Wikipedysta:Piotrus/Media

This is the content of the message I sent on 4 October 2019 to editors of Haaretz in relation to inaccuracies in a story (linked below) I was interviewed for. As of October 30 I have not heard anything from them outside of the automated 'we received your message and will contact you about it canned auto-reply.

Dear editor(s),

I was recently interviewed in, quoted in and mentioned in one of your pieces: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-fake-nazi-death-camp-wikipedia-s-longest-hoax-exposed-1.7942233?fbclid=IwAR0wNANLQtIYaXFAZmROJHrnY-QdHS1VEW3wH1CeCcncckTbUrJbVwxYRSo

In my interview I explicitly asked to be contacted with a draft, so that I could approve and authorize the parts which quote me and refer to me. This request, unfortunately, was clearly not approved, and as a result, the article appears with several errors and inconsistencies, which seem to stem from the fact that the author did not seem to verify a number of claims made by his main source (Icewhiz). I wonder how we can resolve this?

Namely:

1. " Icewhiz claims Poeticbent and Piotrus, for example, were active in rewriting numerous articles dealing with Jewish ghettos, with the goal of including a disproportionate emphasis on heroic rescue of Jews by Poles to overshadow any negative aspects." I was never contacted about such an allegation. It is incorrect on a number of levels (I can provide Wikipedia history links as proof). Icewhiz claim suggests that the two of us worked together in unduly expanding such content, and this is simply false. First, Poeticbent did not rewrite such articles, in the vast majority of cases, he wrote them from a scratch where none existed (he is the principal author of almost all Wikipedia articles on Jewish ghettos). Second, I almost never wrote articles on those topics, nor was I ever in a habit of rewriting such articles to include more information about Polish rescuers. I did, however, disagreed that such information should be simply removed without a trace (as Icewhiz attempted to do, deleting any and all mentions of the existence and activities of Polish Righteous from the ghetto articles), and in several discussions earlier this month, which included Icewhiz as others, we reached a consensus (that Icewhiz never challenged) that such information should be shortened (but not deleted outright), and details of rescue efforts should be moved either to articles about said rescuers or to the List of Polish Righteous.

2. "He argued that though he does not support the false narrative regarding the existence of a death camp at KL Warschau, he does not think it constitutes a “hoax.”" This omits to say what I consider this to be as - which is a fringe theory, just like Flat Earth. I don't understand why a few more words couldn't be spared in the article to clarify my stance; the wording as it is may suggests I give some legitimacy to this view, which I do not. Also, the article links to many wiki sites and policies, it does not link however to WP:HOAX and WP:FRINGE. My point was that the KLW fake number does not fit into Wikipedia's internal definition of a hoax, but it fits with what it describes as a fringe theory.

3. "Regarding the EEML, Konieczny said that the plans detailed there were never actual, and that their publication was almost certainly a “Russian fake news operation.”" I am pretty sure I did not say 'almost certainly'. I do think that "Their publication might have been a "Russian fake operation". There is also the issue that the EEML archive may be incomplete or altered (but in the end, it's a claim of one side versus a claim of another, both unverifiable). Also, "12 Polish editors" did not get banned ("out of a 100"). I have no idea where you got these numbers. IIRC and as can be verified in the public pages on EEML ArbCom, EEML had maybe 5-6 Polish editors. And they represented pretty much the entirety of active Polish editors, all other accounts that might claim they 'are native speakers of Polish' language at that time (which is my best guess for the number 100) were effectively inactive and thus not part of the community (over 90% of Wikipedia accounts are like this, people create them, make a few edits and never come back; it's the difference between Wikipedia having millions of accounts, but only about ~50,000 active editors). Lastly, it is worth noting that a 10-year old case from Wikipedia history is an ancient history whose dredging up is an obvious attempt to poison the well.

