If you had looked up Adolf Hitler on Wikipedia in early May, you’d have seen a peculiar description near the top of the article. Hitler, the introduction concludes, is “almost universally regarded as gravely immoral.” This oddly couched phrase periodically shows up on Wikipedia as a description of Hitler until an editor hops in to delete it and instead highlight a more biting assessment, like the one from the historian Ian Kershaw calling Hitler “the embodiment of modern political evil.”
Whether to call Hitler gravely immoral or evil is one of literally hundreds of discussions about this article, which is among the most viewed ever on the site — more than 125 million times over the last 15 years, twice as many as Jesus’s total and in the neighborhood of the number for the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. The Hitler discussions on Wikipedia take place most days and flit between the trivial (whether Hitler’s infamy has doomed the Hitler moustache, also known as the toothbrush), the peculiar (how to describe Hitler’s painting skills) and the profound (whether there even is such a thing as “evil”).
Setting the record straight matters because historical misinformation walks hand in hand with current disinformation. Just look at the rhetoric around Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has described as a battle to “de-Nazify” the leadership of Ukraine.
Collectively, the debates speak to Wikipedia editors’ awareness of the seriousness of the task. Wikipedia is the...
A senior Iranian official has slammed the United Arab Emirates for being an aggressor, not merely a supporter of aggression, stating that the UAE cannot hide its aggressive nature and role behind ...