Toby wrote:
>In the meantime, have Ed and mav accepted my
>nominations for mediator?(Is mav even reading this
>list right now???)
Sorry - I've been out of town a lot lately and have
only been skimming the lists. However, I already
volunteered to be an arbitrator via an email to Jimbo.
I really don't have enough spare time to be a
mediator, sadly.
-- mav
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Toby,
I don't know if it's "altruism" -- I'm just trying to accomplish our
mutual goal as efficiently as possible.
If I can get more people to focus on writing the kinds of articles I
want to see, by donating 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there -- and this
harnesses 5 staff-hours of time (300) minutes of other writers' time...
Everyone who donates time or money to this project is altruistic. If my
"perspective" has any praiseworthy aspect, perhaps it has more to do
with my concern for efficiency. Call it a "management" perspective,
maybe.
Uncle Ed
Toby answered Ed Poor:
> >Instead, once or twice a month I glance at the article deletion log
and
> >resurrect anything that was thrown out too hastily (it's the Ent in
me,
> >I guess: no such thing as dead wood, hoom, hoom).
>
> Ed, I'd like to hear more (on the list or by email)
> about how you find this tactic works for you --
> especially given the cautious approach you take to most controversy.
> For example, do people get upset at your undeletions? Do you find
> yourself spending a lot of time researching good stubs to replace
> deleted text on articles that you'd otherwise ignore? And so on.
No one's ever complained about the articles I've undeleted. Most of them
were graffiti that I turned into a stub with 5 minutes of googling.
One time, I hastily "blanked" a couple of articles that I thought were
sheer POV, but another user pointed out the context so I unblanked them
(something to do with natural health, non-Western medicine or
[[Holism]], I think).
I don't like deleting "pages". If I find a horribly written article, but
it's a topic of interest (to me or to potential readers) -- then I think
it's a better use of community time to:
* take 5 minutes of my own time to google it into a stub; or,
* take 15 to 30 minutes and whip it into shape (e.g., by refactoring)
Rather than:
* take 2 minutes of my time to list it on votes for deletion
* take up huge amounts of others' valuable time by 'inviting' them to
figure out whether to "keep" or "delete" it.
As eclectic as we are, we don't need any more lightning rods...
Ed Poor
Thanks for pointing out some of the flaws in [[Votes for Deletion]].
I pretty much ignore that page completely. Except a few cases where
someone called my attention to a doomed article they thought I might
care about.
Instead, once or twice a month I glance at the article deletion log and
resurrect anything that was thrown out too hastily (it's the Ent in me,
I guess: no such thing as dead wood, hoom, hoom).
The voting process is silly, and there's no consensus.
Whatever happened to [[Wikipedia:be bold]]?
Anyway, I hardly ever want to delete anything; I'd rather fix it. I can
followe Ahoermeister (spelling?) around and un-delete half the stuff he
throws out and make a perfectly good stub out of it...
Ed Poor
(I'm moving responses that seem to pertain more to the content of the
article to wikien-l, and responses that seem to pertain more to global
issues of NPOV and policy to wikipedia-l.)
Stevertigo wrote:
>Who is Mother Teresa? Is she on her way to being a saint, or a
>contemporary person, for whom an encyclopedia article can write up all
>kinds of dirt on her.
I think this is a false dichotomy. We can "write up all kinds of
dirt" on Catholic Saints.
But I don't really like that phrasing, since 'dirt' implies a certain
kind of evaluation that should be avoided when contentious. We should
report on Mother Theresa and the reasons given by the Church leaders
that she is being beatified and may be canonized. But we should also
report on secular (or Church!) critiques.
But we should do all of those things in a way that both a supporter
and critic of Mother Theresa would agree are fair.
A philosopher might imagine a supporter of Mother Theresa who claims
that any mention or discussion of critics or criticism is inherently
unfair. But I don't think such a person actually edits Wikipedia.
