Hello to everybody!
Crimean question is a hot topic on Russian Wikipedia now and we want to share some basic Wikipedia principles from our Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/russian.wikipedia), would you agree to share it via Wikipedia account in Facebook/Twitter?
I haven't posted it at Russian Wikipedia page yet and want to discuss it before.There are a lot of questions received by our community and local chapter and I think that this post will be useful. Do you agree with such post or not?
Best regards, Linar
----------------------post below---------------------------------- Everybody knows what Crimea crisis is and everybody has his own opinion about what happened and who was right and wrong.
Unfortunately, such situations do happen sometimes, 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 Russian language, not Wikipedia of 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 to produce neutral point of view with all aspects shown.
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 view: what Ukrainian view is, what Russian view is, what other countries do and think, according to the reliable sources.
3. Wikipedia describes disputes but doesn't engage in them. So we want to state once more, that we are not looking for absolute truth and we won't agree with personal attacks of 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 and our previous experience prooves that "discuss, then edit" is the best practice here. For example, the similar disputes are connected with Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, etc.
Dear editors, we kindly ask you to stay calm, show respect to other editors and discuss all your edits based on the reliable sources. Wikipedia has all rules and policies required and we hope that our editors and readers are able to cope with this.