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Elon Musk is the new Trump. I can't read a goddamn thing on the internet without having to read about twitter related shenanigans. And Wikipedia articles are propaganda for the future.
Alright, many not literal massacres are labelled as 'massacres'. Fair enough. But a few journalists getting banned from a social media website is newsworthy enough to have that label and a Wikipedia article on it?
That's not where it ends. The college student who made the ElonJet twitter page also has a Wikipedia. A college student!
I mean, the leader of the Armed Forces of The World Hegemon getting banned didn't have its own article. It was discussed briefly in another article.
History is being rewritten in front of us. If one political tribes' story is lionized and signal boosted in the epistemic commons for the future to look back on, I don't know what else to call it. A Wikipedia article makes an event a part of history, 'something that happened'. What's written about at which length is weightage to assign importance to by readers in the future.
Roughly modeled as;
historical_importance_event = (wikipedia_article_exists)*(length_article)*(n_articles)Its not only that which point of view its written from, its the fact that its written at all combined with how much its written about and where.
The fights of {Elons Detractors plurality political tribe} want their fights to be remembered in the way they viewed it and they are doing a lot to make that happen, not just in this instance.
This is a great way of putting it; I remember trying to grope ineffectually towards this sentiment on The Old Place a couple of times.
One incident was where the NYT (I think?) published a "Gamergate: 5 years on" retrospective, which was pure its-a-harrassment-campaign agitprop, but raised eyebrows mostly for the question of WHY an e-spat needs a retrospective in a national newspaper. The answer, of course, is to complete the epistemic circle of "Newspaper -> Wikipedia notability criteria -> Wikipedia's article -> public consciousness -> official history". And why this needs to be completed on an e-spat is because GG has (rightly or wrongly) been identified by some as a watershed in distrust of the media and thus Trumpism.
In the present, people remember "You retarded shills, I was there and it didn't go down like that". In 20 years, when that defence doesn't work? The most accessible resource, Wikipedia, tells everyone (and with inline citations to "respectable articles in real newspapers") that it was all misogynistic trolling. Who ya gonna believe? References to contemporary / near contemporary accounts, or Grandpa's ramblings?
Propaganda for the future is exactly it.
And just like, the holocaust became questionable. Did it really happen? was it 6 million?
Just grandpas ramblings.
Of course I didn't ever doubt it in the past, but seeing the future narrative so blatantly being written (not just this but on other issues, e.g., Brexit, Trump, Covid, and now Elon) in a way that is completely wrong (or at least to my perspective) casts doubt on everything I didn't witness and everything that I haven't personally materially verified.
Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article on the Elon banning journalists, and whoever wrote that NYTs piece on gamergate have done more to make me doubt the holocaust than ten thousand David Irvings ever could*.
I am forced to wonder what cognitive defect I have that makes it impossible to not forget the previous truths and experiences I knew and had and just accept the new reality as written, as most people seem to do.
*which is still not much, maybe 10% doubt up from about 0.00001% in 2015, but don't let that dampen the dramatic flair here!
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Seems like Wikipedia's "notability" rule is the same as (pre-Musk) Twitter's "notability" rule for verified accounts. Namely, it's nothing to do with notability at all, and it seems entirely to do with whether Wikipedia editors like it or not (barring cases that are too obviously notable to be dismissed like Trump).
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