On 6/1/07, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/1/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 01/06/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah it's a strange sort of category. I don't know whether it's Jews in particular doing it, but there have been some pretty concerted efforts to go around labelling as many scientists as possible "Jewish scientists" etc. I assume the intent is to promote or recognise the religion in some way, rather than to "out" the people in question, as the first post suggested.
It appears to be ethnic promotion. Look at the wranging over which nationality makes it into an infobox.
The two main reasons that people add to these lists are
- Ethnicity boosting, and
- Outing.
Thus, ironically, the interests of Judeophiles and antisemites coincide here, which is what makes these lists so hard to get rid of or even conform to policy. Of course, their interests don't always coincide; the former tend to be interested in populating lists of Jews scientists and Nobel prize winners, the latter lists of Jewish criminals. You'll also see this dynamic in articles, with Judeophiles tending to describe people they are proud of as "Jewish" in the lead, whereas antisemites like to describe criminals, or controversial political figures, or Russian oligarchs, as "Jewish" in the lead.
Why aren't these categories being removed as blatant NPOV violation and incitement to more? Is NPOV up for a vote at CFD or something?
Because it turns out to be very hard to get these things deleted, in practice. See, for example, this CfD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_Ap...
By the way, on the latter you will note that four of the Poetlister sockpuppets voted "keep".