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Lately, Ive been having what I call based-on-a-true story fatigue. I first used that admittedly inelegant phrase in March, when a mini-boom of shows about headlining scandals in relatively recent history premiered in the span of a month, with splashy premises that fizzled on arrival. Those shows Hulus The Dropout, Netflixs Inventing Anna, Showtimes Super Pumped, Apple TVs WeCrashed, Peacocks Joe v Carole varied in quality (The Dropout, on starring Amanda Seyfried as corporate fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, was the only one to transcend mere dramatization and balance entertainment and clarity) and were all weighted by an awkward, often tiresome relationship to truth.

Since then, the number of shows that double as Wikipedia rabbit holes have cascaded into a full true story boom. An incomplete list of shows released this spring that have turned headlines into scripted television: FX on Hulus Under the Banner of Heaven, Hulus The Girl from Plainville, Starzs Gaslit, Showtimes The First Lady, Hulus Pam & Tommy, HBOs Winning Time, Peacocks The Thing About Pam and HBOs The Staircase. Theres not one but two mini-series on the 1980 axe murder of Betty Gore by her friend Candy Montgomery Hulus Candy, which premiered this month and stars Jessica Biel as Montgomery, and an upcoming HBO series from Big Little Lies creator David E Kelley with Elizabeth Olsen.

Without exception, these reality-based shows boast decent production budgets and an embarrassment of riches: prestige casting, extensive costumes with occasional prosthetics, moody scores, the leeway to indulge in multiple timelines over several hours. Theyre almost all well-made, with solid, sometimes showy direction and remarkably committed performances. But they have mostly fallen flat there is, it turns out, a high bar for overcoming the distracting, basic tension of what really happened versus whats on screen, what the real people looked like versus what the actors are doing, and very few of these shows clear it. All spring, with every new release and announcement of yet another installment in the headline-to-series pipeline, Ive found myself asking: why more? And why do these shows, for the most part, pale in comparison to both speculative, unfettered fiction or the real thing?

The timing for this reality-based spring flood mostly boils down to Emmy nomination season the prestige TV version of Decembers Oscar bait and the fact that portraying a real-life figure, particularly a famous one or a tragic one or both, is reliable awards material. See: the success in 2016 of Ryan Murphys The People v OJ Simpson, which arguably heralded the scripted true crime boom (and interest in re-evaluating the 90s) from the connoisseur of the glamorous, celebrity-filled riff on reality. The majority of these spring shows could be classified as true crime some far more violent (Candys axe murder) than others (the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lees sex tape) which seems like the natural evolution of the true crime documentary boom in the 2010s fueled by streaming platforms with money to burn and viewers to hook.

Though my reaction to real-life, and particularly true crime, stories of late has been generally please, no more, there are numerous good reasons to watch a ripped-from-the-headlines show. They can offer course corrections to outdated narratives, particularly for women (as in last years Impeachment: American Crime Story, made with the cooperation of Monica Lewinsky). The veneer of fiction can maneuver cultural knots too tight for real-life discourse or flesh out existing reporting, as in The Girl from Plainville, which uses daydream sequences to illustrate Michelle Carters capacity for self-delusion. Television offers room to complicate that non-fiction does not; the Under the Banner of Heaven creator Dustin Lance Black, for example, invents a fictional, pious Mormon detective (Andrew Garfields Jeb) who investigates a real double murder by fundamentalist Mormons in 1984 Utah. The investigations toll on his faith in goodness, in obedience, in the church illustrates the cognitive dissonance of religion and the tension of belief and intuition more than allegiance to the facts probably could.

Theres also something baseline compelling about watching an actor take on a known quantity who has not immediately Googled a role to see how the celebrity compares to photos or videos or even loose pop cultural memories of a different real person. That gap can be provocative, teasing out unknown dimensions of the person or layers of the persona; the best, such as Seyfrieds portrayal of Elizabeth Holmes, do both, melded with the ineffable charisma that makes for a crackling screen performance. But it can more often be a distraction, uncanny or unnerving. In almost all of these portrayals, the actor is more conventionally attractive symmetrical, smoothed, adjusted, whatever you want to call it than the real figure, another snag on ones attention. Jared Leto as WeWorks messianic founder Adam Neumann in WeCrashed, for example, nails the Israeli accent, but looks more like Jared Leto having a romp than the 6ft 5in founder.

