User:Icewhiz

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Intro
On wiki, I mainly deal with finance, business, military, history, politics, though I sometimes do branch out.

Not in my name
While I have cleaned up some Holocaust distortion (User:Icewhiz/KL Warschau conspiracy theory is particularly notable - For over a decade Wikipedia present a well known conspiracy theory as fact, turning a small short-lived concentration camp into a very large death camp for Poles) and other fabrications from the English Wikipedia, I would caution anyone from using Wikipedia as a source for historical (or for that matter - any other type) of information. In particular, I would stress that you saw my user name in an article's edit history - it does not mean I endorse the content of the article (in fact, the opposite might very well be the case).

What to do if you encounter antisemitic or racist content on the English Wikipedia
For starters, you should avoid calling editors, or even content, antisemitic or racist (even if you have bulletproof evidence). On the English Wikipedia, most such content falls within the Wikipedia concept of Content dispute. To put things simply - unless something is verifiable within 30-seconds of a google search as both racist and patently false (which is only true for stuff like outright Holocaust denial - e.g. an insertion of "The Holocaust is a myth" to the top of Holocaust), or is clearly refuted by citations (e.g. stating "The Jews" planned Holodomor, whereas the citation states Joseph Stalin) - anything else - no matter how false and racist, is a legitimate "content dispute". If you can't prove it is false in 30-seconds (to a slow reader who is completely unfamiliar with the topic and with English language sources only) it is WikiKosher content.

The English Wikipedia is generally tolerant of antisemitic or racist editors - and in fact in at least one semi-famous case a known promoter of modern racial theory views was an active editor (with his true real-life identity openly declared) for a few years on the English Wikipedia. Holding such views on Wikipedia is not a WikiCrime (just as thoughtcrime is generally not a crime in democratic societies). As long as such an editor resolves "content disputes" in accordance with community norms and expectations and behaves with decorum towards other editors, he would generally be welcome by the English Wikipedia.

In contrast to the tolerance of antisemitic/racist editors and content - the English Wikipedia is highly intolerant of Personal attacks. In this context, in the current climate on the English Wikipedia, anti-Semite or antisemitic is considered one of the most egregious personal attacks and is grounds for immediate sanction. Unlike a democracy where thoughtcrime is a non-concept and Freedom of speech is a cherished principle - Wikipedia is a completely different environment. Newbie editors, unaware of this policy, voicing their true concern at racist content on Wikipedia are routinely blocked and driven off of Wikipedia due to their frank comments. This combination of policies turns Wikipedia into a safe harbor for racist content and editors.

So what to do? You can try to WP:SOFIXIT yourself (avoid calling it "antisemitic" or "racist" - say something like "unsupported by mainstream sources"). This may work in the case of a random IP vandalism or content introduced by a retired editor. If you are challenged - engage politely with whomever is defending said content. Opposition can be quite complex and daunting - I suggest you read Wikipedia Continues the Crime and the Silence of Polish Participation in the Murder of Jews, 2015 for an example of multiple unsuccessful attempts to correct false defamatory content on the English Wikipedia.

I am happy to discuss such content - I can be contacted on User talk:Icewhiz and via e-mail (Email this user - on left side of the screen). If you contact me via the Wikipedia talk page - you need to avoid calling anything racist or antisemitic (or even implying that it is). Via e-mail you can talk more freely and describe the issue with the content more clearly.

Anti-racist organizations
The following may be of assistance:
 * United States:
 * Anti-Defamation League, https://www.adl.org/. Mainly antisemitism, though they do other racist and anti-religious incidents as well.
 * Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), https://www.splcenter.org/, Often the go-to organization for general racist incidents in the US.
 * UK:
 * Hope not Hate - https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/ - split out of Searchlight in 2011. General racism.
 * Searchlight - http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/ - general racism, though more focused on extreme right-wing motiviations.
 * Community Security Trust - https://cst.org.uk/ - good contact for antisemitism in the UK.
 * Poland:
 * "Never Again" Association - http://www.nigdywiecej.org/en/ - somewhat similar to Searchlight. Also has coverage in wider Eastern Europe and is also active against racism in the context of Football hooliganism in Eastern Europe.

