Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment
meta.wikimedia.org
meta.wikimedia.org
I think this is a problem for a lot of multilingual online platforms. On Facebook there are pages in Macedonian that constantly publish completely vile hateful material against Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians. These pages would absolutely be banned, except it seems that Facebook lacks the linguistic and cultural ability to understand what this content is and to do something about it.
This kind of vulnerability seems to be a very difficult one to plug. Ultimately, Wikipedia should be seen as a source of information, but not to be trusted blindly. That's a good stance to take purely out of factual inaccuracy and data incompleteness - but also necessary from the perspective that Wikipedia has, is and will be used to influence because it holds an authoritative position.
The reason why people do this stuff is because not only do they want war—-they want to commit genocide again.
Here is what I wrote about it a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788882
It [Wikipedia] does have power over what it allows to be published, although it does not have the staff to enforce violations. As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, it is best to avoid the Croatian language Wikipedia pages about wars, with some more recent than others. It is quite hateful, xenophobic, and nationalistic. The news source I provided is investigative journalism for Balkan countries funded via European Union.
> "Wikimedia Foundation Inc, the US-based non-profit charitable NGO, is the owner of the Croatian version of Wikipedia." [1]
> "However, the Wikimedia Foundation is not the founder of the Croatian version, nor does it accept that it is responsible for the accuracy of its articles. It insists that it does not have any power over Croatian-language Wikipedia entries." [1]
Other reads are provided for reference [2][3][4].
[1] Wikipedia Not Responding to Inquiries on Croatian Entries: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/04/23/wikipedia-not-replying-...
[2] Croatian Wikipedia Removes ‘Polish Genocide of Germans’ Claim: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/29/croatian-wikipedia-remo...
[3] How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/26/how-croatian-wikipedia-...
[4] Croatia Wikipedia Alters Jasenovac Camp Entry Again: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/29/croatia-wikipedia-furth...
The older population is still deeply divided over the horrors of the war with many veterans living on government money (some of them have never seen a fight). I have a lot of trust in the younger people who are sick of it all, want change and believe in integration, free movement (within EU) and modern values. But if you go out for drinks in a less touristy bar that you'll find yourself amidst a celebration of war criminals and/or people who benefited from the spoils of war (and organized crime that goes hand in hand there). Fun facts: the owner of Rimac is building his car company on his fathers criminal empire, the hooligans supporting the local Zagreb club (some of them Neo Nazi's) are being celebrated for enforcing the law in places where the police has no power or helping with local community efforts (rebuilding the city after the earthquake), ...
There is a saying in Croatia "Where were you in '92" that is reserved for the older population. You never know who you are befriending and what crimes they got into during the war.
Among the most horrible people that stem from the place are the modern elite. Anyone who shows their money and who often no longer live there. The owner of "Konzum", a huge grocery chain where the owner built his empire on war money and extracts the revenues via off-shore companies while sitting comfortably in his flat in London while his employees scrape by with shit working condition and terrible pay.
There is also the puppet-mayor of Zagreb who peddles most of his contracts to the Bosnian mob and who is unable to speak up. It really pisses off the older Croatians.
The top lawyer of the country is in the mob, as are several judges. The Hack club "Mama" in Zagreb is constantly harassed by the local criminals who want them to vacate the premises so they can rent it out for higher prices, despite a long term contract being in place. Many of the trendy cafe's are run by the mobsters wifes, GF's and sisters. You can get a great deal there in the middle of the town for lease for your new restaurant or club idea and once you're in - BOOM! the rent double or triples. People wonder why restaurants and clubs never survive there more than 2-3 years and often shut down while they are at the peak of their popularity. It's not because Zagreb constantly plays with new ideas, it's because otherwise you might lose a couple of fingers, or worse. Also cops are useless there (unless you pay them) ... in fact I got some of my best weed of a corrupt cop in Zagreb.
There is also the question of Dubravka Šuica who is now in the Vice-President of the European Commission, a corrupt individual who got rich as a teacher moving into politics and supporting the local "construction projects" and benefited from pork-barrel projects in her home region Dubrovnik.
> There is a saying in Croatia "Where were you in '92" that is reserved for the older population. You never know who you are befriending and what crimes they got into during the war.