All of these shows are also dogged by ethical questions of how much creative license to take with true stories, whose perspectives to soften or simplify or shade in, whose facts to privilege. How much responsibility should a show take in crafting the narrative that will almost surely, by the fact of wide availability and the compelling power of fiction, become the default one? (Who cares about the real story behind the early days of Facebook? In the public eye, The Social Network is the only record that matters.)

That, too, drags down a series. Take the recent controversy over Winning Time, the fourth wall-breaking, HBO drama about the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers that has drawn the ire of the actual Lakers. Last month, former player, coach and general manager Jerry West accused HBO and producer Adam McKay of character assassination for its depiction of West as a volatile, vindictive alcoholic; the legal letter demanded a retraction from HBO meaning the network would have to say its portrayal is false and threatened a legal case going up to the supreme court. (HBO responded in a statement that the series and its depictions are based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing.)

The real-life context can be messy, contested or just plain confusing; it can undercut a series from the jump. How do we view Pam & Tommy, a show sympathetic to Pamela Andersons traumatic invasion of privacy, when we know she didnt consent to it being revisited? (I couldnt keep watching.) The Girl from Plainville, based on the 2014 texting suicide case in Massachusetts is sensitive, well-made, and loaded with psychological nuance but struggles to overcome the queasy fact that its making watchable entertainment out of the deeply tragic union between two unwell teenagers.

The messiness of competing narratives, of who controls attention, is why The Staircase a meta series about death and an afterlife in media is one of the best of this genre. The limited series from Antonio Campos eschews the impulse to make sense of how a wealthy North Carolina business executive, Toni Collettes Kathy Peterson, died at the base of a staircase at home in 2001. Did she slip and fall? Did her husband Michael (an excellent Colin Firth) kill her? The series is less interested in certainty than sensational attentions ripple effects on a family, the sprawling interpretations of truth, and the construction of narrative; the French documentarians whose 2004 series chronicled Michael Petersons trial and served as a touchstone for many films to come after are characters in the series. The work of picking and choosing which information to include, which to set aside the work any true-story adapter must do becomes part of the story.

This unsettling collage of unanswerable questions is what sucked me in despite fatigue with all this semi-reality. Watching The Staircase is, like any other true crime show, a freighted experience there are Wikipedia searches to do, other reports to watch, long-form articles to read, comparisons to make, first-person testimonials to consider. The show is inconclusive enough curious and critical enough of true crimes attention magnet to make such context fun, an added bonus. But thats the exception. For much of this TV season, the scripted story feels like added weight on the real one.

Originally posted here:
Same old true story: why have TV shows turned into Wikipedia entries? - The Guardian

Here are some missing person cases that are creeping out Buzzfeed users.

Wikipedia links are underlined in the headlines.

One missing persons case that kept me disturbed for days is the Andrew Irvine case. He was a British mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest in 1924 with a fellow Brit, George Mallory, but they never made it back down.

Mallorys body was found 70 years later, but Irvines body was never found. Andrew Irvine is the most heart-wrenching Wikipedia rabbit hole Ive ever fallen into.

Maura Murrays disappearance still bothers me after watching a multi-part Oxygen series about it a couple years ago. I think what gets me is how little information there is to go on how can a person get into a car crash, then just disappear off the face of the Earth and leave barely any clues behind?

I still wonder whether she was murdered or maybe ran off and is living a different life somewhere. Murray was a 21-year-old nursing student who got into a car accident in upstate New Hampshire. The strange thing was, prior to disappearing, shed told professors that she would be taking a week off due to a death in the family. However, her family later told authorities that there had been no death.

He was seen entering a bar, but there was no security footage of him leaving when the night was over Like, HOW CAN THAT HAPPEN?!

Brian was a medical student in Ohio last seen going up an escalator to a popular campus bar, but the video never showed him leaving. Foul play has still not been ruled out.

