Abstract

The goal for this paper is to take stock of the challenges facing Wikipedia‘s portrayal of the Polish–Jewish relations, in conjunction with the launch of a 59-page manifesto by Professor of History at the University of Ottawa, Jan Grabowski, a Polish-born Canadian, like the reviewer below. In the so-called age of post-truth, one‘s own version of reality is often amplified and accelerated to the point of disregard for reliable ways of knowing what is true. With the aim of controlling the spread of misinformation, Grabowski & Klein offer a scathing critique of the lack of criticality within Wikipedia. The complaints against volunteer contributors ―promoting a skewed version of history‖ emerge as the new paradigm for evaluating the viability of the project. Grabowski & Klein use a narrative device commonly referred to as dog whistling to tell us what to think and advise us whom to condemn. Thus Wikipedia‘s collective ability to assimilate factual information is questioned. The Polish raison d‘être is linked with incorrigible prejudice. The Foundation is urged to identify state-sponsored agents who might have entered the scene, and behoved to look into the arbitration‘s inability to deal with the issue. The opinions presented by Grabowski & Klein as facts, more often than not, contain both evidence of bias and distorted reality judgments. Named Wikipedians are targeted for degradation, others are glorified. At least some evidence seems manufactured.

Keywords

Wikipedia, Poland, Holocaust, Pogroms, Collaboration

“The Fake Nazi Death Camp: Wikipedia’s Longest Hoax” conspiracy theory invented by a banned Wikipedian

By Richard Tylman

On October 3, 2019 the Haaretz News published a provocative opinion piece in translation from the Hebrew original; in its opening-line proclaiming to the world in large-print: “The Fake Nazi Death Camp: Wikipedia’s Longest Hoax, Exposed.” The qualifying subtitle alleged: “For over 15 years, false claims that thousands of Poles were gassed to death in Warsaw were presented as fact.” – The source and inspiration behind this article written by Omer Benjakob was an interview by email with Wikipedia user Icewhiz. According to WikiBlame, the first actual citation in Haaretz from the earliest versions of the Wikipedia article claiming "the number of the camp’s victims well above 212,000, mainly Poles..." was not in Wikipedia until December 2009. The phrase, first added by an IP sock from Hawaii, appeared 5 years after the article was created, but that is a small potato in comparison to what followed in Benjakob’s report. As it turns out – most of it is a conspiracy theory of its own but not about World War II but about the inner workings of the free encyclopedia itself, as perceived by a single disgruntled Wikipedian.

It is essential to follow the timeline of postwar history of Poland in order to understand how the alleged “Wikipedia hoax” conspiracy theory invented by User:Icewhiz came into being last October. The editing history of KL Warschau article in English goes back 15 years to 2004, with an entry submitted by late Krzysztof Machocki, spokesperson for the Polish Wikimedia – username Halibutt – a Polish Jewish contributor from Warsaw, with a lot at stake. The article “Warsaw concentration camp” submitted by Machocki at 3,629 bytes in 2004 did not have a reference section. These were the old days of Wikipedia with hardly any requirements. Even though Halibutt used to provide an occasional external link, this time he did not. Over 15 years later it would have been impossible to trace his off-wiki references back. Besides, the sources would have been outdated anyway in light of the further IPN research. The brick and mortar encyclopedias of yesteryear did not have reference sections, and Wikipedia was in its infancy – you get the drift.

Halibutt submitted “Warsaw concentration camp” to online encyclopedia on 12 October 2004; the actual reference section (more less accurately reflecting the content) was added over a year later in January 2006 by a different contributor, including webpages already discontinued but archived by Wayback (below):

1. (in Polish) Maria Trzcińska, Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy, Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, Radom 2002, ISBN 8388822160
2. (in Polish) Informacja o ustaleniach dotyczących Konzentrationslager Warschau - Institute of National Remembrance, June 2002 [Wayback]
3. (in Polish) Informacja o śledztwie w sprawie KL Warschau - Institute of National Remembrance, May 2003 [Wayback]

