Croatian Wikipedia and the Ustasha

[michaeldsuarez]

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/how-croatian-wikipedia-made-a-concentration-camp-disappear-03-23-2018

The issues of 2013 are apparently still around.

[michaeldsuarez]

If you want to have a look at the Wikimedia community's attempt to "solve" the problem in 2013, look at the following:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/2013_issues_on_Croatian_Wikipedia

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/2013_issues_on_Croatian_Wikipedia/Evidence/Content

[Strelnikov]

This is the can of worms nobody in San Fransisco, not even James "I sense cheeseburgers" Alexander wants or has the skills to deal with - the Eastern European Wikipedias are considered to embody the culture of the places they're written in, and it's really dicy in places like ex-Yugoslavia, where their time in WWII was extremely bloody and provoked by outside forces (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy), everything was suppressed through a Communist government after the war which created a federated national structure as a sop to all parties, and then the minute the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the components with the most bad blood began fighting again. Republika Hrvatska gets the double whammy due to the Catholic Fascist ideology of the Ustashe (spelled in Croatian as Ustaše) and the Serbian satellite state Republic of Serbian Krajina which took over chunks of the border areas facing Bosnia (itself split between Serbian and Bosniak states, satellite states, militias, and armies) for about five years. Ustaše-ism had been created in the late 1920s as a revolutionary nationalist force to break away from the kingdom of Yugoslavia; they were terrorists for more than fifteen years, given backing by the Axis as the de facto Croatian government and made partners with the other Eastern European Axis satellites as combatants in the invasion of the USSR. The ardent nationalism of the Ustashe played a part early on in the '90s Yugoslav Civil War, allegedly suppressed (much like Praviyy Sektor's ["Right Sector"] Ukrainian Volunteer Corps fighting in the Donbass were later forced to join the regular Ukrainian Army or leave the field), though like a more muted version the Ukrainian love for Stepan Bandera, occasionally young Croatians have been seen wearing black T-shirts with the ringed "U" printed in white or reproduction Ustashe side caps with the metal "U" insignia at football matches and certain rock concerts. And all of this bleeds over into their Wikipedia, just as similar nationalism bleeds into the Serbian or Bosnian Wikipedias, and its far harder to dodge because each of these ex-Yugoslav states speaks a language that was considered a dialect of the same Serbo-Croatian language under Marshal Tito.




German Messerschmitt Bf.109E flown by Croat pilot as part of a satellite air force, Mariupol, Soviet Ukraine, 1942. The only sign that this is a Croat aircraft is the winged Croatian shield with the red-white checkerboard and the wreathed "U" on the fuselage. Note the yellow Eastern Front band on the fuselage. This may or may not have been an ex-Battle of Britain aircraft; the yellow nose was common on "Emils" from 1940 to 1942, which were considered obsolete to the F model which was already reaching the hands of "experten" pilots like Werner Mölders partway through through the air battle with the RAF. The satellite air force planes were used as bomber-hunters, ground strafers, and good enough to fight the more obsolete Soviet fighters like the LaGG-3. As time went on more of these units were kept in their home countries (especially the Hungarian fighter units) as defense against long range USAAF bombers like the B-24.

[michaeldsuarez]

New article:

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatian-wikipedia-removed-claims-on-polish-genocide-over-germans-03-29-2018

This one concerns Hitler apologia rather than the Ustashe, but it still fits the theme of this thread. The Croatian Wikipedia claimed that Poland were committing genocide against the Germans, creating the false implication that Hitler was "justified" in invading Poland. A newspaper reported on this, and some users responding by removing the false claims. An edit war then ensued.

[Strelnikov]

New article:

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatian-wikipedia-removed-claims-on-polish-genocide-over-germans-03-29-2018

This one concerns Hitler apologia rather than the Ustashe, but it still fits the theme of this thread. The Croatian Wikipedia claimed that Poland were committing genocide against the Germans, creating the false implication that Hitler was "justified" in invading Poland. A newspaper reported on this, and some users responding by removing the false claims. An edit war then ensued.

This nonsense comes directly out of German propaganda during the War, namely the 1941 film Heimkehr (Wikipedia article here; title of the film in English is Homecoming) which tries to justify the German invasion of Poland by claiming ethnic Germans within Poland were being treated poorly by both the government and the population. Film was made by the Austrian director Gustav Ucicky, who had been involved with film-making since World War I, yet another German-speaking director who threw in with the Nazis and made the propagandist schlock demanded by Paul Joseph Goebbels, chief of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda). They made an entire subgenre of "Germans in peril from Slavs" films like Menschen im Sturm (Serbs against ethnic Germans, 1941), Flüchtlinge (Volga German refugees attacked by Soviets in 1928 Manchuria, 1933), GPU later retitled The Red Terror (Baltic German lady avenging massacred family by killing off members of a Soviet secret police squad during the 1930s when the KGB was the GPU, 1942). Heimkehr can be found on YouTube, so I'm guessing a lot of the others as well.

[Graaf Statler]

Wouldn't it not much more surprising if a smaller wiki in a foreign language without any control was not taken over by all kinds of extremism with the non intervention and good faith WMF approach?
Taking over such a wiki with a small group with a sock puppet army is pretty easy, and when you have the power you can troll everybody out you don't like whit your cabal.
And WMF is doing nothing, really doing nothing, because they can't. They have to know this kind of things happens but they ignore it whit there #Metoo, i never answer any email approch.

As a local wiki you can break every rule, the Terms of Use of WMF, you can lie and troll as much as you want, because WMF will always support you. Always.
Because James "I sense cheeseburgers" Alexander is always stand by to help you as a community, so you can troll yourself in to the seventh heaven without any consequence and be as extreem as you want.