This thread basically encapsulates my frustration over the occasional POV disputes that flare up on [[Malaysia]]-related articles. When I first came here more than a year ago, I felt many of our articles covering Malaysia were fine, i.e. [[Bumiputra]], [[Malaysia]], [[Mahathir bin Mohamad]]. A year later, I'm horrified at the state of these articles. Two of them have NPOV notices; all of them have been subject to pointless edit wars and constant NPOVing and POVing, wasting a tremendous amount of time. Recently, one anon has been reverting [[Malaysia]] to his biased version (which practically everyone involved on the article was and is reverting - recently, Malbear rephrased some of the factual statements the anon made, which hopefully will pacify this POV warrior). But I'm truly fed up with being a tiny drop in an ocean of editors who would almost certainly be unchecked in their POVing if not for me and two or three others. I wonder what these articles will look like around this time next year, as I've given up doing any NPOVing work on articles related to Malaysian politics that doesn't involve a quick revert.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
Delirium wrote:
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians. What's doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality articles on controversial topics. A quick look reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them. [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that mess. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates. There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.
The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular issue, are a major problem. The neutral arbiters tend to be people without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to the editing process.
-Mark