[Wikipedia-l] Problems with anonymous editing of Middle Eastern conflict-related articles

[Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Uri Yanover wrote:

> It is not a secret that Wikipedia is at occasions the scene of massive
> content wars between the supporters of various positions. This is natural
> and expectable, the resolution coming at the end of each such war being an
> improvement to the original article. However, there's one content war that
> is unique, in several ways. It concerns the Arab-Israeli, and
> Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.
>
> During the recent months, Wikipedia has been the target of almost daily
> twiddling, in sum amounting to vandalism, from different supporters of the
> Arab position on the internet, most often editing the page anonymously. I do
> not oppose them stating their views; however, their style of modifying bits
> here and there, copy & pasting copyrighted articles, linking to pages of
> explicitly propagandist nature, coupled with the fact that they do not have
> a clue of what NPOV and Wikipedia in general is all about, creates a serious
> problem.
>
> On the other side of this equation, however, there's me. There aren't too
> many people who are aware of the complex history of the region on Wikipedia;
> out of them, there are fewer less who are ready to share they knowledge (by
> risking to pace on the mine-field of political discussions). Although I do
> not claim to be deeply knowledgeable, it is often only up to me to include
> the Israeli perspective in these articles.

I hold opinions opposite to your viewpoint in these matters (pro-Palestine),
and from this end the problem looks very different. There are tons of Middle
East articles, and they're far too large, and (IMO) are generally only NPOV on
the surface, the deep bias is Israeli.

When I touched some of these articles, my additions and changes were generally
reverted, and the original (imo) biased viewpoints often strengthened. There
were at least four people doing this, you included, and it made me feel very
powerless and depressed about Wikipedia in its entirety. (This is part of the
reason I've called for an npov-dispute page, to be linked to from articles like
this).

However, it appears the situation has changed. Browsing a few of the articles
lightly today I find they're less biased than they used to be, and from your
comments it appears there are fewer stone-walling people maintaining them.

Any conclusions? I still think most of these pages aren't really npov. Someone
suggested splitting up the articles and shortening them - I think that would be
a very good idea. I also think these articles should be marked much more
clearly as being controversion - so that people won't so easily be provoked by
the content being passed off as encyclopedic facts.

While I'm not up to date as to the current content of these articles, I
consider the earlier (and perhaps current) large scale bias in the article to
be just as big a problem as small but numerous vandalisms.

-- Daniel