My first ever missing persons case that triggered my love for true crime was the story of Amy Bradley. She went missing from her cruise ship in the 90s, and there were multiple sightings of her years afterward in different countries, but nobody ever helped her.

There was even a situation in 1999 where a US Navy man visited a brothel overseas and had a woman approach him, begging for help and telling him that her name was Amy Bradley and that she was being held hostage, but he didnt do anything about it for fear of anyone finding out where he was at the time.

Heather Elvis, who was a cosmetology student, mysteriously vanished after shed arrived home from a date. No one ever talks about her or her disappearance.

She went missing in 2013 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and a couple was recently charged with her kidnapping, but shes still never been found. That poor family will never get closure.

Emma Fillipoffs disappearance sent me down a rabbit hole for months. Lots of drama and red flags surrounding her story she disappeared outside of the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, after being seen talking to the police.

Her Wiki page will give you the chills, and if youre into documentaries, theres an episode about her disappearance on the Fifth Estates YouTube channel. If podcasts are more your thing, almost every true crime channel has covered her. I feel so bad for her family theyre still actively looking for her.

The McStay familys disappearance freaked me out. How they could vanish without a trace? I am glad (but in a very melancholy way) it was solved and their extended family got closure, though.

Joseph, his wife, Summer, and their sons, Gianni and Joseph Jr., disappeared from their home in Southern California in February 2010. Their bodies were found three years later in November 2013, over 100 miles north in Victorville, California.

A year later, a man named Charles Chase Merritt the fathers business partner was arrested, tried, and found guilty of brutally murdering the family. He was sentenced to death in January 2020.

The craziest one I know of is from Philly. Richard Petrone and Danielle Imbo were seen leaving the Abilene bar on South Street, and driving in Petrones Dodge Dakota heading back to Imbos house, and then not them or the truck were ever seen again. The rumor was a drug debt had something to do with it, and the lone person of interest killed himself in prison.

This one always stuck with me as someone who used to walk around Myrtle Beach as a teenager, alone, and we were the same age. She was just leaving her hotel and disappeared.

Years later, a prison inmate had told authorities that Drexel had been abducted and killed, but it still hasnt been solved.

The disappearance of Natalee Holloway always gets me. She was a few years older than me when she disappeared, so it felt like something like that can happen to me or someone I know.

Even when I went to Aruba on vacation as an adult (26 years old) with my boyfriend, my parents worried the whole time.

Read more:
10 Wikipedia Pages About Missing People That Are Really Creepy - Twisted Sifter

Molly White has been making stands on principle since her early teens. Now her scrutiny of crypto is earning her national acclaim.

The Washington Post recently profiled White as the cryptocurrency worlds biggest critic. Via her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, White investigates and exposes scams and other questionable practices in the opaque and largely unregulated industry.

Molly White is a gem of Northeastern University, a Northeastern student posted on Reddit, a social media aggregation website, in response to the Post story.

It feels important to me to make information available to people, especially when other groups are trying to present a very different and I think unrealistic story, says White, a 2016 Northeastern graduate in computer science. Especially with crypto, I see a lot of real people being hurt by itpeople who dont have the money that they can lose who were sold the dream of financial freedom, or a ticket out of having to work two jobs, and then getting put in even more desperate situations.

Cryptocurrencies, which can be circulated digitally without government oversight, are vulnerable to volatile price swings as well as unreliable (and sometimes predatory) traders. White devotes her site to web3the blockchain foundation for cryptocurrenciesin recognition that everyday people are being exploited by outlandish investment schemes.

It feels like, as someone who is able and willing to do the research, that I have an obligation to do it, she says.

Born and raised in Maine, White was drawn to Northeastern by the promise of co-ops. She participated in two of them at HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leading to six years of full-time employment as a software engineer before she left the company last month.

She began developing an online presence in her early teens as an editor and writer at Wikipediafirst about music, and later in praise of women scientists.

I discovered that anyone could edit Wikipedia when I was 13, White says. I have this sort of weird brain: I really enjoy documenting and archiving and collecting information. And I also have always been very passionate about free and open knowledge and access to information. I became a pretty active editor in high school and then continued to do it through college and afterwards.