Post-truth in Wikipedia articles
Should Wikipedia be a Post-truth environment? Verifiability, not truth indeed, but what about content that doesn't pass WP:V? This section (will grow) is dedicated to such content.
 * Warsaw concentration camp was a short lived labor camp to clear the Warsaw Ghetto ruins, per Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (Volume I, part B, pages 1512-1515) some 8,000-9,000 inmates (mainly Jews from countries over than Poland (Hungary, Greece) and some 4,000-5,000 victims. The English Wikipedia presented this as an Extermination camp for Ethnic Poles of the Warsaw capital with 200,000 (or even 400,000) victims (see Extermination camp - places this in the "top 5" of camps). This follows a fairly well known conspiracy theory which is promoted by what Christian Davies in the London Review of Books describes as Catholic nationalists who espouse "Polocaust" - "resentful of the international attention the Holocaust receives to claim a parity of suffering", part of a "standard trope on the Polish nationalist right that Jews have exaggerated their victimhood in order to extort money from the Poles and obtain global power and influence".LRB source. Present in:
 * Warsaw concentration camp - 15 years. (August 2004 creation (lead + "Parts", "Methodology of the crime", "Liquidation and liberation" sections contain several false details in WikiVoice) August 2019 TNT.
 * German camps in occupied Poland during World War II (2006 - 2019): "up to 200,000 at KL Warschau". 5,562 average monthly views; had this hoax live for 13 years and 3 months.
 * Extermination camp (2007 - 2019): Much of the time in unqualified WikiVoice, e.g. "similar camps existed at Warsaw and Janowska"2011)). 36,137 average monthly views; had this hoax live for 12 years, 3 months.
 * Pabst Plan (2009 - 2019): "From autumn of 1942 next step of extermination of Warsaw’s population was launched....
 * Nazi crimes against the Polish nation (2006 - 2019): Death camp for Polish extermination, gas chambers, and Communist cover-up all in WikiVoice; Trzcińska is treated as a bona-fide historian, and the sole item of dispute is the "enormous gas chamber in a railway tunnel" (other gas chambers are presented as accepted historical fact).
 * War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II (2006 - 2019): At addition tunnel was considered fact; at removal camp is still described in WikiVoice as containing "killing facilities" for extermination of Poles in the capital.
 * List of Nazi concentration camps (2004 - 2019). At addition, 40,000 inmates and 200,000 victims. At removal number of inmates went up to 400,000 but victims down to 20,000–35,000. In both false 1942 start date.


 * Is Ashanti Region an independent empire? A modern day Ashanti Empire? Or is it part of Ghana? Dozens of Wikipedia geography and locations articles settled on the former description. Not only that, but articles on cultural topics pertaining to the wider Akan people were ascribed as belonging to the Ashanti people subgroup. Examples:


 * December 2018 - Was Casimir III the Great actually married to Esterka? Or was it mythical? Wikipedia presented this as fact (+issue from the relationship and their alleged lives, and even misrepresented the mainstream legend that sees Esterka as a mistress - not a wife - by listing her as a spouse). Added August 2017, and then to the infobox at December 2017. Average monthly viewership of 7,463, - so roughly 100,000 misinformed viewers. And this isn't an obscure figure - google "most famous Polish king" - first hit is a list, second hit is our Casimir III the Great, third is John III Sobieski, fourth is Quora whose top-scoring answer is "The only king of Poland that is called “Great” was Casimir III The Great...", and fifth is Britannica on Casimir III.


 * In the early days of the German invasion of the USSR in June-July 1941, several anti-Jewish pogroms were carried out by the local residents of Łomża County in Poland with limited or no German involvement. Jedwabne pogrom is the most famous, however these encompassed some 23 other towns. In the Szczuczyn pogrom the atrocities were actually stopped by a German army unit (the Germans, however, would massacre even more Jews in the town on August 1941, place the surviving Jews in a ghetto, and send them to Treblinka extermination camp in November 1942). On Wikipedia, however, some of these atrocities were portrayed as Jewish persecution of Poles in 1939-1941, followed by German massacre of Jews with little to no involvement of the local Poles. These descriptions entered Wikipedia circa 2009-2011, and remained on Wikipedia for almost a decade. This has received attention outside of Wikipedia - Wikipedia Continues the Crime and the Silence of Polish Participation in the Murder of Jews. I became involved in 2018, and these are a few corrections:
 * Stawiski - 21:25, 19 March 2018
 * Radziłów - 15:21, 3 July 2018