In his WP:LEDE to Warsaw concentration camp, in October 2004 Halibutt wrote: “According to various estimates some 200,000 people were killed there by the Germans during the war.” Only Halibutt (Rest in Peace) knew where his estimates originated from, but the book source claiming 200,000 victims is commonly known today as written by Maria Trzcińska, the author of Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy – KL Warschau. Meanwhile, the communiqué published by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance IPN in May 2003 (also linked in 2006 by the other user) informed in Polish:

Results of the investigation do not allow for the definitive confirmation that in KL Warschau some 200,000 people were murdered. They do not confirm the definitive stance regarding the gas chambers in the vicinity of train station Warszawa Zachodnia (Warsaw West); they do not provide basis for the confirmation of the theses that the concentration camp included area known as the Lasek na Kole or the territory of train station Warszawa – Zachodnia. The above questions remain the subject of further analysis in the course of the IPN investigation.

Some questions remain unanswered to this day. Where exactly did the false estimate of 200,000 inhabitants of Warsaw murdered at KL Warschau appear for the first time? Why such incredibly high number has not been rejected by the Polish historiography already decades earlier? Major errors in the estimation of Warsaw’s casualties in World War II were presented as historical facts already before the pro-Soviet military crackdown of 1981 in Poland. Some of them were as old as the years of sovietisation of all spheres of life in the People’s Republic. Judge Maria Trzcińska from GKBZH who at the age of 71 published a book about KL Warschau did not invent the 200,000 victims either. The assumption that she might have is a result of incomplete research (the hallmark of most Wikipedia entries). In her 2002 monograph Trzcińska has found an unlikely prop up for the information popularized by the Polish Great Universal Encyclopedia PWN (Encyklopedia powszechna) published to great acclaim in 1980. The relevant entry about the death toll in the Polish capital during World War II was explained by PWN in the following way, in Polish:

The cumulative losses among inhabitants of Warsaw in the years 1939-1944 are estimated at 850,000 totals, including 400,000 victims directly in the city and over 400,000 in the camps and in Nazi prisons . . . . As far as casualties outside Warsaw, the calculation is comparatively easy because it is based on the number of around 300,000 Warsaw Jews murdered at Treblinka and other mass execution sites, as well as ethnic Poles who perished in Nazi prisons and concentration camps outside Warsaw and outside the prewar borders of Poland.

The number of 400,000 killed directly in the capital includes the following:

1. The September Campaign: 30,000
2. Warsaw Uprising: 150,000 (according to 2009 summary by Materski & Szarota, postwar estimates ranged from 50,000 to 700,000)
3. Palmiry massacre: 1,800
4. Senate Gardens: hundreds
5. Swedish Mounds (Górki Szwedzkie) in Żoliborz: around 100

6. Forests around Warsaw: several hundred

The grand total per above amounted to 200,000 not 400,000 victims; nevertheless the Universal Encyclopedia claimed over 400,000 casualties directly in the city. – No Polish scientist has explained the missing from PWN additional 200,000 casualties in Warsaw. The street executions confirmed by science took the lives of 3,384 people and the murders at Pawiak and in the Ghetto ruins could have cost 20,000 lives on top of that. That is all we know.

The investigation into war crimes committed at the little known (at first) KL Warschau was initiated by the Institute of National Remembrance in 1973 under Gierek. The very next year Trzcińska (43) joined the department specifically to investigate the street executions in Warsaw. Meanwhile, the investigation into a possible death camp at KL Warschau by the IPN was closed after 3 years; it was reopened in 1982 following the military crackdown on Solidarity and again in 2002. Apparently the venerable scandal had legs. No one at IPN works alone, but research by Trzcińska brings to mind the early days of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission once proclaiming that 3 million people had been gassed at Treblinka, not the 870,000 Jews proposed by Yad Vashem in 2010.

