Wednesday 16 October 2013

Maduristas and Wikipedia

Have you noticed how Maduro supporters censor the Wikipedia article on Nicolás Maduro? Nothing, absolutely nothing that could be considered negative for Maduro can be allowed there. If you read articles about well-known politicians - Obama or Putin, Pinera or Mujica - you can see a lot of information that can be constructed as unfavourable. Maduro's Wikipedia article, on the other hand, is a sanitized article that could very well be placed in the government's official sites. 

This is not what an encyclopaedia should be. The article goes completely against the spirit of Wikipedia. But then: a lot of Maduro supporters can afford to spend more time becoming administrators of the English and Spanish Wikipedia. Hugo Chávez's article was never censored as Maduro's.


3 comments:

  1. Kepler, all articles on Venezuela are suspect in Wikipedia. Since the beginning chavismo has had a squad of people making sure that Wikipedia has a red colored vision of Venezuela and its politics. actually in its early years several pro Chavez writers were at the forefront of banning any blog as an acceptable reference in Wikipedia because, well, chavistas were unable to write a decent blog that could be used as a reference.

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  2. Rainer Schneehorst17 October 2013 at 02:07

    Auf die deutsche Wikipedia-Seite zu NM trifft das in deutlich geringerem Maß zu. Hier sind durchaus einige kritische Aussagen zu Maduros Politik zu finden; das gilt auch für die Auswahl der angegebenen Quellen.

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  3. Daniel,

    It's true articles on Venezuela in Wikipedia are heavily suspect but the ones about Nicolás Maduro are extreme. Even in the articles about Hugo Chávez we (normal contributors) have managed to add some balace (after a lot of support from many administrators and lots of editing wars).

    But the Maduristas started very early to delete anything that might be considered negative about Maduro, even if other people simply quote Maduro and use the very state media sources for those quotes.

    It's amazing!

    Rainer,

    The German Wikipedia is indeed more balanced. There are several reasons.
    1) there are much fewer Chavistas who can speak German
    2) even the people from the German extreme left tend to recognise you cannot delete contributions by others just like that, specially if those contributions are clearly supported by sources such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel and so on.
    3) some friends and I have contributed heavily to the Wikipedia articles in German about Venezuela. When I first found Geschichte Venezuelas, it was really extremely pro-Chávez. Now it is much less so.
    It has been fun to translate Iris Varelas' "geflügelte Wörter" into Goethe's language.

    ReplyDelete

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