 * Białystok "Jewish welcoming" caption. Was added to commons on 12 December 2015, and 10 minutes later to History of the Jews in Poland (and in 2017 - in Białystok Ghetto). The cited source, a Telewizja Polska regional station (Given - (and a whole bunch of other sources) - not particularly a good source for the subject matter). is here - and says nothing of a "Jewish welcome banner" (nor does it quite contain the photograph version on Commons). While the commons English text (copied to en.wiki as well) reads - "Jewish welcome banner in Białystok during the Soviet invasion of Poland of September 1939. In the background the Catholic Church of St. Roch (achival photo)." the Polish reads "To jedna z najciekawszych fotografii Białegostoku z czasów sowieckiej okupacji. W tle kościół Świętego Rocha, a wokół sierpy, młoty, pięcioramienne gwiazdy - symbole nowego porządku." - google translate - "This is one of the most interesting photographs of Bialystok during the Soviet occupation. In the background, the church of Saint Roch, and around the sickle, hammers, five-pointed stars - the symbols of the new order." (which possibly could be supported by TVP) - nothing quite about a "Jewish welcome banner", is there? The image composition doesn't quite fit with a welcoming banner - the sign is very drab, routine, and one would expect "welcome messages" to be written in Russian, not in Yiddish. Furthermore, if one reads the first line of the sign (which is what got me off to poking around here) - it is "דער טאג וואלן" or in Latin letters - "Der Tag Wahlen" - which rudimentary German/Yiddish is sufficient to ascertain this is "Election day". Poking around for images, one might find this poster by a museum whose translation (somewhat loose in my mind) is ""The Election of / Delegates / For the people's council / of Western Belarus"" and that this was taken in July 1941 - the beginning of the German occupation. So - fixed Białystok Ghetto, fixed History of the Jews in Poland, Fixed on commons. Lasted three years on Wikipedia - Białystok Ghetto has 1,178 monthly views on average, and History of the Jews in Poland 18,962 - over 3 years - possibly some 725,000 people were misinformed about the Jews in Poland.

New Page Patrol
If you came by here after I reviewed your new page - I am human, you can talk to me, and I'm often willing to help. Getting an article through the seemingly arcane Wikipedia rules and bureaucracy can be difficult. If the subject is notable enough, I will be willing help - and I can be convinced. I am more than willing to discuss and explain Wikipedia policy to the best of my limited ability.

AfD, rescuing articles
I actively patrol some AfD lists. While I perhaps would style myself as skewing inclusionist, my !voting is (as of March 2019) fairly evenly split between Keep (41%) and Delete (45%) with some Merge support (8.6%). I tend to !vote based on policy - including WP:NOT or WP:BIO1E (which skew me Delete vs. the median !voter) while I probably (with the exception of the crazy world of NFOOTY) have a more liberal footing on GNG than the median !voter (which skews me Keep vs. the media !voter).Current Icewhiz AFD stats.

Part of my interest is rescuing articles (my criteria for doing so is eclectic and often depends on my degree of interest), by improving content and sourcing in the process (e.g. Joseph Nicholson Barney which I brought from 06:13, 15 August 2017 to 22:43, 17 August 2017, and which closed as a speedy keep - before moving on to Leon Smith (naval commander) - a much more interesting rascal ("Variously described as naval lieutenant, captain, and commodore or army major, and colonel, but not actually commissioned") who didn't have an article and with whom I crossed paths while working on Barney (both were my first substantive Civil War contributions)... This led to writing the Wrangell Bombardment (in which Smith was killed), the Kake War and Angoon Bombardment (both similar to the Wrangell affair).

In short - this modus operandi has me patrolling in particular topic lists (AFD lists) with articles needing work - from which I branch out.... I will however vote also on articles in which I don't find great interest if I have given them a once-over coupled with a source check.

