Wikipedia blocked Croatian administrators for glorifying Ustashism and distorting history
After almost a decade of complaints from experts from Serbia and other Balkan states about the distortion of historical truth on the pages of Croatian Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation has banned Croatian administrators from working.
This was reported by Politika, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
An expert “finding on disinformation on Croatian-language Wikipedia,” conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation between February and May of this year, found that Croatian administrators, using false sources, significantly distorted historical facts. The conclusion alleges that a group of Croatian administrators operated from 2011 to 2020, working under the aliases Spidi Gonzales, Robert F, and the main administrator registered under the alias Kubura. The latter began editing Wikipedia texts back in 2005.
This group systematically created and edited articles that "contained non-encyclopedic content and obvious historical revisionism." According to Wikimedia experts, the content spread and remained on the Internet for so long that it “created a chain of misconceptions that influenced the moral and value judgment of readers in a way that was consistent with the ideological right-wing views of the group.” The Croatian group of administrators, according to the report, aimed to hide the fact that the fascists and Croatian Ustasha committed various crimes in World War II, denied murders and torture in the camps of the puppet and Third Reich-allied Independent Croatian Power (NDH), such as Jasenovac, and forged death toll.
“They used unverified sources and right-wing sites to support their conclusions to make them seem as believable as possible,” the report said.
Seven years ago, Savo Strbac, director of the human rights information and documentary center Veritas, warned about the problem with Kubura and his team of Croatian editors.
“Posting such texts poses a great threat. How many distorted articles were there about the NDH, Jasenovac, Jadovno, other Ustasha death camps, Pavelic…. This group of editors from Croatia wrote well-thought-out and superbly executed texts for the uninitiated, with which they could “make” the naive trust what was written in them.
For us Serbs from Croatia, this half-truth is the most dangerous because it is rehabilitation and revisionism. Thank God and Wikipedia for finally closing this group down. They had a strong influence on the young. The result is more ethnically motivated attacks on all national minorities, especially Serbs, increasingly radical graffiti, physical attacks, concerts held "Thompson" (right-wing radical Croatian singer – ed.),” noted Strbac.
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Now the editors are aware.