Yeah, I am in my early 30s (I was 3 in '92) and my family is American. Let's just say that I am third generation Croatian-American (for all 3 generations we are American, and this is by birth), and I am half-Croatian (by blood). My grandmother always said that the fighting was always a 2-way street and that neither side has been innocent. She also said that she had Serb friends and that they were "the nicest people she ever knew." It's different in America. I do not know many old people in Croatia.
I also especially take offense to people understating the evils of our Nazi (Ustaše) movement. One reason (of several) is that I have a relative who died fighting the Croatian fascists.
I also wish that Croatia would stay out of Bosnia. I know that is an unpopular thing to say, but we should. It's one thing to give ethnic Croats in Bosnia Croatian citizenship. It's another thing to be funding segregated schools (partially funded by the Roman Catholic Church--on behalf of Croatia) that indoctrinate the next generation of youth with a completely different version of the history of Bosnia.
I also know of corruption done by Croatian diplomatic officials posted abroad (which is just about the worst form of corruption there is--and can be quite dangerous), although Croatia probably would do nothing about it.
Anyways, another thing that irritates me is that there are both Croatians and Croatian emigrants selling insignia with the our Nazi Coat of Arms on it (the Ustaše--we were a Nazi puppet state in WWII so it is literally a Nazi insignia).
Just for reference, on the left is the Nazi (Ustaše) coat of arms [Note: often the "U" at the top is left out--it's Nazi insignia either way], while on the right is the Croatian coat of arms: https://dubokavoda.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Grbovi-NDH...
Here are some listings on Etsy literally selling the Nazi coat of arms:
> https://www.etsy.com/listing/249865187/croatian-cuturica-siz...
> https://www.etsy.com/listing/505814936/old-croatian-grb-croa...
> https://www.etsy.com/listing/917628493/croatian-pendant-char...
> https://www.etsy.com/listing/998887249/croatian-national-sym...
You described Croatia as a Pablo Escobar's Columbia where crime and corruption reigns and dominates everyday life but that's not the case. Yes corruption is high but that's the problem of Communist legacy. Many of the same state workers and politicians who worked in Yugoslavia are working for the state right now or their children are.
Lustration of Communist elite and state workers including judges didn't happen like in other East European countries.
Croatia in 2019 was visited by 20 million tourists and one of the reasons except "nature and beauty" is low crime and feeling of being safe. There are no street gangs and violent street crime over here.
>There is a saying in Croatia "Where were you in '92" that is reserved for the older population.
Btw it's 91 that's the year when the War started you probably confused it with Bosnia where the War started in 1992.
And Balkan Insight is really fucking good at getting English speakers to care about problems in the Balkans.
The curious case of Croatian wikipedia — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737090 — Dec 2019 (31 comments)
A standout was the table listing relevant facts (specifically convictions of war criminals by an international tribunal) and whether the language sub-wikis accurately reflect those facts or not. Whether one likes or dislikes a given fact, its occurrence is a kind of ground truth that can serve as a reference marker by which to weight the factual content of an article. Thus, whether someone was convicted by a tribunal is a fact; whether it was fair is open to debate, but failure to mention the fact at all amounts to a concealment of information, whether negligent or willful. When we see a pattern of factual errors (including glaring omissions), we can assess the degree of deliberation involved by looking at whether the errors all run in similar directions and how systematic/assiduous the erroneous editor is in rejecting alternative points of view.
A complicating factor here is Wikipedia's general open-access policy. As you probably know, some people who are interested in a topic appoint themselves gatekeepers of it and revert edits they disapprove of. Over time, I can be difficult the distinguish between passion and expertise. For example, suppose you grew up in a village where a battle was fought (before you were born or aware of such things). You receive from your parents, peers, and teachers an approximate view of the historical event as experienced by those who lived through or were directly impacted by it. While in high school, you find a Wikipedia page about the battle which has some details wrong - geographical facts, say - and you correct those with your local knowledge. As time goes on, you become the leading Wikipedian curating this topic, and enrich the article with all kinds of valuable information on how the battle was fought.