After the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, Whites focus shifted to the alt-right, which exposed her to online vitriol and prepared her for the blowback that she has endured more recently from the crypto industry. She says she experienced online harassment as a result.

Its unpleasant sometimes, she says. Theres also a gender aspecteven before I started to edit in those topic areasof being a visible woman on the internet with opinions that tended to draw a fair amount of attacks. So I wish it was different.

She has found that those attacks have strengthened her resolve.

Im a very stubborn person by nature, she says. Being harassed online, or targeted in some ways, tends to make me angry that its happening, but also more determined to stick with it. I do what I can to minimize it and to protect myself and my family, but it feels important to continue doing what Im doingeven more so when there are people who try to stop it.

Her resilience is a family trait of which she is proud.

It was not a surprise to my family to have another stubborn daughter, White says, laughing.

White sees her efforts as part of a larger movement.

How can we move the web in a better direction? she asks. I think a lot of people look at me and think shes a crypto critic, she wants to stop crypto, she wants to tamp [innovation] down.

But White says she shares a lot of the same goals as some of the people who are working in the web3 spacefreedoms that include access to information and online communities around shared goals.

I worry that crypto and web3 are moving us in the opposite directionof limiting access to information and to communities, and financializing a lot of the interactions that we have online, she says. My goal is to open the web and make it a better place. Thats really the drive more than the hope to stop crypto.

Soon, she says, she will renew her less-famous career as a software engineer because writing software is my favorite thing.

But shell continue to watch over the crypto industry on behalf of those who are being exploited by it.

I just try to keep doing what I feel is impactful and helpful, White says. I imagine that will continue to be the goal, regardless of what shape it takes at any given point.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

See the rest here:
'Gem of Northeastern,' Molly White Takes on Crypto - News @ Northeastern - Northeastern University

Wikipedia is huge. As of 19 May 2022, there are 6,500,765 articles in its English version, containing over 4 billion words and 55,804,737 pages. It's so big that no person can possibly expect to scroll through everything on their own. We need help. Someone who can sort out the good stuff and present it in byte-size tidbits. Someoone like Annie Rauwerda.

In April 2020, then-sophomore at the University of Michigan, Rauwerda got bored being stuck at home and ended up spending countless hours on the internet.

Passing the time, she came up with an idea for a spontaneous quarantine project and created a new Instagram account, called 'depths of wikipedia.' Flash forward to now, and her online baby has upwards of 800,000 followers, spread across multiple social media platforms.

But its core concept remains the same: Rauwerda curates funny, silly, and weird snippets from Wikipedia and shares them with the world.

More info: depthsofwikipedia.com | Instagram | Twitter | TikTok

See the original post here:
40 Times People Stumbled Upon Something Hilarious On Wikipedia And It Ended Up Being Shared In This Online Group - Bored Panda

On April 13, I found myself sitting in my hotel room in Lviv, Ukraine, listening to air raid alarms go off as I fought on a front of my own in the Ukrainian war against Russia.

My front was Wikipedia.

Specifically, I was battling over the proper national identifier for a man named Kazimir Malevich, a self-described Ukrainian avant-garde artist born in Kyiv to a Polish father and Ukrainian mother. Even though Malevich (1879-1935) directly tied his own artistic development to his Ukrainian history in diary entries, many of the worlds museums today nonetheless label the artist as Russian, Ukraine-born.

My engagement with Malevichs Wikipedia page began two days early, on April 11, when the Shadows Project, an organization I co-founded in 2021, posted a request on Instagram asking museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to update Malevichs labels to accurately reflect his Ukrainian identity. Our post on Shadows got quite a lot of attention, garnering more than 6,000 shares and more than 22,500 interactions. Not long after the post went up, we received a DM from one of our followers; Malevichs Wikipedia page says hes Russian, it read. I sighed, and went to check.

Upon first look, Malevichs Wikipedia page seemed to say that he was a Ukrainian artist. It mustve been updated, I thought to myself. But a few minutes later, I went back to look again. As I sat in Lviv, refreshing the Wikipedia page for Malevich every few minutes, I realized that I was watching the Russian information war in real time:

April 16, 12:13. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was Ukrainian and Soviet avant-garde artist and art theorist

Click. Click. Refresh.

