Tag: Sweden

Wikipedia and the 105-year-old blogger

wikipedia-blogger-carlsson
Dagny Carlsson (aka Bojan) image by Almega – https://www.flickr.com/photos/almega/9206567927/in/photolist-f2xXun-f2y4TM, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51725946

For reasons yet to be linked to Wikipedia, this week I ended up on the home page of a 105-year-old Swedish blogger who goes by the moniker Bojan. I know, it sounds like material for a Nordic noir series. When starting out with the online arts at the age of 100, Bojan starkly rejected comparisons with the ‘100-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared,’ (a popular Swedish novel by Jonas Jonasson).

Bojan’s invariably short pieces reflect on the wonders of daily life that people half her age take for granted. She comments often about the seasons, the weather, old age and being single and alone.

In one recent blog (I found one dated November 5, 2017), Bojan wrote about Swedes who live by themselves. The Google-translate app I suspect renders the English somewhat less fluent than it might be in, say, a Henning Mankell thriller. But you’ll get the drift.

“The other day I read the news that in Stockholm, there are thousands of single-family households, more specifically 380,000 or 40% of the population live by themselves. In the past, there was some suspicion of living alone, but now it is more tolerated. It’s also easier to be single when there are several of them. I myself have been single since 2004 and I think so, of course. It was obviously more enjoyable to be part of a flatness (sic?), but it is pointless to feel sorry for it. Single households are today Sweden’s most common housing form, and nobody thinks it’s something strange. At first, I thought it was pure sorrow to live by myself, but one must get together and live on.”

Bojan started getting together and living on at 100, after buying a computer and teaching herself how to use it. Some of her more recent posts suggest she has become a reluctant ‘cause celebre’ through the conventional media’s fascination with a centenarian who has mastered the online universe. She has done many interviews, appeared on TV chat shows and been the subject of a film, “Life Begins at 100”.

Filmmaker Asa Blanck tracked Dagny Carlsson down and persuaded her to participate in a project which even he admitted was likely to be thwarted by the subject’s death. But no, Dagny turned 105 in May and continues to amuse readers, day by day. (A sequel is planned – the very definition of optimism).

Dagny’s blog is as Blanck found her – “a brusque old lady – all gallows humour”. She promised readers she would not be intentionally nasty but if she ‘trod on toes’, she did not really give a damn, or det kvittar mig, as they say in Sweden. Dagny dreamed of being a teacher when she was young but ended up working as a seamstress. She escaped an abusive first marriage and found love with her second husband, who died when she was in her 90s.

As Blanck observed: “She had managed to rise above her strenuous, grey existence and she had decided she would finally do what she had wanted to do all her life: write.”

Sweden’s blog-readers soon caught up with Bojan’s racey, funny insights and seemingly outrageous behaviour for ‘someone of her age’. For example, she writes about women wearing jeans and how they never did in her day. At 101 she went out and bought a pair of denims.

Ah yes, now I remember how I ended up on Bojan’s blog. I’d been deeply delving into the Wikipedia universe – a free community encyclopedia we writers tend to take for granted. Anyone can contribute, edit or update ‘Wikis’ within Wikipedia. You just need to register as an editor and then be mindful your input will be monitored by a legion of truly vigilant Wikipedia editors. Your input could be as simple as correcting a typo to contributing a new biography of someone you think should have a Wikipedia entry.

One of the things that fascinate me about Wikipedia is the community vigilance which results in entries being updated very quickly. Within hours, it seemed, of the news of Tom Petty’s death, someone had updated his Wikipedia bio, including the premature announcements on social media and the controversy surrounding the timing of Petty’s fatal cardiac arrest.

Wikipedia is essentially a collection of some five million articles in English and another 40 million in 293 languages, all contributed pro-bono by people who care about history, accuracy and detail.

I asked my blogger friend Franky’s Dad if he had ever edited items for Wikipedia. Yes, said FD, a few hundred since 2006. He’d even created a piece about a singer, Bob Wilson. I was momentarily aghast until discovering the latter is a singer, guitarist and songwriter from Pleasant Valley California. Franky’s Dad, aka Lyn Nuttall, maintains a music trivia website www.poparchives.com.au, which aims to find out ‘Where Did They get That Song?’

FD reckons editing Wikipedia is one thing but creating a new entry can be hard yacka, what with their exacting standards for formatting and referencing.