But suppose you find yourself getting into arguments about why the battle was fought; now you're going outside the scope of your local knowledge. Battles might fought for purely logistic reasons (control a river crossing, cut an enemy off from supply lines), personal ones (a commander has family or reasons to love or hate a particular place), or strategic factors (to weaken enemy resolve or tempt a misallocation of forces). These might not be apparent from the local perspective; received wisdom might posit a local cause that was actually just the initial skirmish of a larger action.
Case studies illustrate some of the difficulties in evaluating controversial information. For example, the entry on Ratko Mladić, a Bosnian Serb, is heavily slanted on Serbian wikipedia, which emphasizes his positive qualities and plays down negative aspects of his story, as well as introducing analysis and speculation favorable to Serbian nationalist narratives. Now, a problem with bias accusations is subjectivity; a Mladić apologist might argue that other narratives omit contextual information that seems to justify his actions, or that emphasis on his criminality serves to distract from crimes by other parties that equally severe but less strenuously prosecuted.
Although there may be large differences of opinion, that can be OK when the contextual variations are truthful. Different people can have very different ideas about what the significant factors are, and exploring those differences can be valuable. Most historical arguments (in my non-professional view) are not so much debates about what happened but rather over what matters, and that can vary both because people are on different sides of a tribal argument but also because people have different assumptions about moral/ethical considerations that are orthogonal to their tribal membership.
Missing from the report (perhaps because most people are not that interested) is any kind of dynamic information about the development and intensity of the divergences. It might be interesting to mine the article history and/or talk pages to get a sense of which parties struggled over control and how those struggles played out - for example, was there an openly revisionist challenge on core topics that was eventually sustained by attrition of disagreeing voices, or a stealth campaign of incremental nudges in one direction with a large cumulative effect?Modeling and visualizing these dynamics could yield valuable insights on other sorts of networked conflicts.
Encouraging the affected communities to discuss the possibility of re-merging Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language projects into the original Serbo-Croatian language projects to re-align with the practices of other pluricentric Wikipedia language versions.
Which will not happen, and on top of it is border-line offensive and shows a dose of not understanding the differences. Serbo-croatian or Croato-serbian (as the full name of the language is) was an artificially constructed language during social-communist Yugoslavia. All involved parties agreed to part ways on unification of the languages for a myriad of reasons, not all political ones.. and that's now water over the bridge.. and now this entity, probably through ignorance, wants to offer re-introduction of the topic which countries have fought wars over? Nah. One of the reasons why SH (serbo-croatian) wiki even exists is because there's a group of people living in the past and which makes, for themselves, communities like that. Raisong the issue as a possible course of resokution and common ground not only gives legitimacy to it, but is border-line offensive and absolutely ignorant of the issues at hand.
Otherwise, apart from that, great. Something needs to haooen to ex yugoslavian wikis throughout to make them at least half-thrustworthy.
If (some significant number of) Croatians say they speak Croatian then these is a language called Croatian spoken by Croatians. It doesn't matter if it has a striking resemblance to another language or if it is unique. People have a right to linguistic self-determination as much as anything else.
The language you speak is entirely political. Academics or historians don't get to determine what languages people speak, people do that for themselves.
But what I was replying to made a different claim, that a mutual language does not exist and was made artificially. This is objectively not true, and you can see it in practice (many examples available). The opposite is true: the differences are artificially magnified as a part of a political project, very similar to the actual situation on Wikipedia we are supposed to be commenting on.
For example, Dutch is derived from, and similar to, German as is Swiss German, but no-one is saying that Dutch should be called Dutch German, and the Dutch would surely vigorously object to that. Croatians have every right to reject the notion that they speak Serbo-Croatian or that such a language even exists.
Can you say there's only 10% difference between the two languages? Absolutely. Does that give someone the right to declare the languages the same outside of Academia? No. There is no objective standard to rest your claims of objective truth on.
Let's continue tying the Dutch into this discussion. The war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was in the Hague. One of the official languages there was BCS: Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Not three of the languages, but one of the languages. Can you imagine anything more damning than being charged in a court of law, and not understanding the charges? Fortunately this was not the case, as the languages are in fact identical. That a court of law sees them as identical is a very objective standard. There are many other examples.
