including recently published ones. Our results show that open access plays a key role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge, including by providing Wikipedia editors timely access to novel results. These findings have important implications for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of information science and technology.

What this means in practice is that for the general public open access articles are even more beneficial than those published in traditional titles, since they frequently turn up as Wikipedia sources that can be consulted directly. They are also advantageous for the researchers who write them, since their work is more likely to be cited on the widely-read and influential Wikipedia than if the papers were not open access. As the research notes, this effect is even more pronounced for articles with low citation counts basically, academic work that may be important but is rather obscure. This new paper provides yet another compelling reason why researchers should be publishing their work as open access as a matter of course: out of pure self interest.

Follow me @glynmoody onMastodon. Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: access to information, open access, research, sharing knowledge, studies Companies: wikipedia

Go here to read the rest:
Open Access Makes Research More Widely Cited, Helping Spread ... - Techdirt

Shot through the jaw and tongue by a snipers bullet last year in the last days of the grinding siege at the Azovstal steel plant in Ukraine, Senior Sgt. Maksym Kushnir could not eat or talk, and could barely breathe.

But when he hobbled out of abunker last May with hundreds of other wounded Ukrainian soldiers in a surrender negotiated with Russian forces, there was no medical help or any sign of the Red Cross workers they had been promised.

Instead, Sergeant Kushnir, nine years a soldier and a poet since childhood, said he was taken on a two-day bus journey into Russian-controlled territory and left on a bed to die, with his jaw shattered and gangrene spreading across his tongue.

I thought it was the end, he said. For the first three to four days, they did not do anything. They expected me to die on my own.

That Sergeant Kushnir survived and returned home to tell the tale is one of the success stories of the war. Even as the two sides are locked in full-scale conflict, Ukrainian and Russian officials have been exchanging hundreds of prisoners of war almost weekly.

Yet the prisoner exchanges have also revealed a grim reality. Ukrainian soldiers have come home with tales of appalling suffering in Russian captivity executions and deaths, beatings and electric shocks, a lack of health care and near-starvation rations.

Ukraine allows the International Committee of the Red Cross access to the Russian prisoners of war it is holding, an indication that it is meeting its obligations under international conventions of war. Russia does not. It restricts outside monitoring and has confirmed the identities of only some of those it is holding.

Ukrainian officials and former prisoners say Ukrainian captives were in a visibly worse state than the Russian prisoners at exchanges.

We were skinny like this, Sergeant Kushnir said, holding up his little finger. Compared to us, they looked well. We were thin and bearded. They were shaved and washed.

Its a classic abusive relationship, said Oleksandra Romantsova of the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian organization that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, summing up the treatment of Ukrainian prisoners.

It is unclear how many Ukrainian soldiers are prisoners of war or missing in action. Russia has provided only partial lists of those it is holding, and Ukraine does not release any numbers. But human rights organizations say there are at least 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners, and Ukrainian officials did not dispute those figures.

And more Ukrainians have been taken in the fighting in and around the city of Bakhmut in recent months, according to people working to bring prisoners home. There are believed to be far fewer Russians held by Ukraine.

Some Ukrainian soldiers have also been placed on trial in Russia on dubious charges, and have received lengthy sentences in the Russian penal system, said Oleksandr Pavlichenko of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.

Five hundredmedical personnel and hundreds offemale soldiers and woundedare among the prisoners of war, said Andriy Kryvtsov, the chairman of Military Medics of Ukraine. He said 61 military medics remained in captivityand called for their release.

Dr. Yurik Mkrtchyan, 32, an anesthetist,was among more than 2,000taken prisoner after battles atthe Ilyich steel plant in Mariupol in April last year, many of themwounded soldiers he was caring for.

He said the Russians provided medical assistance only when he begged themand transferred the wounded to a hospital only when they were close to death.

Dr. Mkrtchyan, who was released after a prisoner exchange inNovember, said he remained anxious about the conditions of the wounded, including amputees.

They were just the boys who protected our hospital, he said. Most of them are still in captivity, and I see no excuse or explanation for that because they are already disabled, they cannot fight, there is no reason to keep them in prison.

Former prisoners and human rights groups say Ukrainian captives, including the wounded and pregnant female soldiers, have been subjected to relentless beatings.

Dr. Mkrtchyan described how new arrivals had to run a gantlet of prison guards who beat them with sticks, a hazing ritual known as a reception. He recalled running, head down, through the torrent of blows, and seeing a fellow prisoner on the ground. The soldier, a wounded prisoner with serious burns named Casper, was killed by the beating, he said.

Maksym Kolesnikov, 45, was among more than 70 Ukrainian soldiers and four civilians who were captured in the days just after the Russian invasion in February 2022, when Russian troops overran his base near the town of Hostomel, north of Kyiv, Ukraines capital.

The men were taken for interrogation to a filtration camp in a disused factory, where their commander was beaten within earshot of the whole unit. The Russian network of filtration camps, where military and civilian Ukrainians are screened and interrogated, have been widely criticized for violations of human rights.

After a few days, Mr. Kolesnikov and his fellow detainees were moved to a Russian prison in the Bryansk region, near the Ukraine border.

The reception beating lasted five hours. I was kneed in the face, he said. The beatings continued daily for a month. The guards used rubber truncheons, plastic piping, wooden rulers and knotted pieces of rope, or just kicked prisoners, he said.

Prisoners nicknamed one group of guards the electricians because they tormented prisoners with electric shocks.

The captives were dangerously malnourished, Mr. Kryvtsov said.

It was a good day when you found a potato in your soup, said Mr. Kolesnikov, who added that he lost about 75 pounds in captivity.

