Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2020/Op-ed


 * By Nick-D

The current prominence of anti-racism movements should encourage Wikipedia editors who focus on military history to reflect on our work: do our articles reflect diverse experiences and viewpoints?

At the outset of this short op-ed I'll put my cards on the table. I'm a white middle-aged Australian man who has never been the victim of racial or gender-based discrimination. As such, I can't speak here from personal experiences of discrimination or seeing my community under-represented, and I am certain that I have massive blind spots. I am sure that this op-ed will reflect some of my biases.

We've seen lots of good work in Wikipedia's coverage of military history over recent years to address systematic bias. In the topic areas I'm most familiar with, broader ranges of sources have been used in articles, the coverage of the Australian frontier wars has been considerably expanded, the quality of articles on the military history of the Balkans has been improved and a lot of work has gone into rebalancing our coverage of World War II to reflect modern scholarship. I'm sure that there have been similar, and stronger, improvements in many other areas.

Yet I often see material in articles which makes me wince. As some examples:
 * Many articles covering pre-1945 warfare still refer to non-white inhabitants of areas as being "natives" rather than a more specific term (including text I originally added).
 * There is often little coverage of the experiences of non-white civilians in pre-1945 warfare.
 * The terminology of colonial regimes often appears in articles – for instance, it's common to see text referring to military forces being used to "put down" "rebellions" by "natives", or an assumption that if locals backed a side other than their colonial power during colonial-era warfare they were in the wrong.
 * What such exercises in colonialism meant often aren't described.
 * The use of military forces against left-wing groups also often goes unquestioned – for instance, articles sometimes refer to the military being used to break strikes without describing what this meant or why it came about.
 * Racial segregation of military units and nonsense like assumptions that there are "martial races" is unquestioned, without the injustices this involved being noted.

I think that most, if not all, of this is entirely inadvertent. To a large degree it also reflects limitations in our sources. Until recently, for instance, the literature on World War II in the Pacific generally paid almost no attention to the experiences of Pacific islanders or civilians in the Netherlands East Indies, Philippines and pre-war Japanese colonial possessions. The literature on this topic also continues to largely ignore the racial segregation of many military forces during the Pacific War.

However, there's scope for us to try to do better (and I firmly include myself in this). This could include:
 * Critically assessing the language and content of articles to try to spot gaps or biases.
 * Assessing older sources to determine if they reflect modern scholarship.
 * Actively searching out new or little known reliable sources to help address these problems. This can require searching through journal databases, academic presses and the like to find "cutting edge" works. For instance, lots of scholarly works have appeared over recent years on the experiences of civilians in the Pacific War, and young historians from under-represented backgrounds are having success in finding new stories to tell on colonial-era warfare.
 * Updating long-standing high-quality articles to reflect how the literature has evolved since the article was developed.
 * Being careful with the wording we use to not repeat antiquated terminology.

Addressing these problems will result in stronger and more interesting articles.