4. Lastly, I want to note that you have chosen to take pretty much all assertions Icewhiz makes at their face value. The article mentions, in a particularly disturbing part, that "An examination of his claims by Haaretz reveals the existence of what seems to be a systematic effort by Polish nationalists to whitewash hundreds of Wikipedia articles relating to Poland and the Holocaust. ... Icewhiz admits he can be a bit obsessive, and over the past year and a half he has documented almost fanatically what he claims is a systematic attempt by a handful of editors to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. " There is no evidence of any examination done by Haaretz beyond repeating claims Icewhiz made. Who are those otherwise unnamed 'organized Polish nationalists'? A revived EEML for which existence there is not a shred of proof (but disproving such a claim is another fallacy, proving a negative)? Wikipedia's article history is open for anyone to examine, there are even specialized tools for that like a list of newly created Polish-related articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot/PolandSearchResult or others. Even if Haaretz did not want to investigate it themselves by using such tools, it is clear Icewhiz knows how to use them and had plenty of time to do so. His 'evidence' was presented, publicly, in the proceedings that ended up with him being blocked indefinitely, because it was revealed that he even tried to contact employees of some people he considers to be "his opponents", in an attempt to ruin their reputation with accusations of antisemitism or anti-LGBT views or whatever 'dirt' he could dig up. He even went so far as to post private information (names, etc.) of their opponents and even posted about their families (!) who have nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Yes, there is a "grain of salt" to what he says: a lot of articles are old, created years, even over a decade ago, using poor or no sources, and some of those poor sources do come from the unreliable amateur historians associated with Polish nationalistic right like Trzcinska. So errors like including Trzcinska's fringe theory do happen. But it is crucial to observe that NOBODY objected to Icewhiz removing Trzcinska's claims. Where are the hundreds of Polish nationalists, feared by Grabowski, defending such claims? Not even a single one restored that claim or tried to defend it on talk. These days, Wikipedia has matured, no established editor defends fringe Holocaust revisionist ideas like the one mentioned (Holocaust deniers and revisionists got weeded out and blocked long ago). Crimes committed by Poles on Jews, as well as many other Polish historical articles, are getting written up or rewritten, with nationalist propaganda that often, though sadly not always, dates to the communist era, being removed. It is a slow process, and it is likely some other errors like the one introduced in the KLW article still persist. However, nobody to my knowledge is inserting or restoring low-quality propaganda claims, certainly not en masse. Hence, Icewhiz's claim that insertion of such errors (propaganda, whatever) is a concerted effort is totally lacking in proof, particularly as to the best of my knowledge he has never been successfully challenged and 'lost a battle' whenever he identified such an error and removed it. The boogyman army of Polish nationalists he fights against simply does not exist. Icewhiz, however, did try, among others, to completely remove any mention of Polish Righteous from the ghetto articles. It is one thing to argue that a section is overly detailed and needs to be summarized and shortened to reduce undue weight, it is another to try to effectively censor certain things out of an article. The only big 'fight' he lost, as far as I can tell, is his attempt to completely remove mentions of the Polish Righteous from the ghetto articles - however, relevant sections and mentions are now much shorter than they were before his involvement, so it is not that he even lost that battle, he just didn't get the exact version he wanted, because Wikipedia works through reaching compromise. Unfortunately, it seems that he cannot accept to compromise; if one does not agree with him, one has to be wrong, plain and simple. There is no organized effort to push 'Polish nationalist propaganda' (nor 'Israeli/Jewish' for that matter) in Polish-Jewish articles. A single editor, Icewhiz, did lose his temper because he couldn't get his way 100% of the time and got banned, and now he is trying his best to portray those disagreeing with him as 'antisemites', 'Polish nationalists', and such. He failed to do so on Wikipedia, so he is reaching to other media (Twitter, newspapers). Again, consider Poeticbent. Yes, he did use some low-quality sources that are now being replaced and errors from them are being fixed, but to suggest that the editor who created, single-handedly, something like 90% of articles on Jewish Ghettos on English Wikipedia, is a 'Polish nationalist/antisemite' is rather unfair, to say the least. And it is very disappointing to see Haaretz fall for this.

Sincerely,

Piotr Konieczny