Re: [WikiEN-l] Addressing bias in Malaysian political articles

From: John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 21:05:04 +0800 To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Addressing bias in Malaysian political articles I have posted two or three times to [[WP:RFC]] (a few months apart), twice to [[WP:VP]] (two or three weeks apart), and once on [[WP:PR]] (regarding [[Anwar Ibrahim]]'s potential to become a featured article) for help on addressing this, but since there's still no response, I have no choice but to ask for help on the mailing list. Several Malaysian editors have expressed doubts about the (N)POVness of several articles related to Malaysian politics. Since I arrived last year, things have only deteriorated. Even [[Malaysia]] has not been spared - the second half doesn't mince its words in showing its open criticism of the government, declaring the court that judged Anwar to be a kangaroo court (the least that could have been done was to explain that the justice involved was unknown and inexperienced and other such reasons for accusing the government of unfair manipulation), and at one point, makes the blanket statement that "almost anything to do with the government involves corruption". I'm in the process of NPOVing this. [[Anwar Ibrahim]] and [[Bumiputra]] both have NPOV notices on them, and there's been a furious discussion on both Talks where much has been hashed out but little has come out to improve the NPOV value of both articles, beyond the effort of those who originally complained. (An excellent deal of other work was done on [[Anwar Ibrahim]], though.) A storm is brewing in [[Malaysian New Economic Policy]] which is overtly pro-NEP in the beginning and suddenly switches to full-blown opposition with completely inappropriate wording, directly stating the Malays are "robbing" the Chinese and Indians. The main issue here is that several editors have been doing great work expanding these articles, but are not wording their edits in accord with our NPOV policy. Sometimes crucial facts and opinions of those supporting the government are not available at all, creating an unbalanced impression, such as in [[Anwar Ibrahim]] (I NPOVed the last section as a lot of material was available on it before complaining on the Talk, whereupon it just degraded into all hot air and no actual work done on NPOVing the article). Another issue is that [[User:Malbear]], one of the few users other than me actively involved in these articles has accused me of deleting material that I don't agree with, such as on [[Education in Malaysia]]. Malaysian politics is highly impassioned, so I would really appreciate if someone could tell me and [[User:Jpatokal]] that we're just paranoid and overreacting, or that there really is an issue with how NPOV Malaysian political articles are. Thanks very much, John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]]) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l