Did the estimated 850,000 Varsovians perished in World War II? The number was widely believed to be true already in 1960s. Clearly, the 200,000 casualties in the capital out of 850,000 totals remained unexplained for at least 50 years. In any case, here’s where the work by Trzcińska came to the fore: Trzcińska decided that the only possible place of mass extermination of such incredible number of Poles from the capital ought to be at least equally incredible… and focused her life’s work on the theory of Konzentrationslager Warschau, and the biggest gas chamber, the world has ever seen.

Krzysztof Machocki / Halibutt must have run into the fresh new monograph by Trzcińska before his own new submission from late August 2004. Trzcińska’s theory was not discredited until 2007, or three years after his new English article was uploaded. The article in Wikipedia was completely rewritten several times over the years, contrary to the claims from Haaretz that "it was completely rewritten this past August" 2019 exclusively. The timeline offered by Benjakob about the recent discovery of an alleged “hoax” is false. In March 2006, for the first time ever, the camp was described as an ‘extermination camp’ not by Halibutt, but by user Kocoum active in Wikipedia for 6 months only. In the same month an IP user from Kansas (Paven1) said it, like it was: there was no death camp! Paven1 was reverted by user MFago who last edited in 2008, but Paven1 put it back. There was and edit war. In July 2006 user Taw from Poland repeated: there's no evidence of a “gas chamber.” – In November 2006 user HanzoHattori removed the information that the gas chamber in a railway tunnel would have been "highly atypical and inefficient" and took ownership of this entry for a few months in 2007. HanzoHattori included several crematoriums in it. He had been indefinitely blocked in February 2008, but the story began to take on a life of its own. In the following years various users removed the word controversy from the copytext. Halibutt was nowhere to be found – he had nothing to do with this article anymore. Krzysztof Machocki passed away on 31 January 2018 after an illness. In the same year user Buidhe (formerly Catrìona) added the Infobox with a grossly inflated number of 400,000 inmates at the camp.

The conspiracy theory by Icewhiz, about the English Wikipedia running a “hoax” for 15 years, includes broader discourses of suspicion in the Haaretz narrative such as character assassinations, fictionalized linkage to unspecified Polish nationalists, and purported cabals quoted directly from the racist Encyclopedia Dramatica. Individuals who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to engage in conspiratorial actions from behind a mask of anonymity. According to Haaretz, it was “an Israeli editor dubbed Icewhiz, who refuses to be identified by his real name.” Several long-term contributors to Wikipedia reminded Icewhiz repeatedly about the difference between a conspiracy theory and a hoax. A conspiracy theory is a theory of a “moon landing hoax”, but the moon landing is not a conspiracy theory; it is a fact disputed by the conspiracy theory as an alleged hoax. For over 15 years Wikipedia tried to bring facts to light. KL Warschau was not an extermination camp. It is a conspiracy theory exposed first by the Polish historians of the Institute of National Remembrance; not by an editor dubbed Icewhiz, nor anyone else from within Wikipedia.

With their mothers’ milk

Vendre un canard à moitié ?

This is a goodbye essay from one of Wikipedia's faithful supporters, grateful for the opportunity of working together over the years.

As a long-time contributor to Wikipedia with an account registered on 9 April 2006, and over 2 thousand pages created, I quit on 17 May 2018. It was caused by a 6-month topic ban from the most significant area of my global contributions spanning over a dozen years, which was: the history of Poland during World War II including the Holocaust in Poland. I have been penalized for alleged violation of NPA, without warning, while speaking out against the grotesque removal of information from Wikipedia about the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. The assault on the Holocaust-related series of articles about Poland was a recent development in English Wikipedia fueled by the worsening of Polish-Israeli relations down to its lowest point ever. If it wasn’t for the efforts of a small group of committed editors, the many accounts of saving Jews from Nazi ghettos in World War II authenticated by Yad Vashem would have vanished from dozens of articles during my TBAN, which expired in late November that year.

