Aus: Mäckler, Andreas (Hrsg.) Schwarzbuch Wikipedia: Mobbing, Diffamierung und Falschinformation in der Online-Enzyklopädie und was jetzt dagegen getan werden muss. Höhr-Grenzhausen: Zeitgeist 2020, S. 215-235 Wikipedia als Tummelplatz des geistigen Lumpenproletariats Uncorrected machine translation by DeepL, February 4, 2021 From: Mäckler, Andreas (ed.) Schwarzbuch Wikipedia: Mobbing, Defamation and Mis- information in the Online Encyclopaedia and What Must Be Done About It Now. Höhr- Grenzhausen: Zeitgeist 2020, pp. 215-235 Wikipedia as the playground of the intellectual lumpenproletariat Dr. rer. nat. habil., Dr. phil. habil. Volkmar Weiss, geneticist and historian 1 Until 1989 I was co-author of an encyclopaedia of genealogy in the GDR. The publishing house had originally approached me to take on the role of editor, but my office, the Central Institute for History of the Academy of Sciences, thought that the experienced family histori- an Wolfgang Lorenz, then professor of Marxism-Leninism, would be a better solution to give2genealogy, which had been ostracised in the Soviet zone after 1945 as "cultivating bour- geois traditions", a place in socialism. In 1990, the Bibliographical Institute in Leipzig, which was responsible for the encyclopaedia, was caught up in the turmoil of unification and the work could no longer be published. I had written the basic terms and methods of the subject for the book and even received the fee for it, but the text remained lying around. As Wikipedia took shape, I saw the opportunity to bring these contributions to the readers. Since 1990, head of the German Central Office for Genealogy and subordinate to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior, I used my office computer to upload these encyclopaedia texts to Wikipedia at my workplace. The contributions were technically mature, hardly anyone found fault with them, and they are essentially still in the online encyclopaedia today. After this was done silently, I turned to the terms "intelligence" and "inheritance of intelligence" in Wikipedia, which I had written a dissertation and a habilitation on and consequently under- stood a bit more about than genealogy. But this was the beginning of a never-ending trouble. I had been 3a committed Wikipedia author until 2009, when I was finally banned, and thought 1 Abridged and edited version by the author as well as the editor of a text that could be read on the internet since 2009, originally as Google-knol, see: http://webarchiv.wikimannia.org/knol/volkmar-weiss/totalitaetsanspruch- der-gleichheitsideologie-in-der-wikipedia.htm (retrieved 27.11.2018) 2 Weiss, Volkmar: Vorgeschichte und Folgen des arischen Ahnenpasses. On the History of Genealogy in the 20th Century. Neustadt an der Orla: Arnshaugk 2013 3 Compare: Weiss, Volkmar: Der erweiterte SächsArchReport. A documentation by the director of the German Central Office for Genealogy 1990-2007. Neustadt an der Orla: Arnshaugk 2019, therein pp. 260-270 Wikipedia: 1 the project could become something; it did in some areas. I am still amazed at the momentum I had back then, which I would no longer be able to achieve now. Readers will find a great deal of material in the Wikipedia archive on my user page Dr Volkmar Weiss4 , but especially also on permanently deleted or amputated terms such as "he- redity of intelligence"5 , "dysgenics"6 , on which I endeavoured to co-write, more than they need for a critical judgement. The following excerpts are not so much about my factual state- ments as about the qualifications of the people through whom they were made and the style in which they were muzzled. If someone supported me in the discussions, the user was quickly suspected of being a sock puppet of mine and was banned forever. Peter Mersch, for example, was like that.7 He wrote under his real name and angrily argued that he was Volkmar Weiss. It did him no good, he was banned. Imagine a large hall where the keynote lecture of the annual meeting of a scientific so- ciety is being held. It is a warm day and all the doors of the hall are open. The speaker is, as you would expect from a keynote lecture, a recognised expert, in the opinion of many the best in his field, and he naturally refers in his lecture to his own work on the subject. A summary of his contribution would make a first-class Wikipedia article, and in passing the speaker also drops a remark to that effect. An unknown person, masked to boot, appears in one of the open doors and shouts into the hall: "You fraud! You self-promoter! If your wife knew what non- sense you're talking here, she wouldn't let you in the door anymore!" And with that the person disappears again. The speaker and all the audience are astonished at first, and it is agreed dur- ing the break discussion after the lecture that it must have been a completely unqualified and probably somewhat disturbed person, and