On 8/23/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson haukurth@hi.is wrote:
I hereby volunteer to watch his edits and revert and comment as appropriate if he is unbanned and returns to editing. That's one. Jack, you in? Anyone else?
Thanks for offering to do that, but I wonder if you realize how much work would be involved. I've done it with a few of the neo-Nazis, and it's not a question of blindly reverting. You have to rewrite their edits, because their writing is often poor; you have to resource their claims because the sources are often white-supremacist or personal websites; you have to answer their questions on talk and stay civil and respectful; you have to steer them in the direction of policy, and explain it to them many, many times.
It's not easy to do this all the while knowing that the editor (in this case) personally believes that his Jewish Wikipedian colleagues are sub-human.
Look at the response to Amalekite's post here http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=22047&highlight=wikipedia
"I think it's time for the white man to use a different strategy against these semitic jew mongrels, the days of talking are over, it is time to use physical force against the jewish population, and take our country back. They are vicious vile people, either we are going to survive or them."
And others quote Alex Linder (who is Amalekite) as saying: "DEATH TO THE JEWS."
Our NPOV policy states that our edits should reflect majority and significant-minority opinion, but not the position of tiny minorities. Our NOR policy says that we publish views that have already been published by credible sources.
Amalekite represents a tiny minority of nutcases who believe that certain ethnic groups and races are not fully human and do not deserve to live. Those views are never published by credible sources. Therefore, according to our own content policies - NPOV and NOR - those views have no place in Wikipedia, except in articles specifically devoted to them, in which case great caution is needed in editing them, so that they're fair to the Nazi view but don't end up being used as a platform by them.
As David Gerard has said: "Wikipedia is not an experiment in Internet democracy. It's a project to write an encyclopedia." The encyclopedia is the thing that matters, and Amalekite was out to subvert it for the good of his own tiny-minority cause, not for the good of Wikipedia.
Sarah