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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

The good thing about Wikipedia in this case is that it cites sources for every single claim. There are 502 citations on that page. So even if it's inaccurate, it is inaccurate in a way that the reader can assess, whereas the alternative way to find out about that conflict is through single news articles (ie. most of the citations are news articles, but it's like a longitudinal reference point of ALL news articles about the topic).

Not only that but anyone can review and contribute to the discussion, and submit edit requests. So if you're able to prove the inaccuracy of that picture, you can post about it and submit an edit request about it.

Compared with headline news it's a pretty amazing resource even for the most fiercely political issues.

I don't think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's a stage where propaganda can easily pass off as undeniable truth.

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> 502 citations

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

- Joseph Goebbels (allegedly)

It is farcical propaganda, period. While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide".

It is not Qanon-tier disinformation, which Wikipedia is resilient against.

It is Nayirah-tier disinformation: peddled by special interest groups in Washington, including the State Department, it gets signal-boosted by establishment media who are on good terms with those SIGs.

Wikipedia is extraordinarily vulnerable to this class of disinformation campaign.

And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?

> While there may be heavy-handed counterterrorism and anti-poverty policies circa 2017 in Xinjiang, there is no evidence of "genocide".

Why do people say “there is no evidence of X” to mean “the evidence that has been presented of X is not sufficient to make me believe that X is more likely than not to be true.”

I mean, I get that it sounds stronger to an audience that has no exposure whatsoever to the debate, but to otherwise it seems mostly to be credibility-killing.

It's a propaganda technique as old as time

When people say "there is no evidence of genocide", they mean it in a legal sense. No legal definition of genocide applies to China's domestic policies in Xinjiang. The UN and US government both agree on this point; they don't pretend to prosecute China for something they know they can't prove in an international court.

But that's not the point. USG doesn't give a single F--- about distant Muslims, much less Chinese Muslims.

The propaganda effect is the point. And Wikipedia is an important tool for that.

> When people say "there is no evidence of genocide", they mean it in a legal sense. No legal definition of genocide applies to China's domestic policies in Xinjiang.

Evidence has been provided specifically to the internationally accepted legal definition of genocide. [0] If that doesn't convince you, that's fine, but there is not “no evidence”.

[0] for which, see https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

Are you referring to when far right racist Adrian Zenz horribly misinterpreted some official Chinese government documents to make his case for "forced birthrate suppression"?

Please link this "evidence". The actual primary evidence.

Well, I feel your frustration. Indeed the English Wikipedia isn't immune from Systemic (western-anglo) Bias, as one would expect, and there's no one denying that within the community, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/08/17/the-uyghur-genocide-t...

https://eagle.bchigh.edu/features/2021/04/26/the-uyghur-geno...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/china/xinjiang-detective-tort...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071

https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/12/world/congressman-says-gi...

Consent = manufactured

> And good luck challenging it in the talk page. Your edits will get instantly reverted by an army of pro-Washington trolls. How else could that extremely inaccurate header image stay up?

Have you tried?

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