The reason is because the Russians insist that the “real” surrender occured in Berlin, a day after Jodl signed a surrender further west. For political reasons the Soviets had a redo involving Keitel, and everyone played along.

All the same, I think you and I can agree that Keitel is not the most important man of World War II, and that using his photo in the infobox is a lousy editorial choice.

I guess my point (about your comment) is this: There is an internal conversation going on that is probably very productive but one would need to break into it.

In this case, one would have to imagine (or know where to look up in the depth of the wikihistory) the alternative historical statements.

Anyway to the blogger here: good job with this blog. Your brief characterization is as good as any I’ve read, and I’d love to have you come write for Encyc. Consider this your engraved invitation.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=18641

is a good example of wikipedia weirdness. The author of the comment give several examples of a particular editor’s prose, obviously to indicate that it is wrong somehow, but not once does he say what is wrong. It looks fine to me (as quoted). I’m sorry, but it is not stunningly obvious. If there is a complaint, make the complaint, don’t point to it and assume everyone else will understand it. Very strange.

@Laura: The problem is that each time you load a page into wikipedia you can never be sure whether it has just been vandalized or not. Besides there are historical articles that for years say “X agreed with this” and then for last two years say “X did not agree with this” which is true. Articles have great injections of tosh inserted into them by one editor, and the most blatant rubbish gets removed, but not all of it.

My blog also covers some of the stranger articles in Wikipedia (I’m a specialist in medieval history – see this http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/william-of-ockham.html e.g.).

My point is that because of the nature of the process itself that results in these fact-rich treatments, biases emerge simply because the distribution of the facts does not always reflect the nature of the issue at hand.

I left this out regarding the battle in question: The official wiki version of describing a battle includes listing the combatants . This entry notes that some several hundred “blacks” (from “native” regiment) defected prior to the battle. But, it does not mention the wholesale and fully atrocious, illegal slaughter of all of the Zulu wounded after the battle. It is suggested that this latter fact is because that happened ‘after the battle.’ But the defection of the “black/native” soldiers before the battle happened before the battle.

Here it is plain and simple: Changing the criteria as to what to include first makes the Africans look bad, then hides a major atrocity, of historic proportions, committed by the British/Whites.

In my book, that makes this entry very racist. Yes, all the facts are in there, but they are arranged in a very selective manner, probably unconsciously. But not assuming that there is intention does not mean that it is OK. If a fact was accidentally misrepresented it would not be considered correct just because it was gotten wrong by accident. The very racially biased layout of the article is real, and a result of the process used by Wikipedia.

I am writing something about the movie depicting this battle, and Wikipedia gives very usfull and documented information that I can use, and I appreciate that for what it is. But there is this other problem…