Hello,Please take a moment to read and review the updated SM calendar which has a message which we plan to post today on behalf of Wikimedia Russia regarding the Crimean crisis and Wikipedia editors.Thanks!
*f/g:The following post is from Wikimedia Russia.
Most people know what the Crimea crisis is and everybody has their own opinion about who’s right and who’s wrong. Unfortunately, such situations happen, but what should we, editors of Wikipedia (and especially Russian Wikipedia), do?
It's important to state the following principles to understand this question better:
1. Russian Wikipedia is Wikipedia in the Russian language, not Wikipedia of the Russian Federation. We have active editors and sysops not only from Russia, but also from Europe, Asia and America. Due to this fact we have different opinions that help us produce neutral point of views.
2. Wikipedia isn't looking for absolute truth; it should represent "fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.” That means that we are not stating, for example, that Crimean referendum was legitimate or not, we provide different points of views: what Ukrainian view is, what Russian view is, what other countries do and think, according to reliable sources.
3. Wikipedia describes disputes but doesn't engage in them. We want to state once more, that we are not looking for absolute truth and we won't agree with personal attacks from one group of editors to another group of editors: all of them have equal rights.
4. We don't encourage mass edits in such a hot topic without prior discussion with other editors: that's why a lot of articles of this category are protected from editing - propose your adjustments at the talk page and discuss them with other editors, that's the most constructive and effective way of editing.
5. We admit that such articles require additional attention and that's why our community is discussing nominations for the new mediators of this topic. Nevertheless, even now editors and sysops invest much time and effort to keep Wikipedia neutral and true.
6. Wikipedia already had some similar situations. Our previous experiences prove that "discuss, then edit" is the best practice. For example, the similar disputes are connected with Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, etc.
We kindly ask editors to stay calm, show respect to other editors and discuss all edits based on reliable sources. Wikipedia has rules and policies, we hope that our editors and readers are able to cope with this accordingly.
--
Carlos Monterrey
Communications Associate
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Social-media mailing list
Social-media@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/social-media