Darned politics
I used to say I don't do Israel-Arab/Politics/etc., or don't do much. I guess that has changed a bit, as I have done some, but these tend to be less fulfilling - especially when dealing with edit-warring (or clear outright trolls and vandalism) or itty-bitty bickering over minor points (which lead to 10 foot long talk page discussions over a single sentence - or even a flag or single term). I think I have learned in these areas that it is best to start out with WP:AGF, place polite talk-page self-reverts comments on 1RR (or other issues) before escalating to anything else, stay polite and on-topic, and also to try and work collegially with editors from the "other camp(s)" - with time, I at least have come to respect some of them as editors (even if we disagree on POV). Collaboration can lead to good results, and in some areas that require cross-language (or POV - which in the polarized media landscape is becoming akin to a language (e.g. FOX/WSJ/NR/Telegraph vs. CNN/NYT/Poltico/Guardian) - with many people not only sticking to one language, but also sticking to a few clearly POV-aligned outlets - so we have FOX-editors and CNN-editors viewing the world via a narrow prism(*)) sourcing - this is key to building a good article. In short - if you can reach out across the aisle, then I'll work with you.

(*) - this does not describe me, I actually tend to read more political sources that I disagree with than those that I agree with - and when possible I also try to work across the language barrier.

My DYKs

 * ... that an engineer inadvertently took off in an English Electric Lightning fighter jet after engaging the afterburner by mistake?  24,741 views, this made it into WP:DYKSTATS - cool article - had a laugh reading about it and then writing it up - while not heavy or serious material, this was pure fun (and an informative article to boot on RAF lore).
 * ... that as of August 2019, around thirty LGBT-free zones have been declared in Poland, including four south-eastern voivodeships (depicted on map)? 21,633 views in 12 hours.
 * ... that the U.S. Army bombarded the village of Wrangell, Alaska, in 1869 to force the handover of the first man to be given the death penalty under U.S. rule? 18,232 views - in WP:DYKSTATS


 * ... that in some Polish homes, an image of a Jew holding a coin (example pictured, left) hangs to the left of the doorway, and is customarily turned upside down on the Sabbath so that good fortune may fall upon the household? 12,752 views in 12 hours
 * ... that the historic wooden Kruszyniany Mosque (pictured) was targeted in 2014 during a wave of attacks on mosques in Poland? 2,521 views in 12 hours
 * ... that Arthur Menachem Hantke sought support from Austria-Hungary during the First World War for the Zionist cause? 2,112 views
 * ... that in his 2002 book Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945, Gunnar S. Paulsson estimated that nearly a tenth of Warsaw's population were helping Jews during the Holocaust? 3,354 views
 * ... that incendiary balloons made from condoms and party balloons, and incendiary kites, have been launched from the Gaza Strip and started hundreds of fires in Israel in 2018? 7,168 views
 * ... that Amnon Rubinstein coined the term "enclave law" to describe Israeli law in the West Bank settlements? 1,341 views
 * ... that Jonas Noreika is commemorated on plaques and street signs in Lithuania, despite his active participation in the Holocaust? 6,631 views
 * ... that the anti-Muslim Ełk riots in Poland led to the launch of the ironic The Kebab War website, which listed attacks on kebab eateries? 3,799 views

Some of my work
Some of the articles I created (or re-created following TNT):
 * General military: Loitering Munition, Leon Smith (naval commander), Wrangell Bombardment, Kake War (redirect expanded into proper article), Angoon Bombardment,  Carlo (submachine gun), Incendiary balloon, Incendiary kite, SMS Vulcano, Holden's Lightning flight
 * Lithuania (Jewish history/Holocaust): Jonas Noreika, Silvia Foti, Šukioniai, Plungė massacre, Jacob Bunka, Holocaust in Telšiai
 * Poland (Jewish history/Holocaust): Radziłów pogrom, Dalej jest noc, Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act of 2017, Jew with a coin, Warsaw concentration camp, New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship (conference)
 * Poland (other): Sieci, Tadeusz Wojda, Białystok equality march, Islamophobia in Poland, "Never Again" Association, Elżbieta Podleśna, Ełk riots, LGBT-free zone
 * Holocaust: Bernheim petition, Holocaust inversion, Terezin Declaration,
 * Other: Amir Bramly, Body broker
 * Authors/academics: Jeffrey Kopstein, Saul S. Friedman, Jonathan C. Friedman, Christoph Dieckmann (historian), Rafał Pankowski, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

Some of the articles I contributed to significantly (far from complete): Ahmad Musa Jibril, Finsbury Park Mosque, Gaza electricity crisis

Article rescue following significant rewrite/expansion/sourcing (far from complete): Joseph Nicholson Barney, Michael Strauss (industrialist), Aleksander Piotr Mohl, Godfrey Lewis Rockefeller, DW Norris, Courtesy call

Barnstars, Food&Beverage
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