You are also doing Croats a disservice by presenting them as a hive mind that rejects certain notions in unison. Some of them disagree explicitly that the languages are separate, and a lot of them disagree implicitly (if not most!). For example, only a couple years after the war there was a Serbian movie in Croatian theatres, and it was subtitled. This was met with widespread ridicule in Croatia, and the practice has been, as far as I know, abandoned. So even if people don't want to open this can of worms (that I unfortunately did here), when faced with the full consequence of it, a large number of them will find it ridiculous.
To be clear, I am a native speaker of this language, or if you wish languages. I also speak English and German, and have spent some time in Switzerland. I believe my experience is adequate to say that we are in fact speaking one language, and the differences are nothing more than regional differences, that exist everywhere else in the world.
But yeah, while I 100% agree it's one language, naming it is tricky. I tend to use BHS (short for Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian).
Any and all discussion around languages in these matters have started and stopped by politics and ultimately even supported by academia. Is there a common understanding and overlap between languages? Of course. Are there differences? Of course, and as time goes by they grow larger - new generations have no idea what the other one are talking about for a lot of even trivial examples. Whomevwr says differently either does not love in the region or lives in a bubble. Whether that's anecdotal or a docimented fact (exercise to a reader to find reactions in each country to said declaration that followed promplty lole fire from all levels from academia to politics in all countries) is a sideshow to the following: apart from yugoslavian period and a bit before there's no shared history (500+ years of ottoman empire does that to one part of the region whereas the other wasn't in it), there's no shared literature throughout history (since it's a wikipedia post, find history of croatian literature and then serbian), how come it's called serbo-croatian or croato-serbian excluding all other nationalities/countries (and how come it's only ex-yugoslavia centric?), and ultimately and the only unarguable reason relevant to the topic is that language is one of the key components to national identities which region has struggled (wars over) within recent decades - tha ultimate reason why this won't happen ever, as exemplified even by this small universe of replies within.. which was my whole point.
This is not a good analogy, because there's a separate Alemannic Wikipedia (covering slightly more than Swiss German) https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte
It's called "Schweizerdeutsch" (Swiss German) and is indeed a separate language. In fact, every region in Switzerland has a different dialect :-)
--- Imam automobil s dobrim strojem na unutarnje izgaranje. Krenuo sam u trgovinu u neboderu. Mislio sam, bit će tamo hljeb kruha i za mene. Nemam svoj vrt stoga kupit ću još malo sira, mrkvu, krumpir, špinat, raznog drugog povrća, gljive i tjesteninu, sve to ću staviti u posudu za kuhanje i u svom stanu na drugom katu skuhat ću dobru povrtnu juhu. Prljavo posuđe ću staviti u perilicu, a onda opeglati rublje.
Zamolio sam prijatelja u Beogradu da napravi isto, ali i da to i napiše. Evo kako je on to uradio.
Imam automobil sa dobrom mašinom na unutrašnje sagorjevanje. Krenuo sam u dućan u soliteru. Predmnjevao sam, biće tamo hleba i za mene. Nemam svoje bašče, zato ću da kupim još malo kačkavalja, šargarepu, krtole, spanać, raznog drugog povrća, pečurke i makarone, sve to ću da stavim u šerpu i u svom stanu na drugom spratu ću da skuvam supu od povrća. Prljavo suđe ću da stavim u mašinu za pranje sudova, a onda ću da opeglam veš.
https://m.vecernji.hr/vijesti/antideklaracija-ili-otvoreno-p...
Right, but this does not make it different languages because I just made up a reason. These differences exist between all regions and in all countries. The differences between American and British English are even more pronounced. The differences between German and Swiss German are more substantial than the similarities etc. And even when the Swiss speak German for the Germans to understand them, there are differences, e.g. Fahrrad vs Velo, the construct "es gibt" vs "es hat". There are differences between German spoken in Saxony and Bavaria. There is nothing special going on in the Balkans, contrary to what a lot of people there think.
Most people will understand almost everything in the quoted texts, although almost no Serb will understand the quoted Serbian text completely. You will need a lot of luck trying to find a person in Belgrade who understands what "predmnjevati" means. I have no idea. No actual person speaks like this. There are other comical errors that illustrate what is going on here: artificial magnifying of the differences. But the only outcome possible for those that attempt it is to fall flat on their face.
