[sittingnut]

wikipedia is now under the effective control of limited number of entrenched editors, mostly subscribing to western establishment's "liberal" ideology, with almost absolute power over content. a prime example of this bias, is the article about british empire. comparison of that article with articles about other brutish regimes(ussr, mao's china, etc) is telling, even though it's atrocities far exceeds any other regime, in terms of both quantity and extent.

[the_duke]

Can you provide some links to said atrocities by the British empire? (I'm genuinely curios)

There probably are some Wikipedia articles you could link to.

Edit: just a few examples

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Enslaved_Af...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

As an Australian, this came to mind.

100 years of massacring Indigenous Australians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenou...

[fit2rule]

This is probably one of the best examples of modern white-washing of our history ..

[krastanov]

I did not get your comment and I would like to understand it better. Isn't "whitewashing" the process of forgetting about the contributions or tribulations of non-white people in our history? Acknowledging atrocities committed by western civilizations seems like the opposite of that (and I do think we should hold ourselves to a very high standard and being aware of these atrocities is part of that).

[fit2rule]

What I mean is that Australians sweep the details under the rug about the genocide of the First Nation people that occurred in order to make their modern nation .. its not at all near as well acknowledged as it should be, and Australia continues to build tourist traps on sites of mass murder as if its nothing.

Australians prefer ignorance over acknowledgement, generally. Its not something we should be proud about .. in fact, there is a lot of shame in being an Australian with NO CLUE about the civilization that was swept away to make way for White Australia. Australia's first inhabitants were far more advanced than we care to admit.

EDIT: some things all Australians should know about the first people:

* They have been on the continent for at least 65,000 years * The current biosphere is a result of their management of the land and wildlife for the duration of those 65,000 years * They used cryptographic techniques to keep the peace between tribes * They have the oldest confirmed oral history of any human society, ever - scientifically proven to stretch back 40,000 years. (We in the west can't keep our oral traditions sane for 100 years, by comparison..) * They had a version of the Hippocratic Oath long before European medicine * Their medical culture had an understanding of antibiotic and antiseptic materials in their environment and were using them to great effect at a time when European medicine still believed in miasma theory

.. and there is much, much more. Alas, the hubris around what has been done to the First Nation people (see for example White Australia policies continuing into the 1980's... forced castrations... forced re-settlement of children... etc.) has resulted in a general ignorance of the situation among current Australian culture...

[mehrdadn]

I was looking this up just now. It seems 29 million died in India alone under British rule due to famine. [1] However there was widespread crop failure in the late 19th century. [2] I don't know how much control they had over what and how every set of deaths occurred, so it's not yet clear to me you can just directly compare number of deaths between empires without taking into account the surrounding context.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-did-the-British-empire...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#East_India_Comp...

[sbmthakur]

While it wouldn't be wise to attribute all those deaths to the British Empire, it's important to note that British agricultural practices led to widespread famines and crop-failures. Diversion of food crop land to grow Opium and Indigo led to famines[1]. And the risk of crop-failures was often beared by the cultivator[2].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation_in_India#History

2. http://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_364.pdf

[twic]

The Bengal Famine is a well-studied case where, AIUI, the current consensus is that imperial policies contributed significantly to the suffering and death toll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

[claudiawerner]

>so it's not yet clear to me you can just directly compare number of deaths between empires without taking into account the surrounding context.

This is true, but perhaps in a way you weren't anticipating; this point was made decades ago by Herbert Marcuse in response to people attempting to compare, for instance, Nazi death tolls with Soviet ones. This mode of argumentation reduces concrete matters of policy and motivation (quality) into mere numbers to be thrown about (quantity). But authoritarianism is not a quantitative matter - a nation with harsh laws under which only few are convicted is still an authoritarian nation.

[kiliantics]

And yet such nuance is never afforded to the other empires mentioned in GP's comment. "Communism killed 100 million" etc. being widely held views.

[sbmthakur]

This is a good start:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

[tombh]

Of particular recent relevance are the opium trade and the opium wars, which led to the creation of Hong Kong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

[MatekCopatek]

While I agree with that assessment, I don't really think it has much to do with Wikipedia itself, it's just how things are in the entire Western culture. History is written by the victors and all that.

Consequently, it feels a bit unfair to put this on Wikipedia editors. Kinda like blaming a random restaurant manager for forcing waiters to rely on tips. Yes, if they have enough profits, they can pay people more and fix a small part of the problem. The general issue remains systemic though.