they do not attach any importance to the incident for the time being. But every time the speaker now wants or is supposed to say something somewhere, similar incidents repeat themselves. And it gets worse and worse. Not only one anonymous person attacks him and slanders him with interjections and page-long texts, there are several. When he wants to take action or at least complain about it, he finds that his com- plaints always end up with a panel of anonymous people with unknown qualifications who are obviously in cahoots with the slanderers. The slander and insinuations can take on absurd dimensions. An example: My father Heinz Weiß, who died in 1945, was born in Zwickau in 1920. How old was he then in 1933? In the blog of the person who has particularly distinguished himself in Wikipedia against the Genealogy (retrieved 30.6.2004). - Previously published in: Familie und Geschichte 13th ed. (2004), pp. 129- 139. 4 https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Beiträge/Dr._Volkmar_Weiss&dir=prev&offset=2004070810 0410&limit=500&target=Dr.+Volkmar+Weiss (retrieved 27.11.2018) and https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer_Diskussion:Dr._Volkmar_Weiss&offset=&limit=500&acti on=history (retrieved 27.11.2018) 5https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer_Diskussion:Dr._Volkmar_Weiss&diff=prev&oldid=31682 171 (retrieved 27.11.2018) 6 https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Löschkandidaten/6._Mai_2006&diff=prev&oldid=166480 46 (retrieved 27.11.2018) 7 In 2018, there is no evidence of a user page for Peter Mersch in Wikipedia, nor of any archiving of his contri- butions. In Wikipedia, discussions and archive sections are systematically deleted if they contain particularly meaningful references to grievances. Unwanted opinions or statistics that are presented with particular force are deleted immediately and thus their archiving is not even permitted. "This won't even make it into the archives", I read several times as a comment on a deletion. 2 user Dr Volkmar Weiss (born 1944 in Zwickau), one can read: "Worth mentioning from the guild of doctors writing for a wider audience seems to me, for example, Heinz Weiss, co- author of the 'Almanach of the National Socialist Revolution, published in 1933 by Chief President Wilhelm Kube, with the collaboration of Willi Bischoff and Dr Heinz Weiss'. I as- sume that he is identical with Heinz Weiss, father of Thilo Sarrazin's idea man Volkmar Weiss. Volkmar Weiss wrote about him: 'My father was the full-time bannführer of the Hitler Youth of Zwickau'. One should also know that Zwickau was a playground for eugenic ideas even before the National Socialists came to power (keyword 'Lex Zwickau'). US eugenicists were significantly involved in the creation of the draft law 'Lex Zwickau' (for the introduction of forced sterilisations of allegedly mentally inferior people) - above all Harry Laughlin, later associated with the Pioneer Fund founded by Wicliffe Draper in 1937. ... It is therefore not far-fetched to ask whether Volkmar Weiss' connection to the Pioneer Fund is already second generation. Further, it is quite possible that the mutual appreciation of the writing work of Volkmar Weiss and Thilo Sarrazin already existed with their fathers Heinz Weiss and Hans Christian Sarrazin." 8 Is it even possible, hypocritically pretending to be objective research, to be even more hair-raising, even more slanderous? This and much more can be read unchallenged on the net for years. (Personally, I don't have the time and money to take legal action against this). Every expert, every scientist who writes contributions for today's Wikipedia should be aware that he is entering a lecture hall whose doors are open to the street and that any passer- by can attack him anonymously, can and will also slander him with allegations and insinua- tions in the case of politically or otherwise controversial topics, without anyone wanting to or being able to effectively stand up for him. At some point he, like me, will be glad when the nightmare of his unrestricted blocking has come to an end. A few years ago I wrote a few factual contributions for Wikipedia under the pseudo- nym "Meisterhand" (or something like that), all of which were considered good. But a very eager person who writes under the name "Liberal Democrat" (or something like that) found out about it and had "Meisterhand" blocked for "circumventing the block". Some people no- ticed that Meisterhand had only written useful texts, but this did not delay the unrestricted blocking in any way. If someone writes only on innocuous factual issues, he can acquire and retain all user rights forever under a pseudonym, but woe betide him if he turns to a contro- versial topic! In my experience, the inner circle of authors and administrators of the German- language Wikipedia functions like a closed Jacobin club.