--Jimbo
Just a heads-up. A user "Wartortle" (a Pokemon reference, apparently) has
been voting "keep" /en masse/ on the VfD page with no explanations for
awhile now. He has been questioned (politely) numerous times as to his
intentions via his talk page.... there has been no response. I think the
time may come for Jimbo to give him a talking too... or else we all could
decide together if this is vandalism of a sort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=War…
The above link is to his contributions page.
-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri(a)digitalgrapefruit.com
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
-Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
>James-
>
>this does not belong on wikipedia-l. I have therefore copied it to
>wikien-l, and all replies should go there.
>
>1) There was an edit war on the "Mother Teresa" page after you moved away
>about 20K of text to a separate "criticism" page in clear violation of our
>neutrality policy, which states that no preference should be given to any
>side.
Not so. NPOV requires balence in content. The critique in such detail
clearly violated wikipedia's NPOV policy. It doesn't matter if it was 70%
glorification or 70% demonisation of MT or anyone else. Making an article
overwhelmingly one sided where the vast majority of the text is putting
forward one view, expecially when when the text isn't about the person the
article is about at all but about her religious order, is unambiguously
against NPOV. I did not remove the criticism. I put it up front in the
opening paragraph. I moved the main complex text to a link article, linked
/in/ the text of the article, and was in the process of summarising the
criticism in a couple of paragraphs, so that the information would be there,
expressed unambiguously, without turning the entire article on Mother Teresa
into 'Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa's order and how they washed
their bed linen and used needles', which is what chunks of the stuff you
added in was about. Doing that makes perfect sense and absolutely in keeping
with wikipedia's 'be bold' editing policy. But your response was to
/immediately/ place the link article on the VfD page, dump the text and keep
reverting the article back to the over long, badly written, biased and
frequently off-topic article in place of a properly written, NPOV, balanced
piece that covered the pluses and minuses of MT without letting one side,
/either/ side, dominate. That is the basic definition of NPOV.
>
>2) I have warned you repeatedly not to make any substantial changes to the
>article while the major issue of whether the text was to be moved to a
>separate page was not settled. You ignored these warnings and pushed
>forward to edit the text, including your movement of 20K of text to a
>separate page, and complain that these edits were reverted together. This
>is simply disingenuous and you know it.
Again, not so. All I did was try to NPOV a POV mess of an article. Most (but
not all) of the problem was with that 20K text, which did not belong there,
and you know it.
>
>3) A sysop protected the page in an attempt to cool down the edit war.
>This was a largely symbolic gesture since we are both sysops, but we chose
>not to edit the page while it was protected. However, this precluded non-
>sysops who had announced that they wanted to make edits to the page from
>doing so. To prevent this unfortunate situation, I unprotected the page
>with the comment:
>
> "removing protection for now (I was involved so I won't edit for
> another few hours if Jtdirl won't, but others should be able to)"
>
>I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you,
You know I am not on during the daytime. So I didn't have a choice, just
came back to find you were editing away again, having unprotected a
protected page in clear breach of sysop rules.
>You moved virtually all the criticisms of Mother Teresa to a separate page
>without discussing this on the talk page first. Three users (myself, Bryan
>and Jiang) disagreed with this. I and Bryan Derksen reverted your changes.
>It might be argued that it would have been "wiser" to just wait a day or
>two and then address the matter again, but that is clearly wrong -- had we
>done so, you would have reorganized the entire article(s) according to
>your idea of NPOV, making it very difficult to reach any kind of consensus
>on the matter.
>
No I didn't. I moved a body of text, much of which was about her order, not
about her, to a separate article and attempted to put a shorter summary in.
Others on the page had already complained about what you had added in but
you went ahead regardless.
>In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist
>of
>- personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though
>several users have expressed disagreement with your actions)
I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl is no longer out of the
question for me.Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)
Given that he is editing a page about a person that is supposedly all about
love, he carries a great deal of hate inside him.
You can play up your oh-so-critical "lapsed Catholic" attitude as much as
you want
Here you have Jtdirl, the valiant defender of truth and neutrality who makes
all people happy and contented.
