This part breaks down the 1st part of the Grabowski and Klein paper. In this section, paragraphs 1-30, the authors first introduce the topic with fairly standard boilerplate found in most academic papers, attempt to link their paper to a broader context, and name the “Polish editors” supposedly responsible for four general problems with Wikipedia’s coverage of the Holocaust in Poland.
Regarding one of these four supposed problems - the claim that Wikipedia pushes the narrative that “Jews control Poland” - the authors don’t even make an effort to substantiate it anywhere in the paper. Quite simply, this accusation just doesn’t come up ever again, except here in the introduction, where it’s mentioned. It looks very much like the authors just threw that in there for good measure to “beef up” the accusations, further sensationalize their “scholarly” work and to make their targets look extra bad. There is nothing to analyze here with regard to this particular assertion since there is nothing in the paper that even attempts to back it up.
In paragraph ten the authors name these evil Polish nationalist editors that are supposedly responsible. As mentioned here, this is really just a list of any editor, maybe not even Polish, who had some kind of dispute with user Icewhiz on Wikipedia, who is described in detail here. It seems fairly obvious that Icewhiz provided the authors with this list of his personal enemies, they took it at face value and ran with it without bothering to check whether these editors were actually responsible for any of the text that they criticize next.
These criticisms are presented in paragraphs 13-30. They concern 25 pieces of text which the authors claim “distort” the history of the Holocaust in Poland on Wikipedia. Some of these criticism are legitimate. Others less so, or are at best complaints that someone could have made a different edit than they actually did. Crucially as it turns out, most of these pieces of text (15 out of 25) were not even made by any of the editors the authors list in their paper! The majority of them were added by OTHER editors, ones that Grabowski and Klein don’t even mention!
This is quite strange. After “naming-and-shaming” supposedly Polish editors responsible, the authors proceed to criticize Wikipedia text which none of these editors are actually responsible for. What gives? Why this discrepancy? The answer is actually quite straight forward and already given, repeatedly, in these posts - the list of “bad Polish editors” was provided to Grabowski and Klein by Wikipedia editor Icewhiz. Whatever errors the authors found on Wikipedia themselves (and this section does appear to be written solely by the authors) they simply proceeded to attribute, almost completely falsely, to Icewhiz’s personal enemies.
The following table breaks down the 25 pieces of text.
It’s a lot of information, so let’s summarize the main points.
The 25 pieces of text cover seven Wikipedia articles. By far, most of the criticisms - almost half - are directed at the article “Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust”. This is not surprising given that in the past Grabowski has been extremely critical of anyone - Polish, Israeli, American, British or any other nationality - who has written positively about or highlighted rescue by Poles during World War 2. This is not the place to dwell on why this is one of Grabowski’s obsessions other than to provide it as an explanation for the focus of this section.
More relevant here is actually the authorship of the pieces of text the authors flag as problematic. Following table breaks it down according to the categories implied by Grabowski and Klein themselves: currently active editors mentioned by them (individually), editors mentioned by them but no longer active and then editors who are never mentioned by the authors.
As it turns out a whopping 15 out of the 25 pieces of text are the responsibility of editors who Grabowski and Klein never even mention. Instead they try to blame “Polish editors”. A further 6 out of 25 are the responsibility of editors which are indeed mentioned by the authors but who have stopped editing Wikipedia long time ago. GizzyCatBella, Nihil novi, Lembit Staan, Xx326 as well as some of the other editors called out by Grabowski and Klein are responsible for exactly ZERO of the texts criticized.
This leaves 4 pieces of text - out of 25 - that were indeed introduced by currently active Wikipedia editors from the authors’ “black list”. Two of them were from user Piotrus two of them are mine. In other words, I account for 8% of the text criticized by the authors in this section.
My two edits are addressed here.