This week the creation of racial categories like "Nordic race A" was discussed on Commons. On digging further there is a fundamental problem with the way modern portraits of living people are being misused to "illustrate" these 1930s race myths. Rather than using available real archive material from the 1930s, a user created collage of modern portraits being used to illustrate these pseudo-scientific racial classes on Wikidata as well as Wikipedia in German, Hebrew, Italian, Ukrainian, and the Tamil wiktionary.
It is certain that if portraits of WMF board members were misused and labelled "Nordic race" or "Negroid race", then WMF legal would be swept into action in line with the terms of the website. However, as the modern portrait photographs illustrating offensive 1930s racist terminology are not us personally, apparently, we can wikilawyer this to one side rather than taking action. The rationale on Wikimedia Commons will default to the faux anti-censorship trope of "if there is one Wikipedia that uses it, we cannot delete it" even though the use of modern photographs to illustrate racist theories of Nordicism or Nazism are clearly anti-educational and so out of scope. Consequently, this appears to need a cross-project consensus to not use our Wikimedia websites to promote race hate or white supremacy, possibly with the authority of WMF Legal to take action behind it. Feedback and pragmatic suggestions on how to move this forward would be welcome. Links: 1. Commons VP discussion https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Correctly_representing,_but_not_promoting,_%22racial_theories%22_used_in_Nordicism_and_Nazism 2. Wikidata discussion https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Correctly_representing_archaic_or_debunked_%22racial%22_term_entries 3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_races_according_to_Coon_(collage).jpg 4. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasse 5. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razza_(categorizzazione_umana) (where an attempt to remove the problematic image has been reverted) 6. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Human_races_according_to_Coon_(collage).jpg deletion request for the modern collage of portraits used to promote 1930s racist language Thanks, Fae _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