The Listener’s technology correspondent Peter Griffin confessed he was a Wikipedia ‘freeloader’ until deciding to attend an edit-a-thon in Wellington. Events like this were attended by 70,000 people worldwide last year. The main idea is to pick a neglected subject and add to the body of work. There is also a push to correct what is seen as a gender imbalance. Griffin was not confident until encouraged by a veteran Wikipedia editor to “get stuck in and break things”.

The key intention is to keep it factual – not easy in the Trumpian world of fake news and flat-out fabrication. Griffin’s group were on safe enough ground, however, collating biographies of female scientists.

“The seasoned editors smiled knowingly as we fumbled along,” Griffin wrote in The Listener’s September 16 print edition.

“But after a full day, we’d created about 20 biographies of women in science and extensively edited 30 more.

“I’d like to think we increased the sum total of the world’s knowledge.”

Even famous racehorses have a Wikipedia entry. Australian racing’s latest super-horse, Winx, has won 22 races in succession, amassing more than $7 million in prizemoney for her owners. A few weeks back she won the country’s premier race (The Cox Plate), for the third time. No such profile for Regal Monarch, a racehorse with just four wins to its name, put down after falling in race four on Melbourne Cup day.

You’d think tragedies like this (remember Dulcify, 1979), would prompt connections to retire Winx to lush green pastures and make another fortune at stud. But there is an ambitious program in 2018 to race the mare again in Australia and against the best in Europe.

There was even talk she might contest the Emirates Stakes in Melbourne this weekend. But trainers know. Chris Waller last week said Winx would go to the spelling paddock. At least someone other than me could see that Humidor’s fast-finishing second in the Cox Plate did her in.

As Peter Griffin found at the edit-a-thon, only facts are allowed in Wikipedia, and each fact must be backed by a rigorous reference. So seriously is this edict taken, editors this year banned the UK Daily Mail as a source, citing poor fact checking, sensationalism and fabrication.

Additionally, bots continually crawl the Wikipedia site for signs of vandalism (intentional corruption).

So I guess I’ll keep my opinions about Winx to myself, then.

 

Greens coalition bridge too far

Greens metaphor: Oresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark
Öresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö photo by Fab-o-Paris https://flic.kr/p/oudRkh

You may have missed my Facebook link to the story from the Guardian Weekly about the alliance between New Zealand’s Labour Party and the (Kiwi) Greens. The two parties drafted a one-page agreement with one specific aim – to defeat the Nationals and Prime Minister John Keys at the 2017 election. There is no suggestion of a coalition beyond that point, just a muscling-up to push the incumbents from office.

This seems like a fond hope. On the 2014 election result, Labour/Green would still be 730,389 votes short. Still, the NZ Greens hold more sway in the New Zealand parliament, holding 14 seats and taking 10.70% of the popular vote in 2014.

My one line suggestion on Facebook (“memo Bill and Richard”) apparently fell like pearls into the Facebook pigsty. Only one person ‘liked’ it. (This aligns with research that suggests few Facebook browsers click through and read to the end of a lengthy article).

Last month, Australian Greens Treasury spokesman and the only Green MP Adam Bandt said on Q&A that the Greens were open to forming a coalition with Labor. But Labor Opposition leader Bill Shorten said Bandt was “dreaming”.

“Labor will fight this election to form its own government and to form a government in our own right. Labor will not be going into coalition with any party,” he told ABC North Queensland.

The Australian Greens remain incensed about Labor’s ads which suggested they were doing a preference deal with the Liberals. The Greens have since said they will put Labor ahead of Liberal on how to vote cards in all but 11 seats, leaving the latter ‘open’. PM Malcolm Turnbull told ABC Online last Sunday the Liberal Party will preference the Greens last, or behind Labor. “This is a call that I have made in the national interest,” the PM said.

Labor confirmed it will direct its preferences to the Greens in the lower house. There are reports of Labor promoting the Liberal Party over the Nationals in the South Australian seats of Murray, O’Connor and Durack. The Sydney Morning Herald also reported this week that Labor is considering a deal with Nick Xenophon that could see the independent senator pick up three Liberal seats in South Australia.

But is it, as Ben Eltham suggests, trivial to focus on preference deals (which are after all just recommendation on how-to-vote cards), instead of policies?