What gives it out is that, although it mainly uses "correct" words, with some obvious slips, makes some pretty obvious gramatical and ortographical errors. I guess that it's written by a Croatian journalist, who obviously can speak, read, and write "Serbian" rather well, but who wrote several things wrongly because he imagined that Serbian uses these distinctive features. I can attest that I understand all words in the "Croatian" version without any help, and that the "Serbian" version sounds closer to what is spoken in Belgrade, but only to an extent (it sounds silly and artificial to my ears).
Really, all languages are basically the same language. Draw a circle around any <del>50km</del> 5km area and almost everyone in there will understand each other, with only minor differences in speech.
Think this is wrong? Okay, then: English should be divided into Romantic and Germanic. It's two languages (basically French, and basically Dutch) that have been mashed together, with a splash of Celtic influence.
These are all bad takes. So's yours.
"Experts have the viewpoint that if 70 percent of the words between two languages are common, then they are not languages but variants of the same language. And in our case it is not 70, but over 90 percent".
Original quote in Serbian: http://www.rtv.rs/sr_lat/drustvo/govore-li-srbi-hrvati-bosnj...
People either understand each other or they don't. There's absolutely nothing political about that.
Speaking of… Wikipedia (Dutch):
> Wikipedia is een online encyclopedie die ernaar streeft inhoud te bieden die vrij herbruikbaar, objectief en verifieerbaar is. Het project is gebouwd op vijf zuilen. De Nederlandstalige versie startte op 19 juni 2001 en is, gemeten naar het aantal lemma's, met meer dan 2 miljoen artikelen de op vijf na grootste taalversie.
And Wikipedia (German):
> Das Ziel der Wikipedia ist der Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie durch freiwillige und ehrenamtliche Autoren. Der Name Wikipedia setzt sich zusammen aus Wiki (entstanden aus wiki, dem hawaiischen Wort für ‚schnell‘), und encyclopedia, dem englischen Wort für ‚Enzyklopädie‘. Ein Wiki ist ein Webangebot, dessen Seiten jeder leicht und ohne technische Vorkenntnisse direkt im Webbrowser bearbeiten kann.
Different languages. Neither is too hard for an English speaker. (If in doubt, try pronouncing the words.)
While I'm at it, Wikipedia (French):
> Wikipédia est un projet d’encyclopédie collective en ligne, universelle, multilingue et fonctionnant sur le principe du wiki. Ce projet vise à offrir un contenu librement réutilisable, objectif et vérifiable, que chacun peut modifier et améliorer.
Also a different language! But just you tell me you don't understand that.
Your comment sounds fine on the surface, if you don't actually stop to think about it. It's horribly wrong in lots of Europe, Africa, south America and Asia, hell even in the US it's not correct everywhere.
Even this is only to a point; namely, all these languages use Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic (Serbian uses both alphabets). Croatian originally used Glagolitic script (many centuries ago). This Latin/Cyrillic division is caused by Catholic/Orthodox church split and Habsburg/Ottoman empire border rather than being some central feature in languages.
Snježana Kordić's book made the case that there is a polycentric language shared by those countries and that much of the current politicking over this topic is nationalist in basis. I think it's easy to see that this bickering over language is yet another useful distraction from the catastrophic state of society and the economy in those lands.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Lang...
I'm sure US admins are patriots as well for example and are proud of their War of Independence and all the good things that US has done in the past while at the same time being critical of all the bad things that happened in the past.
After all Wikipedia should be facts not opinion articles but of course there is always some commentary on top of facts which can be ideological.
In Croatia there is Culture War going on between the Left and the Right for the last 30 years but that is democracy. If we all think the same then nobody is thinking.
Why is Croatia singled out and not Poland for example? Poland is more "right" than Croatia and over there we can see intense and sometimes violent confrontations between left and right.
That is what is being "singled out", not their political ideology.
And like I said Wikipedia is not about opinion articles it is about factual information.
Exactly, they're not interested in the truth, but to push their own political views. Sharing those political views doesn't make them true.
After all our history books and our Constitution should be the source of reliable information not crowd-sourced Wiki website.