April 16, 13:16. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was Russian and Soviet avant-garde artist and art theorist

Click. Refresh.

April 16, 16:21. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was Ukrainian avant-garde artist and art theorist

Click. Click. Refresh.

April 16, 18:42. Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist

This isnt just a trivial semantic back-and-forth, but an effort to erase the very existence of Ukraine. Russias efforts to subvert and destroy the Ukrainian identity are far from a new phenomenon. Denying Ukraines separate and distinct culture stems from as far back as Imperial Russia, when the Valuev Circular, a secret imperial decree from 1863, declared that a separate Ukrainian language has never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist.

Denying Ukrainian nationality, and the consequent forceful erasure of Ukrainian culture, has been a significant policy concern for the Kremlin since the days of the Russian Empire. And while Western countries have been working with Ukrainians to provide ammunition, drones, tanks and morethey have yet to match Russias cultural cannonry.

For many observers in the West, Putins Feb. 21 speech, in which he claimed Ukraine was a state created by Lenin, was their first interaction with Russias revisionist history with respect to Ukraine. Newspapers and Western academics were shockedcalling his monologue surreal, strangeand were quick to dismiss it as an angry and bitter tirade. But Putins erasure of Ukraines history is not just the rambling of a washed-up old dictator, and dismissing it as such is dangerous. Historical revisionism is actually one of the Kremlins most powerful weapons.

As I write this piece, a debate is taking place about whether Russia is engaged in genocide within the meaning of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as any of several types of attrocity when committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. Obviously, it is not itself genocide to send an army of trolls to edit Ukraine out of Wikipedia. But consider for a moment that this activity is taking place concurrent with mass killings, deportations of children and the deliberate destruction of cities. While it is not violent activity in and of itself, it is some of the most compelling evidence there is that Russia and its proxies are acting with intent to destroy [the Ukrainian] national [group] as such. As you read the following, keep in mind that the slaughter at Bucha and Mariupol were taking place even as I was fighting with some anonymous troll over whether Malevich was Ukrainian or not.

For most of its history, Russia has been able to control the access to and flow of information about history because of the centralized nature of the Russian state and Russias physical control over the landmass of Ukraine. During the Soviet Union era, access to the outside world and to archives and information about what was happening inside the country was severely restricted. The central government had broad control over the historical narrative, and thanks to this, the Soviet government was able to rewrite or modify, or in some cases just erase, much of Ukraines history.

Ukraines independence in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, combined with the rise of the digital age and the internet era, however, meant that free access to information about Ukraine and its history was suddenly available as never before. And this has been both a blessing and a curse in Ukraines fight for independence.

On one hand, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians are able to have open discussions about their past, their culture, their identity, and the crimes committed against them by the past Russian governments. On the other handbecause Russia has controlled the flow of information for so long, even in the internet ageUkrainians are battling upstream in order to correct and untangle centuries of imperial narratives.

Consider Wikipedia.

Malevichs page is not the only page being vandalized by trolls, but it is a particularly striking and prominent example. As I sat there refreshing the page, I watched pro-Russian accounts literally wipe away every mention of Ukraine from Malevichs biography.

This was what the Wikipedia page looked like on April 9 at 22:30:

This is what it looked like on April 11 at 13:16:

The Ukrainian avant-garde had become the Russian avant-garde. Ukrainian-born had become Russian-born, and Ukraine had become the Russian Empire. Every single mention of Ukraine had been systematically wiped off the page.

If you think that this erasure of Ukrainian identity on Wikipedia is a recent phenomenon, think again. A simple dive through the edit history of famous cultural figures tells you all you need to know.