Conor Little, research associate at Keele University wrote in The Conversation about the difficulties facing Green parties in coalition:

 “Large centre-left parties often fish from the same pool of voters and compete on similar issues as the Greens. As a result, the Green parties are very often seen as a threat to mainstream centre-left parties and vice versa.’’

On any level, Green politics is less influential in Australia that in many European countries and, as we have stated, New Zealand.

The Greens served as the junior coalition partner in Germany’s parliament in 1998 and 2005 and came fourth at the last election (beaten out of third by one seat). In the UK, the Greens polled more than 1 million votes, holding its one seat (Brighton) in the British parliament.

Nordic noir (or verte)

In Denmark, the Red-Green Alliance polled 7.8% of the vote and holds two seats in Opposition. Across the Oresund Bridge in Sweden, the Greens held 6.9% of the vote and 25 seats at the 2014 election, the fourth-largest party in the Swedish parliament.

I mention these two countries in particular as we have become armchair experts on things Nordic, watching acclaimed TV series including The Bridge, Borgen, Wallander and Unit One. So we now recognise useful Swedish words like ya (yes), nej (no), öl (beer) and kön (sex).

The word ‘Green’ can mean different things in global politics. Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance is the most socialist party in Denmark, advocating socialist democracy not just for Denmark but internationally.

Finland’s Green League has 15 seats in parliament after the 2015 election, having quit the coalition twice over approval for a Russian-backed nuclear power plant. Statistics Finland says the party won five more seats in 2015, its vote increasing by 1.3% to 8.5%. The League usually sits in the centre of the political spectrum, criticising both socialism and the free market. But it is also anti-nuclear, anti-conscription, pro same-sex marriage and takes the high moral ground that rich countries must lead others in mitigating the impact of climate change.

So it seems that as the various shades of Green in the world have gathered support and joined coalitions, some have stepped back from the more absolutist positions of their founders.

Conor Little says being in coalition is difficult for any small party. “Co-operating with (or in) a government is a balancing act and no matter how much they achieve, parties with only a few seats usually need to compromise on much of their platform.”

Sometimes the need to assert their identity leads these parties to end their coalition early, as the Australian Greens did, ending its alliance with Labor in February 2013. Likewise Finland’s Greens walked out in 2002 and 2014 over a nuclear power plant proposal. In 2002 the New Zealand Greens rebelled over the release of genetically modified organisms. As Little says, these moves tend to attract more support for Green parties.

Meanwhile, with just 16 days left until Australians vote, what is it about the Australian Greens that makes the LNP believe the party is a threat to the national interest? Perhaps this:

“The Greens are the only party that understands that the economy must work for the benefit of society and not the other way around. We have a progressive plan where tax reform starts at the top by removing unfair tax breaks and wasteful subsidies for polluting industries. Not only will this help address the structural deficit of the budget, but it will force money away from tax sheltered locations like superannuation, housing and mining and into productive areas that will set us up for the new economy and more equitable wealth distribution.”

The party polled 8.6% of the primary vote in 2013, yet because of our preferential voting system, the Greens have only one voice in Parliament, although they have 10 seats in the Senate. In New Zealand, with a first-past-the-post voting system, the Greens have 14 seats in Parliament. In Finland, the Greens hold 15 seats with just 8.5% of the vote.

The Australian media rarely portrays the Greens in a positive light. In one transparent example, a page one article in The Australian in April 2015 argued that only the “godless and rich” voted Green. An analysis of seats in the 2015 NSW election by Mark Coultan concluded that atheists and agnostics were more likely to vote Green, as were the wealthy.

Coultan said the primary Green vote averaged 17% in the top 10 electorates ranked by proportion of households with income of $3,000 a week or more (based on 2011 Census). In the top 10 electorates with the lowest proportion of rich families, the primary Green vote was 10.9%. Coultan added that this figure was inflated by outstanding Green results in the anti-CSG electorates of Tweed and Lismore.

Electorates ranked one and two for the number of atheists, agnostics, humanists, rationalists and people with no religion (Balmain and Newtown), were among the three seats picked up by the Greens in NSW.

So how relevant is this report and did it really warrant page one treatment? Judge for yourselves (i) the original yarn and (ii) a lengthy dissection by blogger Dr Kevin Bonham.

Having said that, we’re off to prune the roses before the fickle finger of climate change brings on unwanted early buds.