Francis Berger
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The Trouble With History on Wikipedia

11/19/2019

13 Comments

 
In a post I wrote earlier this week, I mentioned I will spend Christmas in a small town in southern Hungary close to the region where I set the first part of my novel. The town is called Bonyhád and - knowing next to nothing about the place - I did a little light research into it online. The first two hits my browser pulled up were Wikipedia links - one in English; the other in Hungarian. 

The English Wikipedia page dedicated to Bonyhád provides cursory information about the town's current mayor and some of the settlement's facilities, but the rest of the page focuses exclusively on the tragic history of Bonyhád's Jewish population, most of whom were deported to Auschwitz during the Second World War. The remaining information on the page details the fate of Bonyhád's surviving Jews who remained in the town until 1956, after which most decided to flee to America or Israel. The English Wikipedia page ends by citing Bonyhád's last remaining Jewish resident - a woman named Mrs. Sári Warum - who died in 2013.

The Hungarian Wikipedia page about Bonyhád is far more thorough and comprehensive. It expansively chronicles the settlement's establishment in the fourteenth century and even makes note of traces of earlier possible Celtic settlements in the same location. The page then moves through the centuries, making concise stops at a few key historic dates in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The Jewish population is acknowledged in passing in a segment reporting on the town's religious and ethnic composition, but no mention is made of the deportations to Auschwitz. Instead, the page dedicates a few sentences to the Danube-Swabians and other ethnic Germans who were persecuted, dispossessed, and expelled from the town after the Second World War. 

The English page focuses almost entirely Bonyhád's Jews to the exclusion of practically everything else while the Hungarian page concentrates on everything else and barely mentions Bonyhád's Jews. 

Talk about two solitudes.   
13 Comments
bruce charlton
11/20/2019 16:46:57

Strange. In this instance (looking at the history of the Wiki article) it seemed to reflect the ethnic angle of the person that wrote it - so the article says more about the way they see the world, than anything about that town in particular. They would have written the same kind of thing about Patagonia or Mongolia, no doubt.

Nobody else seems to have had sufficient interest in the place to contribute and correct the bias. So, maybe there's an opening for you?...

This kind of obsessive and distorted ethnic perspective is increasingly common. A well known local TV presenter here is half-black and has done lots of well-publicised work about the history of black people on Tyneside - whereas the reality is that (untiil 15-20 years ago) there essentially wasn't any history (except for students temporarily at the university, doctors training in the hospitals, footballers temporarily employed and other almost arbitrary examples).

But of course, black history in Tyneside is now a Big Thing with our local SJW Establishment - wth annual exhibitions, parades etc; even though it isn't.

Reply
Francis Berger
11/20/2019 17:05:20

@ Bruce - Yes, both Wiki articles are heavily influenced by the ethnic angle of the people who wrote them. The Hungarian article is a bit more expansive and objective, but its omissions are quite striking when compared to the English article, which is almost perversely idiosyncratic.

Sadly, this sort of thing permeates the chronicling of Hungarian history and culture in more formal, serious, and 'scholarly' publications and media as well as in lighter forms of media such as Wikipedia.

For example, I once knew a person who wrote a Frommer's guide for Budapest in which he included a short chapter on Hungarian history. Like the Wikipedia article, the chapter focused exclusively on the plight of Budapest's Jews. One thousand years of history reduced to two horrific years in the Second World War. The author was not Jewish, but he was homosexual and extremely liberal, so . . ..

The recording of history has always been troublesome, but it has truly become a playground of subjectivity and distortion (which, sadly, has a big effect on the present, as you so astutely point out in your comment).

Reply
Ingemar
11/20/2019 18:07:10

I noticed that Wikipedia seems to have style guidelines when it comes to mass killings--Jews are "murdered" while everyone else is just "killed." Agenda much?

Francis Berger
11/20/2019 18:19:25

@ Ingemar - It appears words still possess power after all.

