One problem with Wikipedia politics is that everything takes place on a very meta level.

Fascists will

• capture disciplinary bodies that
• police what people can say in
• discussions that set rules on
• how to edit articles, which
• determines what is in the articles.

By the time Auschwitz had become a “collection camp” on the Croatian Wikipedia, it was far, far too late. Editing the article would not improve that Wikipedia, it would just get you banned from it.

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Such regulatory capture is made possible in part by

• the rather technical and tedious nature of policing
• the fact that good-faith editors are there first and foremost to, you know, edit (and more generally produce content such as images, sounds, videos, Wikidata Q-items etc.)
• the depolitisation of Wikipedia, which is a later perversion of its original intent, and has nothing to do with the neutrality of the articles (much to the contrary in fact).

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Wikipedia has a statement of mission and values.

Fascists love to talk of Wikipedia itself as aiming for neutrality, which is utter nonsense: what is a “neutral encyclopedia” supposed to be? Something that you can read without learning anything?

Of course, stifling education, preventing progress and safeguarding bigoted preconceptions is very much a part of fascism, so you can see the logic.

Depolitising the projects themselves is a way to neuter them and render them harmless to fascism.

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Currently, on the French-speaking Wikipedia, long-standing admins undergo formal disciplinary action for alleged “conflicts of interest”, simply for taking part in Les Sans PagEs (the French-speaking equivalent to Women in Red).

Meanwhile, self-avowed “Gender criticals” are spearheading transphobic transformations of the project, without a hint of such criticism.

The main difference between the two is that Les Sans PagEs is not a hate group.

This is what depolitisation of the project does.

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Nitpicking about wording quickly degenerates into fascism-friendly tone-policing, because it is easy to write polite hate speech. This is the “Radio Courtoisie” approach of far-Right subversion.

To supplement this naive bottom-up approach, we need a top-down vision: start from the values of the projects and the decisions of the Wikimedia Foundation, and check whether local policies and discourse are compatible with the fundamental aims of the Wikimedia projects: education for everybody.