Here is one of the earliest versions of composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovskys Wikipedia page, from 2003:

As the entry reflected as of December 2, 2003, Tchaikovskys father was Ukrainian, his mother, French. Later versions of his page (April, 2004) were updated as follows:

On November 24, 2005, the page was updated to erase his fathers Ukrainian heritage, keeping the mention of his mothers French roots:

According to my researchit took three years until this edit would be reverted and Tchaikovskys father was recognized as Ukrainian once again. Tracking the edits of Tchaikovskys page throughout the years, I saw the recognition of his Ukrainian side swing back and forth. Notably, however, I found no instance in which whoever was eliminating the composers Ukrainian heritage also removed mention of his mothers French roots.

These changes were sometimes explicitly political. On December 12, 2020, for example, there was a section of Tchaikovskys Wikipedia page dedicated to his Ukrainian roots and the time he spent in Ukraine:

On December 14, 2020, a user removed this entire section, leaving an edit comment stating, delete fake. The USSR created Ukraine. Sound familiar? This idea that Lenin created Ukraine did not originate with Putins February speech.

The section about Tchaikovskys relationship to Ukraine and his time spent there no longer exists on his Wikipedia page. The only mention of Ukraine on the composers page is a statement that his great-grandfather was born there; there is no mention of the composers multiple summers spent in the country at his familys home in Ukraine, nor of the deep influence that Ukraine had on several of his works. Now, to be sure, Tchaikovsky was born in Russia, but his Ukrainian Cossack roots are an influence in his music and a large part of his life, and these have just disappearedor, rather, they have been made to disappearfrom Wikipedia.

Or take, for another example, David Burliuks page. Burliuk (1882-1967) was another Ukrainian avant-garde artist. His nationality, like Malevichs, has been subject to constant attacks by trolls pushing Russian narratives. But in Burliuks case, the trolls went a step further.

Heres what Burliuks page looked like as of April 16 at 00:15:

Burliuks national identity had already been modified to say Russian. But thats not what the trolls were after. About 15 minutes later, the page looked like this:

The editor removed the Ukrainian-language spelling of Burliuks name and commentedno point duplicating the Russian spelling and pretending its a distinct language. The point here was not merely to edit Burliuks identity but to edit out the existence of the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian spelling of Burliuks name on the theory that Russian and Ukrainian are the same language and therefore should not be mentioned separately.

The Wikipedia trolls are not above blatantly lying, either. For example, this is what the Wikipedia page of Vladimir Tatlin, a Ukrainian and Soviet painter, architect and stage designer, looked like as of April 17, 2020:

It correctly stated that Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, present-day Ukraine. A few days later, on April 20, 2020, his page stated that Tatlin was born in Moscow:

This, perhaps, is one of the most direct erasures Ive found thus far. Its a step further from simply obscuring any mentions of Ukraineits a blatant falsehood. According to Encyclopedia Britannica and Constructivism in Russia: 1920-23 by Monoskop, Tatlin was born in Kharkiv, present-day Ukraine.

This is not the first time that Ukrainians have had to wage war on Russian disinformation campaigns on Wikipedia. One of the most public Wikipedia edit wars of all time is the battle over the spelling of KyivIs it Kyiv, or Kiev? This may seem like a trivial matter of vowel placement to a lot of Westerners, but the two names sound quite different to native ears. Kyiv is the spelling of the city transliterated from its Ukrainian name, while Kiev is transliterated from the citys Russian name. As Ukrainian is the countrys official language and Kyiv is a Ukrainian city, the appropriate and correct spelling is Kyivbut because of centuries of imperial rule, Kievthe citys Russified nameis still widely used.

Wikipedias Battle of Kyiv began in 2003, 12 years after Ukraine officially became independent, and two years after the website began. Editors began to change the Russified version of Kiev into the official Ukrainian spelling of Kyiv. The battle has raged for nearly two decades since. However, after the first Russian invasion in 2014, more and more Western media began to switch over to Kyiv as a sign of respect for Ukraines autonomy, and the Ukrainian government launched the #KyivNotKiev campaign to raise awareness of the issue. By September 2020, English Wikipedia officially adopted the Ukrainian spelling of Kyiv but even though that is the official line, to this day, rogue pro-Russian editors still modify the spelling of the citys name.