I have big doubts that you would engage in an edit war over Sun Myung Moon,
but of course with your proven pro-Catholic bias it seems obvious that you
would want to defend the fiction that has been built around Mother Teresa,
without any substantial arguments to support your edits.
Who made all those attacks, Eric?
>- false accusations of abusive behavior
And what were those comments above then?
>- disingenuous tactics like your behavior in the edit war, piling changes
>upon changes to bully your way through
>- making false claims (e.g. repeatedly claiming that the criticism section
>was merely based on "a single TV show", whereas I have shown you the
>multitude of sources on which it was based, including several books and
>newspaper articles and an editorial in "The Lancet")
All of which I mentioned in the short summary which you called censorship.
>
>I chose to ignore your continuous stream of attacks against me, but other
>users would not have shown the same amount of patience and be driven away
>by your behavior, which resembles that of a schoolyard bully.
What was that again about personal attacks?
>
>In spite of this unacceptable behavior on your part, I have repeatedly
>offered to seek a cooperative, consensual solution for the alleged or real
>NPOV problems on the page in question. In fact, I was working on reaching
>a consensus with Bryan and other contributors while you continued
>reverting to your style. Everyone can see this by taking a look at
>[[Talk:Mother Teresa]].
>
>It is time for you to stop playing strategic games against other
>contributors, and to start working in the spirit of mutual cooperation.
>Now is a good moment to do so -- I fully approve of your recent edits of
>the article (provided you haven't again started moving away the criticism
>section).
So why then accuse me of a 'pro-catholic bias' and censoring criticism of
MT, when I was doing nothing of the sort, merely trying to NPOV an article
and give stuff not about MT its own article?
>Yet you continue your bullying tactics against other
>contributors. You do not want peaceful cooperation, you want to pick
>fights and win. That is not how Wikipedia works.
Which is why, I suppose, every edit I made for ages tonight was screwed
around when you went in and began changing past tense to present tense while
I was trying to save NPOV changes. So much for co-operation. And throwing
accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' really is constructive and non-bullying,
I suppose?
>
>I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious
>commitment to seeking consensus on your changes.
Others users earlier criticised your constant adding in of more and more
detractors' claims and said that it unbalanced the article. Here and
elsewhere your usual approach has been 'be bold' when you think you can get
away with it, cry 'consensus' when someone stops you.
>That cannot always be
>done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases
>where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo
>etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any
>kind of solution.
More threats from 'The User Who Does Not Make Threats', eh?
>
>So here's my offer: Make the changes to the criticism section you find
>important. I will edit the parts which I don't like and if we can't agree,
>we'll go to the talk page. Once the criticism section is edited, we will
>take a look at the entire article and if it is too long (32K), we will
>summarize individual sections and split them away, regardless of their
>content. If it is still below that size, we won't do that. If the
>criticism section is still too dominant, we will together try to expand
>the other sections of the article. How about some wiki-cooperation for a
>change?
I have co-operated with many people on wikipedia. The only fights I have had
here in ages have been with you, when you tried to POV not one but a series
of articles on religion. Each time you accused me of a 'pro-catholic bias'.
Others said the edits were perfectly NPOV. Bias has no place in a wikipedia
article, whether it is bias for or against RCism, protestantism, Islam, the
Jewish faith, etc. How is it that it is your edits on religious matters that
draw criticism from people and accusations of bias.
You are perfectly entitled to hold humanist views and be critical of
organised religion, but what you cannot do is go around turning articles
into polemics for your opinion. I have been accused of bias for and against
Australian republicanism, the British monarchy, Israel, communism, etc often
simultaneously, for standing up to both sides and saying 'that is not NPOV'.
I have turned religious articles that were seen as unsalvageable into
articles that were praised as NPOV. What makes you think I want to turn an
article on Mother Teresa into a POV polemic. I don't. If I was trying to
'silence the facts' I would have simply deleted them, not moved them up to
the opening paragraph and given them their own article. But I am sick and
tired of wild accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' for trying to do a
professional editing job on sloppily written one sided articles, whether
they are pro- or anti- catholic, pro- or anti- MT.