He said he suffers from a compressed spine from malnutrition, and hip and knee injuries from the prolonged beatings.

Oleh Mudrak, 35, the commander of the First Azov Battalion, was unrecognizable and painfully thin when he returned from four months in captivity after being taken prisoner at the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, said his nephew Danylo Mudrak.

He regained the weight and underwent surgery on his shoulder, but five months after his release, he died of a heart attack, Danylo Mudrak said.

Members of the Azov battalions, long painted as neo-Nazis by Russia as part of its justification for the war, came in for especially harsh treatment, according to Maj. Dmytro Andriushchenko, who was a deputy commander of the Second Azov Battalion when he was taken prisoner at Azovstal. Azov was like a red rag for them, he said.

Major Andriushchenko was in a penal colony at Olenivka in July when an explosion ripped through a barracks, killing at least 50 Azov members. Likeseveral former inmates of Olenivka who wereinterviewed, he accusedRussia of orchestrating the explosion.

The prison guards closed the gates to the barracks, preventing survivors from escaping, MajorAndriushchenko said.

Dr. Mkrtchyan, who was in the same penal colony, said he and other Ukrainian medics urged the guards to let them help the wounded, but they were not allowed out of their building.

Russia has blocked calls for an independent investigation into the explosion and blames it on a Ukrainian strike.

For some of the wounded from Azovstal, visits by Russian television crews may have been a lifeline. The publicity created pressure on the Russian authorities to care for the prisoners, who were already weak from their time under siege in Azovstal with little food and water, Sergeant Kushnir said.

With his broken jaw and gangrenous tongue, Sergeant Kushnir could not lie down and sat with his head in his arms for several days without painkillers or antibiotics.

Eventually, he was moved to another hospital where doctors amputated his tongue and wired his jaw closed.

He dreamed of eating. He wrote some verse:

Have mercy on me, fate. Im alive.

Dont punish me mercilessly.

The physical pain was not as hard to bear as the uncertainty ofbeing a captive, he said.

When you dont know what to prepare for, what the next day will bring, he said, especially after seeing what the Russians were doing to our men, and being in constant expectation of death, it is not a cool feeling at all.

At the end of June, Sergeant Kushnir and other wounded men from Azovstal were loaded onto buses and driven to the front line to be exchanged.

Back in Ukraine, he has been through multiple operations and spent months learning to talk again by exercising the scar tissue at the back of his throat.

His surgeon, Dr. Vasyl Rybak, 44, the head of the department of rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery at a hospital in Odesa, took bone from his hip to reconstruct his jaw, but when that did not work, he inserted a titanium jaw, created at a 3-D printing lab in the city of Dnipro.

Next, Dr. Rybak plans to learn from pioneers in India how to create a new tongue for his patient from muscle tissue in his chest.

Hes a hero, he said of Sergeant Kushnir, during a break after surgery. They all are.

Oleksandr Chubko and Dyma Shapoval contributed reporting.

See the article here:
Freed Ukrainian P.O.W.s Report Abuses in Russian Captivity - The New York Times

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) Ukrainian air defenses downed 32 of 35 Shahed exploding drones launched by Russia early Tuesday, most of them in the Kyiv region, officials said, in a bombardment that exposed gaps in the countrys air protection after almost 16 months of war.

Russian forces mostly targeted the region around the Ukrainian capital in a nighttime drone attack lasting around three hours, officials said, but Ukrainian air defenses in the area shot down about two dozen of them.

The attack was part of a wider bombardment of Ukrainian regions that extended as far as the Lviv region in the west of the country, near Poland.

The Shahed drones made it all the way to Lviv because of the inability of air defense assets to cover such a broad area, Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said.

Air defense systems are mostly dedicated to protecting major cities, key infrastructure facilities, including nuclear power plants, and the front line, he said.

There is a general lack of air defense assets to cover a country like Ukraine with a dome like Israel has, he said, in a reference to Israels Iron Dome aerial defense system.

In the Lviv region, the Russian strike hit a critical infrastructure facility, starting a fire, according to Lviv Gov. Maksym Kozytskyi.

Russia also struck the southern Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine with ballistic missiles.

Ukraines air defenses have been reinforced with sophisticated weapons from its Western allies, allowing it a higher success rate recently against incoming drones and missiles.

Previously, a winter bombardment by Russia damaged Ukraines power supply, though speedy repairs blunted that Kremlin effort.

The latest aerial assaults behind Ukraines front line coincided with the early stages of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, as it aims to dislodge the Kremlins forces from territory occupied since Russias full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The counteroffensive has come up against heavily mined terrain and reinforced defensive fortifications, according to Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraines armed forces.

Story continues

Russia has also mustered a large number of reserves, he said in a post accompanying a video of him visiting front-line positions with other senior officers.

Heavy battles are taking place in eastern Ukraine, around Bakhmut, Lyman, Avdiivka and Marinka, the Ukrainian armed forces said. Russia shelled 15 cities and villages in the eastern Donetsk region, wounding five civilians, including three in Chasiv Yar near Bakhmut, according to Ukraines presidential office.

Despite the fierce resistance of the occupiers, our soldiers are doing everything possible to liberate Ukrainian territory. The operation continues as planned, Zaluzhnyis post said.

In other developments, Russias Foreign Intelligence Service, known by its acronym SVR, invited Ukrainian diplomats stationed abroad to come to Russia with their families to avoid returning to Ukraine. It claimed many Ukrainian diplomats are unwilling to return home after their tours and want refugee status in the European Union and Asian countries where they worked.

___

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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Ukraine downs Russian drones but some get through due to gaps in air protection - Yahoo News