Why do these Wikipedia wars matter? For one thing, they matter enough to Russian-sympathetic trolls that they spend time and energy modifying thousands of articles. But they also matter because Wikipedia is one of the leading informational authorities on the internet; millions and millions of users scroll through Wikipedia each day and its a website thats become incredibly trusted among users. So, the edit wars arent just minor quibbles but, instead, are a part of a dangerous game. The information seen on Wikipedia shapes peoples perceptions of the truth.

Ive battled with this reality firsthand. When attempting to contact museums asking them to relabel Malevich from a Russian to a Ukrainian artist, I often received responses that specifically referenced the way Malevichs nationality is described on Wikipedia to defend their labeling. All roads lead back to Wikipedia. And if Wikipedia is wrongand not just wrong but wrong for political reasonsand if Russia is committing time and energy to making sure Wikipedia is wrong, what then?

Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, interest in the country and its history has spiked to unprecedented levels. In February 2021, the number of people reading about Ukraine on English Wikipedia was roughly 290,000. In 2022, that number went up to more than 22 million page views. Thats millions of people who may be encountering Ukrainian history and culture for the first time, and the information they see on Wikipedia has incredible power to mold their perceptions and opinions about the country.

This is exactly what Russian-sympathetic accounts try to influence on Wikipedia, with thousands of pro-Russian bots and users conducting guerilla-like campaigns to infiltrate any corner of the web where users may be encountering, and forming opinions about, Ukraine. It affects cultural figures, artists, authors and many others.

And its not just Wikipedia. Since 2014, de-Ukrainianization had already begun to be officially implemented as policy in Russian schools. After the invasion of 2014, Russian textbook editors were instructed to mention Ukraine as rarely as possible in their textbooks. After Feb. 24, they were again given verbal orders to minimize all references to Ukraine and Kyiv. Textbook editors reported having to rewrite about 15 percent of the texts. One of the textbook editors reports being tasked with making it seem as though Ukraine simply does not exist.

As French historian Ernest Renan once said, forgetfulness is an essential factor in the creation of a nation. No nation knows this better than Russia. Russian elites have historically built their nation on the backs of their colonies, and now, with these colonies having achieved independence, many of the staples of Russian national identity reside outside of Russias geographic borders.

This causes a paradox for the Russian nation that requires a strategic forgetfulness to consolidate; the countrys conception of its own historical borders, which sees the modern Russian nation as a descendant of the Kyivan Rus, does not coincide with the countrys actual territorial borders. It is an inconvenient fact for this worldview that Kyiv, the mother of all Russian cities, is not Russian. How do you reconcile this inconsistency in your national narrative? According to Putin, you resolve your cognitive dissonance by force on the ground and by loosing trolls on the internet.

In other words, the seemingly petty Wikipedia edit wars are actually an important battleground, and unfortunately, they are a battleground on which Russian narratives are much more successful compared to how Russian soldiers have fared on the ground in physical battle against the army of a nation Russians pretend does not exist.

These efforts at historical revisionism persuade a lot of people who should know better. On April 26, in an exchange with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Rand Paul said, You could also argue the countries [Russia has] attacked were part of Russia. Consider the import of that comment: A U.S. senator suggested that the U.S. ought not to come to Ukraines defense because Ukraine is really a part of Russia. This is Russias centuries-long misinformation campaign to distort Ukraines historical sovereignty playing out with tangible consequences. Paul corrected himself later to say the Soviet Union, but the Freudian slip is telling, and it captures exactly why historical memory is a battle that will continue long after the current war is over.

And so, any comprehensive national security strategy for Ukraine must take into account cultural and informational security.

Defending Ukraines sovereignty means defending sovereignty in every sense of the wordnot only Ukraines territorial sovereignty but also its control over its own culture and history. Content moderation presents its own host of challenges, but Wikipedia could perhaps help by closely monitoring and restricting any edits on its pages that include the removal of the words Ukraine and Ukrainian, with particular scrutiny in cases where these words are replaced by Russia or Russian.

I dont know whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one hears it, but I do know that it makes it very hard for Ukraine to exist if people dont believe it exists. The countrys future as an independent nation is fought for not just on physical battlefields but on virtual ones as well.

See the original post here:
The War Over UkraineOn Wikipedia - Lawfare