On this article, comments made on your massive add-in include
In this article, 1/3 described her life and work, and 2/3 described
detractor's claims. And this is for someone who won the Nobel Prize for
Peace. Is this NPOV? --Kaihsu 16:35, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Why is there such a long DIATRIBE against this person in an aricle which is
supposed to have a neutral POV? The criticisms are written with such bias
that even as a stand-alone article it currently violates NPOV.205.188.208.72
21:38, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I think the best solution would be to summarize the controversies here, and
move the whole text to another article. This one has gotten way too long in
my opinion. Dori 19:06, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Who said anything about hiding. Like most other people, I see an article
that long (which looks more like a book report) and I shy away. I said
summarize and link to the long article. If you want to write your PhD thesis
here, then go ahead. Dori 21:43, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
In moving the text, I was doing no more than reflecting the will of those
users you ignored and told " It is not a place for apologetics" as if they
too were part of some big pro-catholic conspiracy to stop you telling 'the
truth'. If you want to lecture people on NPOV, start practising it. If you
want to accuse everyone else of bias, start looking just how neutral /you/
are in your edits, and just how many facts as opposed to opinions you have.
And don't lecture everyone else on your behaviour when your approach is to
break sysop rules if you can't get your own way, accuse everyone else of
bias if you can't get your own way, and throw around POV allegations like
confetti against those trying to fix a poorly written article that veers
between glorification and demonisation of the subject and misses NPOV by a
mile.
JT
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Rick sighed:
> I wish I could do that. Whenever I delete ANYTHING without
> going through VfD, I'm attacked as a terrible person.
First of all, no one should attack you or insult you -- no matter what
you do here.
Second, you CAN do what I do, the way I do it -- and you'll get the same
results.
I don't have a special dispensation; I'm just careful about what I do,
and when I
make mistakes I always admit it, apologize and change my ways (sometimes
quickly, sometimes after a few days of kicking and screaming :-)
Uncle Ed
Poor,-
>> BTW - this is Eric's latest threat:
>>
>> I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl
>> is no longer out of the question for me.
>> -Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)
> No, Erik would never do that
No, I would not ban Jtdirl myself, and I have never said that I would. But
it is beginning to look like a necessity. I will look at this again when
Jimbo is back and if I deem it necessary, supply the evidence to him that
would support a temporary ban.
Oh, and this still belongs on wikien-l.
Regards,
Erik
Personal attacks are not allowed. See [[talk:Silesia]] for an example of
me (as Uncle Ed) laying down the law.
Saying "Stop attacking me verbally, or I'll ask the site owner to decide
whether your contributions amount to a bannable offense" is not itself a
threat. To put it another way, insisting that someone stop hurting you
or you'll report them to the authorities is not a "threat" in the same
sense as "shut off that damn stereo or I'll come over to your house and
jolly well do it myself - and woe to anyone who tries to stop me!"
It's the distinction between vigilante activity and seeking help from
the sheriff. Visitors to Jimbo's living room (or tavern or reference
library) have to follow Jimbo's rules, or he'll kick them out. It's not
against Jimbo's rules to ask someone (politely) to follow the rules.
It's not a "bannable offense" to warn someone that their repeated
violations are provoking you to request Jimbo to ban them.
I applaud JTD and Eloquence for DOING THEIR BEST to be civil toward one
another, despite the strength of their feelings on the MT article. The
fact that no one had to ring Jimbo's cell phone while he attended the
wedding is really a cause for mutual back-patting all around.
These are trying times. Violence is heating up in the Middle East. We
can do our part for world peace by finding ways to work harmoniously
together on the Great Project of Wikipedia. We are contributing to world
knowledge, and it's not easy.
We need something we can all rally around. An idea or person, maybe. For
now, it's the idea of creating a top-notch free encyclopedia. This idea
is being sponsored by a wonderful philanthropist, Jimmy Wales.
Ed Poor