On Oct 17, 2005, at 11:29 PM, Michael Turley wrote:
Leave them. Edit them now and then. Cite references for all your
changes. Use cleanup tags liberally. Use NPOV tags as necessary.
As they mature, they'll become better articles. It's hard to see the
long view of history from this close. Don't abandon them for later,
but keep in mind how recent and contentious these events are. Their
historical impact is still being defined. Immanuel Kant, on the other
hand, has been dead for 201 years, so it's clearly easier to see his
ultimate historical impact.
A nice sentiment, but in this case naive - I slapped dispute tags on
them, and I'm already being threatened with reverts. I fully expect
to be reverted by morning. If one cannot even insert a dispute tag
without starting an edit war, how do you propose that the articles
will be fixed?
Over time? They're as bad now as they were ten months ago, if not
worse. Articles do not generally fix in the form of consolidation -
as was pointed out in the cases of the [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane
Fonda]] article.
This is not a situation where the usual platitudes about the Wiki
process are going to do any good. The articles are scrupulously
referenced. The problem is that the references are the paranoid
rantings of a bunch of bloggers and activist groups that no
mainstream sources considered worth refuting. It's the same problem
we had on the [[Lyndon LaRouche]] articles where we finally had to
declare that LaRouche sources were all well and good, but just didn't
count as sources for the purposes of verifiability.
-Snowspinner