From: Delirium delirium@rufus.d2g.com Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:56:20 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: from pliny.wikipedia.org ([130.94.122.197]) by mc2-f23.law16.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.5600); Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:02:20 -0700 Received: from pliny.wikipedia.org (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])by pliny.wikipedia.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h6G403I08147;Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:00:03 GMT Received: from odin.ac.hmc.edu (IDENT:root@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu [134.173.32.75])by pliny.wikipedia.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id h6G3xWI08058for wikien-l@wikipedia.org; Wed, 16 Jul 2003 03:59:32 GMT Received: from rufus.d2g.com (delirium.ST.HMC.Edu [134.173.58.243])by odin.ac.hmc.edu (8.12.9/8.12.3) with ESMTP id h6G3xT8p013079for wikien-l@wikipedia.org; Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:59:30 -0700 X-Message-Info: EoYTbT2lH2MsQxQLKd6QGpQxvU17UYmU Message-ID: 3F14CCE4.20002@rufus.d2g.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030714 Debian/1.4-2 X-Accept-Language: en X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-milter (http://amavis.org/) on odin.ac.hmc.edu Sender: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org Errors-To: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org X-BeenThere: wikien-l@wikipedia.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13 Precedence: bulk List-Help: mailto:wikien-l-request@wikipedia.org?subject=help List-Post: mailto:wikien-l@wikipedia.org List-Subscribe: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l,mailto:wikien-l-request@wikipedia.org?subject=subscribe List-Id: Discussion list for English-language Wikipedia <wikien-l.wikipedia.org> List-Unsubscribe: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l,mailto:wikien-l-request@wikipedia.org?subject=unsubscribe List-Archive: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ Return-Path: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org X-OriginalArrivalTime: 16 Jul 2003 04:02:20.0368 (UTC) FILETIME=[0DDE5500:01C34B4F]
It strikes me as increasingly obvious that some concerted effort to be as NPOV as possible on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is necessary, as it's starting to be one of the more frequent edit wars, and distributed throughout the wiki, even in places you might not expect.
Two issues in particular that have come up lately, one from each side:
- [[User:BL]] is mass-adding the contents of palestineremembered.com --
massive lists with hundreds of subpages comprising every village (defined as 10 or more people) destroyed in the 1948 war, every "massacre" (defined as 10 or more people) committed or purportedly committed during that war (little effort is made to distinguish), and a whole host of other information that's difficult if not impossible to verify.
Even if it weren't for the difficulty in verifying this information, it strikes me as somewhat odd that we'd have 300 pages dedicated to Arabs killed in 1948, and only a single page dedicated to the Armenian genocide, or the Pontian Genocide, or the Hutu-Tutsi genocide, and so on. I don't think it'd be a good idea to add 10,000 pages or so, one for each village ("village" defined as 10 people or more) destroyed in each of those conflicts. And if we're going to have a separate page for every instance of civilian deaths during a war, WW2 alone would be another 10,000 pages or so.
- [[User:RK]] is, as is probably obvious, somewhat of a pro-Israeli
activist, and is becoming difficult to clean up. The latest thing I've noticed is him adding 2-paragraph-long attacks on Arab anti-Semitism to articles such as [[George Washington]] and [[Benjamin Franklin]], in the guise of "defending" their "tarnished" reputations against charges of anti-Semitism stemming from little-known fabricated quotes.
Not to single out these two users in particular; they're the two that come to mind at first. And these two issues in particular are also being dealt with on talk pages. But it's becoming clear that it will be very difficult to catch all of these, so perhaps some more concerted effort is needed. I'm not sure exactly what to propose, but it seems as a minimum we need a group of several people who are not particularly partial to either side -- but who are knowledgeable about the issues -- to essentially police (hopefully in as unconfrontational a way as possible) this sort of stuff. The problem is that those most knowledgeable and interested in spending a great deal of time writing articles on these topics are often those who are most partisan to one side or the other.
Suggestions?
-Mark
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