[blattimwind]

> Consequently, it feels a bit unfair to put this on Wikipedia editors. Kinda like blaming a random restaurant manager for forcing waiters to rely on tips. Yes, if they have enough profits, they can pay people more and fix a small part of the problem. The general issue remains systemic though.

Systemic yet oddly restricted to a particular area.

[derefr]

I think you mean “English-language Wikipedia”. Try switching to one of the other languages and then putting the article through Google Translate. They’re not the same article semantically! Each language has its own set of editors putting its own spin on things. It’s only to be expected that each language’s editorial policy will be dominated by the cultural hegemony of that language’s speakers, if one exists.

(For example, even without government interference, you would expect “Taiwan” to have different first-sentence descriptions in the Chinese–Simplified, Chinese–Traditional, and English Wikipedias.)

[amyjess]

> For example, even without government interference, you would expect “Taiwan” to have different first-sentence descriptions in the Chinese–Simplified, Chinese–Traditional, and English Wikipedias.)

I agree with your sentiment, but that's not the best example. There is one Chinese Wikipedia, and articles are machine-transliterated between simplified and traditional forms (plus a few more forms using region-specific vocabulary).

[yorwba]

Well, besides Mandarin there are also articles about Taiwan in Cantonese, Eastern Min, Gan, Hakka, Literary Chinese, Southern Min, and Wu. They all seem to be able to agree that it's an island in the Pacific, but differ in the degree to which they mention that the Republic of China controls it. The Hakka article prominently displays the national flag, while the Southern Min one doesn't mention it in the introductory paragraph.

[Yizahi]

At least one Wikipedia should maintain close to facts approach. If you prefer authoritarian "rewrite history" approach then you can consult Russian Wiki, where they rewrote all political and history pages, and I assume Chinese Wiki is the same.

[owl57]

you can consult Russian Wiki, where they rewrote all political and history pages

Can you link some specific examples?

[Yizahi]

En: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass Ru: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83...

En: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_intervention_... Ru: none, lol

En: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru... Ru: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE...

En: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War Ru: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83...

For several years they vandalized Kievan Rus' page (in Ru segment) renaming it to Ancient Rus'. For some reason they stopped doing it now , but all changes are still in history. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81...

En: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 Ru: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Катастрофа_Boeing_777_в_Донецк...

Basically any mention of unfavorable or outright bad mention about current country of a dictator or about any preceding country from which they claim inheritance is censored or obfuscated or buried in a flood of "alternative" opinions.

[owl57]

1) Some freak repeatedly vandalized a Wikipedia page. Editors reverted the vandalism, perpetrator stopped trying. If I understood all of this correctly, why is it not simply Wikipedia working as intended?

2) So, Russia and USA & Britain are involved in some recent and ongoing armed conflicts (all of them near Russian borders, I'd note). There's some difference in coverage of said conflicts between Russian and English Wikipedias, sure (though I skimmed the linked articles and didn't immediately notice blatant censorship on either side). And you cite that as Russians rewriting "all political and history pages"? Seriously?

3) The "lol" one is the coolest. "Ukrainian armed forces: 232,000 … 15,000 defected to Russia." Didn't see the figure before. If Russian Wikipedia was a worthy piece of pro-Russian propaganda, of course it would also have this figure in a prominent box. Alas, Russian Wikipedia is worse than English one at almost anything, including pro-Russian propaganda.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Do you mean to imply that "conservative" western ideology would be more truthful about British empire?

[claudiawerner]

That's not what GP means by "liberal"; "liberal" in this sense refers to the belief and support of the current "democratic" establishment, the right to private property, the idea of human rights, and freedoms defined as matters of separation between people (i.e. the assumption of the person or people attempting to take them away rather than a positive conception in human community). In this view, both US 'liberals' and US 'conservatives' are both liberal. Thus, what GP means by 'non-liberal' includes the critics of liberalism, most notably ones on the left.

You can read more about the philosophical notion of liberalism and its critics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Thank you.

[andrepd]

Whenever Wikipedia is mentioned in hackernews, it's always the same comment. Have you got anything new to add, or any substantial argument to support your position? As it stands it's a pretty serious accusation and a pretty thin argument.

[pessimizer]

I've rarely seen this comment on hackernews about wikipedia. I think you may have been thrown off by the use of "liberal" to think it's a right-wing critique. Incidentally, the complaints I'm used to are that "they keep deleting the thing that I'm involved with that I think is notable" "they won't let me edit myself even though I'm an expert on myself" and "weird editors squat articles."

This is a "wikipedia is completely western and whiggish" critique.