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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
Random- I happened to be reading the Wikipedia entry for Khamenei, when on a whim I thought to compare it to the Wikipedia page for Trump.
Even if you just read the summary introduction, the tone and facts emphasized for Khamenei are vastly kinder to him than they are for Trump.
But this is fundamentally insane. Khamenei has had thousands of people killed (including recently!). And he was crucial in Iran's long-term support of terrorist groups that have killed huge numbers of people in the Middle East.
Is there really no recourse for this? Are Americans absolutely forced to have one of our major sources of information (heavily used in schools) basically running propaganda operations on behalf of religious extremist dictators of governments that encourage "Death to the USA"?
That depends. How much spare time do you have right now? One of the many structural problems Wikipedia has is their reliable sources policy. The way they've written it places all scholars and academics as the highest authorities for claims. Paper beats rock, decolonial cultural studies or not. The good news for you is that doesn't seem to be a serious issue on this article, as the 400 citations are mostly news sources which can be defeated with other news sources or, possibly, the same ones with a more neutral interpretation.
Your main problem is going to be that this is a protected article. Each change you want to propose is required to be a sentence for sentence replacement. After you submit it to the talk page, a person -- one who has decided this is what they want to do on Wikipedia -- will swoop in, read it for a few seconds, and say yes or no. That's another structural problem in Wikipedia: the people who choose to participate. Most likely you will need to claw, yell about policy, request other editors give a second opinion, re-submit a different version, and generally escalate it until you get your sentence replaced. You can then repeat this process to do the next sentence or small paragraph. So I ask again, how much spare time do you have?
Khamenei's article doesn't seem too bad by Wikipedia standards of bias, but it's there. Tracing Woodgrains wrote a good critique Mao's article last year to highlight its atrociously soft framing. I agree that when compared to Trump it's absurd, although that goes for a lot of articles on Wikipedia.
I haven't checked,* but I'm going to go out on a limb to say that there's more Trump-related articles than any other president or living world leader. I suspect the great 20th century dictators have him beat, though I'm not very confident.More options
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