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Re: Wikipedia extolled as an aide for getting history correct


From: Ade Malsasa Akbar
Subject: Re: Wikipedia extolled as an aide for getting history correct
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2022 13:44:38 +0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.11.0

Hello respected LibrePlanet people,

On 18/06/22 13.06, J Leslie Turriff wrote:
        Indeed, the failure of Wikipedia to differentiate references to the 
kernel (Linux) and
OSs that depend on it (GNU/Linux et al) is unfortunate.  Many people, including 
those who
actually use Linux-based systems, are wont to use 'Linux' as a short-hand for 
GNU/Linux*;
and there are many who aren't aware of the distinction at all, which is where 
this
shortcoming of the Wikipedia article is particularly unfortunate.

Leslie

*Me too.

I am glad apparently I am not the only one who think this way.

I 'd love to add that I myself had once fallen to misunderstanding of GNU/Linux naming, and so did many of people in my country, because Wikipedia taught us to call it "Linux" instead of GNU/Linux. This is very unfortunate. Once I learned my favorite article, GNU Users Who Have Never Heard of GNU [0], I understand it was a mistake and started to call it GNU/Linux.


On 21/06/22 09.57, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
*nod*.  I've witnessed several such efforts, from an editor who denied
and suppressed references to blobs in Linux, even after being given hard
evidence of it, to various efforts to reject writings that referred to
GNU/Linux as such (rather than just Linux), and to remove wikipedia
entries for 100% free distros.  It's definitely not neutral ground.

I know similar thing about this in real life. That, in my place, many people seem to systematically erase the presence of GNU Operating System in every chance they talk about GNU/Linux --regardless they did that consciously or not--. It is obvious to me that "something" taught them to not talk about GNU at all, or significantly decrease its role in the Free Software Community. This occurs for years up to today. And now I can see that Wikipedia perhaps one among that "something".


For that reason I really like The GNU Project website www.gnu.org.


Sincerely yours,

Ade Malsasa Akbar

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[0] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-users-never-heard-of-gnu.en.html







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