Those of you who are not familiar with the History of the Jews in Poland would find the following timeline of the gradual escalation of the most recent Jewish-Polish and German sociopolitical conflict enlightening. The controversy began with the “Polish death camps.” The camps were Nazi German – there is no doubt! But many non-Polish media and notable figures in the West continued to use such phrases implying that the gassing of Jews might have been a responsibility of the Poles. Discouraging the use of these terms (since 1989) did not work. Polish Foreign Minister Rotfeld had suggested that there are instances of “bad will” and that “attempts are made to distort history and conceal the truth.” Subsequently, Warsaw passed a law (since annulled) that made it illegal to accuse the Polish state of complicity in Nazi German war crimes. The bill sparked an outcry from Israel; the Foreign Minister Katz (quoting Shamir) stated: “Poles suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.” Poland withdrew from economic conference in Tel Aviv and canceled a visit by the Israeli officials. Israeli man spit on the Polish ambassador. And the story goes on. Meanwhile, the campaign to damage Poland’s international image with the use of hostile disinformation and provocative commentaries from the press is only just beginning in Wikipedia.

Following my topic ban from the History of Poland during World War II and the Holocaust in Poland, I’ve seen fanatics use my silence to delete my contributions and slander me. One of the more repulsive attacks on my reputation was a smear job about a blurry World War II photo from Białystok, which I downloaded to Wikimedia Commons. I do not read Yiddish, and the image from the collections of Stowarzyszenie Szukamy Polski (In Search of Poland Society © 2004) was misidentified at source. My contributions to the Final Solution and dozens of Holocaust articles from previous years devoted to memorializing Jewish suffering and heroism during World War II was intentionally overlooked.

Several attacks on my integrity looked like some mental health issue. Users exhibiting signs of paranoia are a dirty secret of the Wikipedia process. There are no remedies: contributors are ‘supposed’ to be healthy in the name of everyone’s online freedom of expression. “Comment of content, not on the contributor” states the policy guideline. And so, even if aforementioned content has already been identified a hundred times as paranoid, it keeps on coming like a universal constant, sanctified by the rules. The bitter irony of these attacks in my absence was the fact that back in 2010 I had become a target of another, the most ghastly attack on my real life identity for contributing to the same subjects in Wikipedia already. The campaign was too dirty to be mentioned, but I can quote the reactions of notable Wikipedians who saw the proof of it with their own eyes.

: Doesn't matter. I don't care if he overreacts a bit. Poeticbent is clearly the victim here, of an extremely nasty and persistent dirt campaign. He deserves the full solidarity and support of all Wikipedia editors as far as this problem is concerned. Exacerbating the issue by calling for sanctions against him is highly inappropriate. [[User:Future Perfect at Sunrise|Fut.Perf.]] [[User talk:Future Perfect at Sunrise|☼]] 07:23, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

:: Ditto about support for Poeticbent. I don't know anything about any dirt campaign, as I haven't read through Poeticbent's history, nor have I been following the Tylman article discussions. But I did just look up the blog page that Poeticbent linked, in his fury. In my opinion the blog page is libelous. One cannot rule out that a WP squabble has spilled out into dirty tricks the blogosphere, and therefore WP cannot just pretend it has nothing to do with it. My opinion is that Poeticbent gets our full support, along with a warning that his legitimate grievance should have been taken up through proper WP channels rather than with this outburst of rage. Then, WP should contact law enforcement authorities and explain the situation. That said, I expect such a nasty trick as this was sent anonymously from an internet cafe and we may never find the perpetrator. Still, the blog site that hosted the information may be liable. In any case, WP legal team need to jump on this immediately and fully investigate it. I think we all deserve a statement from them. – [[User:Chumchum7|Chumchum7]] ([[User talk:Chumchum7|talk]]) 07:59, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Meanwhile, the police detective who familiarized himself with my case at the VPD headquarters in my district advised me to WP:VANISH because he would not be able to help outside the jurisdiction. – I stopped contributing as User:Poeticbent entirely and began creating legitimate multiple accounts for privacy reasons. I never used these accounts to disrupt or undermine consensus, but regrettably, I have become overconfident and in the following months submitted two dozen articles to WP:DYK including the epic “Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland” in June 2011. I was reported to WP:RfCU two months later in a “fishing expedition.” I admitted openly and on my own initiative to creating accounts mentioned in the investigation of someone else’s bid. My accounts were blocked with no evidence of disruption on the condition of my return to editing as User:Poeticbent only, with the authorization from ArbCom. I felt the need to look further into the past in search of answers concerning my family's history including the history of war-crimes in Eastern Poland. With time, I gained the reputation of the most accomplished Holocaust writer in English Wikipedia. My personal quest continued, nevertheless these were the opinions of my peers:

He's a prolific content creator and probably our most active contributor in this area in terms of the number of articles created and amount of text added. . . . I respect his commitment to Wikipedia's Holocaust articles. [[User:AmericanLemming|AmericanLemming]] 05:01, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

You [User:Poeticbent] are Wikipedia's most prolific content creator in this area. [[User:Piotrus|Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus]] 12:24, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

All along, writing for Wikipedia about the Second World War was a part of my personal journey. My father performed forced labor in Nazi Germany. My mother was deported from Kowel to forced labour in Siberia. They both met in Kraków and settled there.

I was born and raised one-hour drive from Auschwitz and visited the Museum at the age of 9 for the first time. I defected from Poland two days ahead of the military crackdown of 1981. – I felt the urge to learn more about what had happened in the course of the war and during the Holocaust in the Second Republic. I needed to be informed on all sides of the issues because no healthy debate can be reduced to a frozen truth written from the inside of an ethnocentric bubble. Although I wrote poetry about my family history, the advent of Wikipedia changed the landscape of information entirely. I learned from my studies that those who use their minds to buffer themselves from the death-related anxiety often buffer themselves from the radiance of life as well. Healing is a long and difficult process. I focused on the memory of the Righteous in Wikipedia to remind others that humans are inherently good and not innately selfish – the ultimate source of evil is the ‘plot mentality’ in social relations; this is the very logic of genocide. Meanwhile, as soon as I left Wikipedia in May 2018, the many Righteous Among the Nations honoured and epitomized by Yad Vashem were removed from my articles about the Nazi ghettos in occupied Poland on false premises; my Ukrainian Righteous were not.

I have little trust in Wikipedia's ability to resolve the grief between the Jewish and Polish Wikipedians by using administrative means; it is not going to be possible given the totality of the antisemitic and polonophobic tropes already published in so-called WP:RS literature. Once created with the best of intentions, the WP:RS guidelines have become a bottomless pit used for trashing and salting out facts not yet peddled by commercial monoliths. The insistence on using only timeworn resources not only prevents newly established facts from being investigated, but also undermines evidence. Research must span a gamut of materials.

The administration can silence editors like me, and allow our adversaries to continue on, because this is all they ‘can’ do. When presented with the mainspace evidence of prejudice, bigotry, and delusional paranoia, they can penalize the dissenters for getting upset about it. They cannot drive out hate. Unlike in academia (or in politics), in Wikipedia, one cannot call the anonymous liar out because that's an “attack,” while the liar’s intentional deception is only a breach of our “verifiability” guideline. In the world of anonymity there are no alternatives for maneuvering. Bowled over, editors who believe in integrity and truthfulness can excuse themselves from further participation. Nothing's going to change just because one guy you came to admire is leaving.

I did not log in to Wikipedia even once for over one year. I could not possibly continue, because accepting the limitations of my WP:TBAN would inadvertently mean justifying the injustice. I did not read notifications about my user name being mentioned by others. – Logging in as User:Poeticbent would have exposed me to common baiting and badgering strategies of my adversaries. Wikipedia’s anonymity might lead to its ultimate undoing during the course of the social media revolution, because the Generation Facebook is accustomed to acquiring information from the actual real accountable humans.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friends for their continued support; you know who you are; we've had an incredible decade working together. Thank you. – A final note. I suppose there must be something inside of me that works like a trigger for the internet trolls hiding behind anonymity. In all likelihood, their ‘gravedancing’ and vengeance are not reactions to what I might have achieved there... but the reactions to who I am as a man. This is not a happy thought, except that I cannot become someone else.

This is User:Poeticbent signing off.