If you look into the Wikipedia arguments about the name of the "Uyghur genocide" article, you'll see that the argument is that "Uyghur genocide" is the common name and therefore the one that should be used. Like the same reason the "Spanish flu" article is called that despite not actually being from Spain. i.e. they know it's not actually a genocide, but they still want to call it that and came up with some bullshit technicality.

But ultimately, like most other bullshit on Wikipedia, it's based on a supposedly neutral restatement of "reliable" sources, which at best means it inherits the biases of those sources which surprise surprise are mostly Western. Wikipedia likes to pretend it's unbiased, but in reality it just shifts a direct bias about the facts of any given issue to a bias about the reliability of sources, making the actual facts harder to argue. It's basically Wikipedia policy that the articles are not based on fact but rather on what has been stated by those sources, regardless of fact.

[–] spectre@hexbear.net 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Damn I totally would expect "Spanish flu" to redirect to the scientific name of the disease.

[–] edge@hexbear.net 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The article is about the pandemic rather than the disease or virus itself. The most accurate name would probably be "1918-1920 flu pandemic". But in general using the common name is understandable.

The article itself begins:

The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer Spanish flu

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