On 6/27/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com
On 6/27/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
Unsurprisingly, the Arab-Israeli conflict is fertile ground for this
kind of
issue. As an unsurprising example, [[Zionism]] has been added to (and removed from [[Category:Racism]] more than once. Recently
[[User:Yuber]]
went on a campaign of removing all sorts of areas controlled by Israel
from
[[Category:Geography of Israel]], typically adding them to [[Category:Geography of Syria]], apparently on the grounds that these kinds of Categories were not intended as an aid to the reader in finding articles, nor should they reflect physical reality, but rather they
should be
seen and used as a political statements about legitimate ownership of territories. Both sides quoted the same policy to each other ("Unless
it
is self-evident and uncontroversial that something belongs in a
category, it
should not be put into a category"), indicating that the specific policy
was
actually of little help in making these kinds of decisions.
Jay.
Indeed policy, unless intricately written to cover all situations, will occasionally fail to be of much use in individual circumstances. In problem instances, it is best to look at the individual case, and have the majority of editors insist on common sense and a resolution that comes closest to NPOV while being accepted by most.
Well, that's one way of looking at it; however, as I understand Jack Lynch's and Fred Bauder's view, this would more likely be seen as organized attempts by POV pushers to control article content. :-)
Jay.
Organised attempts by POV pushers are usually reasonably transparent. The only problem of course, is where the majority of Wikipedians support a POV and put that ahead of NPOV editing (easy to do when you're in the majority and can get your way).
But this is a problem when doing up policy in any case (particularly if attempting to nail down individual cases in general policy/guidelines - e.g. MoS).
An interesting question is what would have happened if a majority vote/voted for using BCE/CE near-universally (except for Chrisitan topics). Does that mean it would have been NPOV?
Zoney