Reply
bruce charlton
11/20/2019 22:50:49

I suppose this is - in microcosm - how the most powerful group in the world are also officially regarded as the most oppressed victims of the world.

Reply
Francis Berger
11/21/2019 10:54:03

@ Bruce - I agree - the English-language article certainly reflects that.

Reply
Bookslinger
11/22/2019 16:33:04

@FB: anyone can be a Wikipedia editor. You could translate the Hungarian sections and then add them to the English page.

If you don't have time to learn the Wiki markup language, you could just translate the Hungarian sections/paragraphs, and either email them to the last person to edit the english page, asking them to do it, or post the translated sections on the page's "talk" page, hoping someone will mark them up according to the Wiki template and put it on the live page.

Just be sure to transfer over the references with links, either way you do it.

Reply
Francis Berger
11/22/2019 19:41:20

@Bookslinger - anyone can be a Wikipedia editor

Yes, that's my main point. These two articles on the same Hungarian town demonstrate just how disparate the information on sites like Wikipedia can be. I'll consider your suggestion, though I imagine wading into something like this could be akin to opening Pandora's Box.

If the English/Hungarian articles are this divergent for a small town, can you imagine the differences that exist in more controversial or contested subjects and issues?

Reply
bookslinger
11/23/2019 00:11:39

Yeah, but... it need not be nefarious.

Wikipedia is a work-in-progress. They get volunteers, and no one is really in charge. It's a distributed work-load, with persons doing just a little here, and a little there, hoping it will aggregate.

It could be merely because the one English speaking editor was the only English speaker willing to make a token effort, and he picked what he thought was most importsnt to an english-speaking audience, and his interest or attention-span only lasted for that brief story.

Maybe the one, or few, Hungarians who volunteered to submit info don't speak/write English, so they had nothing for the English page, nor could they translate the English info to Hungarian, or they were just not interested in that black mark.

In this case, There was/is no supervisor to monitor the page across languages, as the differences illustrate that no bilingual person has volunteered to do that, or else it would have been done. Each "side" is working just on their little work-space.

Yes, it is a shame. Yes, it illustrates bias. But each side is merely acting through their default filters. And, you can't make volunteers do more than what they feel like doing. You can only make polite suggestions. Or... do it yourself.

The worst that can really be concluded is that they have not coordinated. But that could simply be because it never occured to them to look at the other language. Or, if it did occur to them, maybe they are just not bilingual.

Remember, complaining about the food on a campout is tantamount to volunteering to help cook the next meal. ;-)

Reply
Francis Berger
11/23/2019 16:46:01

@ BS - I wasn't really complaining in my post; merely pointing out something I found interesting/strange. I understand how Wikipedia operates; I also understand its shortcomings.

That a small town in Hungary even has a Wikipedia page in English is admirable. That the article focuses almost exclusively on the history of one ethnic/religious group is troubling. Conversely, the Hungarian article, though understandably much more comprehensive, makes no real mention of the ethnic/religious group. This is also troubling.

I mentioned two solitudes in my post - these Wikipedia articles are merely an example of that. These kinds of solitudes exist everywhere. It's like parallel universes existing side-by-side. It might not be purposefully nefarious, but it ends up being nefarious all the same.

Reply
William James Tychonievich link
11/24/2019 14:23:04

I remember ages ago finding the English article on the gun designer Uziel Gal to be bizarrely lopsided. I redid the whole thing based on the German version. These days I’m too lazy to do that sort of thing.

Reply
Francis Berger
11/24/2019 18:46:37

@ Wm - I am tempted to do the same, but I simply don't have the time. Maintaining this blog properly is proving to be enough of a challenge at the moment. This is due mostly to the revisions I have embarked upon (which I sometimes regret even starting).

Reply
Susan strohli
4/6/2021 22:17:49

My aunt was sharing warum she married my father's brother Ignatius warum my father changed his name when his took him and my mom out of Sweden where I was born on Gothenburg name change was warren

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