User:Peterstrempel/Brezhnev-era

History is not a plaything

Written 14-21 March 2011 in snatches as part of the process of distancing myself from the events that prompted the opinion.

It appears that a special emphasis has been given to populating Wikipedia with content relating to Soviet history. In the post-Soviet era, this seems to be an uncontroversial decision, and a worthy endeavour for an ebcyclopedia, particularly with some archival Soviet material becoming available for the first time ever.

In that endeavour, an apparently small but highly active group of writers and editors have tackled the period characterized by the West as the Brezhnev era, after Leonid Brezhnev, who was visible to the West as the successor to Nikita Khrushchev, but may have had a less firm hold on political power than his predecessors.

Nevertheless, the name Brezhnev was associated during the 1960s and '70s with all things USSR, from the impressive space programme to detente, but also with the re-emergence of Stalinist civil liberties repression, calculated and dangerous brinkmanship in the Middle East, and a stunning split with the People's Republic of China. These are all matters of trolling newspaper headlines, scholarly articles and now even reference works.

It is right that Wikipedia writers and editors should mine that mountain of information to make sense of the period.

But what appears to have happened instead is that the Wikipedia internal organisational phenomenon has interposed itself with some unexpectedly un-encyclopaedic effects.

A number of the Soviet history articles are written in bad English, exposed as that by grammatical mistakes as much as by stilted diction and 'foreign' idiom. But because Wikipedia's rules don't address these matters as important adjuncts to credibility, lack of ambiguity, and consideration of the overall quality of an article, such problems persist. Worse, a small but active clique of editors with proprietary impulses appears to have managed to fend off challenges to bad English and questionable referencing methodologies. They appear to be motivated by accumulating the Wikipedia brownie-points that come with placing 'barnstars' and other kudos on their pages, not by any earnest desire to present accurate and relevant information.

Worst of all, the Wikipedia 'culture' of some kind of undergraduate open debating society in which facts are subject to consensus, the very people who should probably be involved in tidying up the Soviet history project are likely put off by inane challenges to even the smallest and most reasonable changes proposed for the quality of the articles (rather than the size of the ego).

As a consequence, there is a growing section of history being 'propagated' that doesn't really deserve the Wikipedia aegis, and that will now take years to fix, during which time a massive fraudf is being perpetrated on Wikipedia users about veracity and reliability.

That this situation does damage to the entire Wikipedia project seems to conern the Wiki elite (administrators, etc) less than the absurdly irrational, anti-intellectually politically correct, principally American 1960s Berkely model of debating everything and then re-aligning reality to suit those ideological dictates.

It seems it matters more that many people think red is green than it does that spectography says it ain't.