James-
this does not belong on wikipedia-l. I have therefore copied it to wikien-l, and all replies should go there.
- There was an edit war on the "Mother Teresa" page after you moved away
about 20K of text to a separate "criticism" page in clear violation of our neutrality policy, which states that no preference should be given to any side.
Not so. NPOV requires balence in content. The critique in such detail clearly violated wikipedia's NPOV policy. It doesn't matter if it was 70% glorification or 70% demonisation of MT or anyone else. Making an article overwhelmingly one sided where the vast majority of the text is putting forward one view, expecially when when the text isn't about the person the article is about at all but about her religious order, is unambiguously against NPOV. I did not remove the criticism. I put it up front in the opening paragraph. I moved the main complex text to a link article, linked /in/ the text of the article, and was in the process of summarising the criticism in a couple of paragraphs, so that the information would be there, expressed unambiguously, without turning the entire article on Mother Teresa into 'Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa's order and how they washed their bed linen and used needles', which is what chunks of the stuff you added in was about. Doing that makes perfect sense and absolutely in keeping with wikipedia's 'be bold' editing policy. But your response was to /immediately/ place the link article on the VfD page, dump the text and keep reverting the article back to the over long, badly written, biased and frequently off-topic article in place of a properly written, NPOV, balanced piece that covered the pluses and minuses of MT without letting one side, /either/ side, dominate. That is the basic definition of NPOV.
- I have warned you repeatedly not to make any substantial changes to the
article while the major issue of whether the text was to be moved to a separate page was not settled. You ignored these warnings and pushed forward to edit the text, including your movement of 20K of text to a separate page, and complain that these edits were reverted together. This is simply disingenuous and you know it.
Again, not so. All I did was try to NPOV a POV mess of an article. Most (but not all) of the problem was with that 20K text, which did not belong there, and you know it.
- A sysop protected the page in an attempt to cool down the edit war.
This was a largely symbolic gesture since we are both sysops, but we chose not to edit the page while it was protected. However, this precluded non- sysops who had announced that they wanted to make edits to the page from doing so. To prevent this unfortunate situation, I unprotected the page with the comment:
"removing protection for now (I was involved so I won't edit for another few hours if Jtdirl won't, but others should be able to)"I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you,
You know I am not on during the daytime. So I didn't have a choice, just came back to find you were editing away again, having unprotected a protected page in clear breach of sysop rules.
You moved virtually all the criticisms of Mother Teresa to a separate page without discussing this on the talk page first. Three users (myself, Bryan and Jiang) disagreed with this. I and Bryan Derksen reverted your changes. It might be argued that it would have been "wiser" to just wait a day or two and then address the matter again, but that is clearly wrong -- had we done so, you would have reorganized the entire article(s) according to your idea of NPOV, making it very difficult to reach any kind of consensus on the matter.
No I didn't. I moved a body of text, much of which was about her order, not about her, to a separate article and attempted to put a shorter summary in. Others on the page had already complained about what you had added in but you went ahead regardless.
In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist of
- personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though
several users have expressed disagreement with your actions)
I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl is no longer out of the question for me.Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)
Given that he is editing a page about a person that is supposedly all about love, he carries a great deal of hate inside him.
You can play up your oh-so-critical "lapsed Catholic" attitude as much as you want
Here you have Jtdirl, the valiant defender of truth and neutrality who makes all people happy and contented.
I have big doubts that you would engage in an edit war over Sun Myung Moon, but of course with your proven pro-Catholic bias it seems obvious that you would want to defend the fiction that has been built around Mother Teresa, without any substantial arguments to support your edits.
Who made all those attacks, Eric?
- false accusations of abusive behavior
And what were those comments above then?
- disingenuous tactics like your behavior in the edit war, piling changes
upon changes to bully your way through
- making false claims (e.g. repeatedly claiming that the criticism section
was merely based on "a single TV show", whereas I have shown you the multitude of sources on which it was based, including several books and newspaper articles and an editorial in "The Lancet")
All of which I mentioned in the short summary which you called censorship.
I chose to ignore your continuous stream of attacks against me, but other users would not have shown the same amount of patience and be driven away by your behavior, which resembles that of a schoolyard bully.
What was that again about personal attacks?
In spite of this unacceptable behavior on your part, I have repeatedly offered to seek a cooperative, consensual solution for the alleged or real NPOV problems on the page in question. In fact, I was working on reaching a consensus with Bryan and other contributors while you continued reverting to your style. Everyone can see this by taking a look at [[Talk:Mother Teresa]].
It is time for you to stop playing strategic games against other contributors, and to start working in the spirit of mutual cooperation. Now is a good moment to do so -- I fully approve of your recent edits of the article (provided you haven't again started moving away the criticism section).
So why then accuse me of a 'pro-catholic bias' and censoring criticism of MT, when I was doing nothing of the sort, merely trying to NPOV an article and give stuff not about MT its own article?
Yet you continue your bullying tactics against other contributors. You do not want peaceful cooperation, you want to pick fights and win. That is not how Wikipedia works.
Which is why, I suppose, every edit I made for ages tonight was screwed around when you went in and began changing past tense to present tense while I was trying to save NPOV changes. So much for co-operation. And throwing accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' really is constructive and non-bullying, I suppose?
I can and will work with you on this article, provided you make a serious commitment to seeking consensus on your changes.
Others users earlier criticised your constant adding in of more and more detractors' claims and said that it unbalanced the article. Here and elsewhere your usual approach has been 'be bold' when you think you can get away with it, cry 'consensus' when someone stops you.
That cannot always be done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any kind of solution.
More threats from 'The User Who Does Not Make Threats', eh?
So here's my offer: Make the changes to the criticism section you find important. I will edit the parts which I don't like and if we can't agree, we'll go to the talk page. Once the criticism section is edited, we will take a look at the entire article and if it is too long (32K), we will summarize individual sections and split them away, regardless of their content. If it is still below that size, we won't do that. If the criticism section is still too dominant, we will together try to expand the other sections of the article. How about some wiki-cooperation for a change?
I have co-operated with many people on wikipedia. The only fights I have had here in ages have been with you, when you tried to POV not one but a series of articles on religion. Each time you accused me of a 'pro-catholic bias'. Others said the edits were perfectly NPOV. Bias has no place in a wikipedia article, whether it is bias for or against RCism, protestantism, Islam, the Jewish faith, etc. How is it that it is your edits on religious matters that draw criticism from people and accusations of bias.
You are perfectly entitled to hold humanist views and be critical of organised religion, but what you cannot do is go around turning articles into polemics for your opinion. I have been accused of bias for and against Australian republicanism, the British monarchy, Israel, communism, etc often simultaneously, for standing up to both sides and saying 'that is not NPOV'. I have turned religious articles that were seen as unsalvageable into articles that were praised as NPOV. What makes you think I want to turn an article on Mother Teresa into a POV polemic. I don't. If I was trying to 'silence the facts' I would have simply deleted them, not moved them up to the opening paragraph and given them their own article. But I am sick and tired of wild accusations of 'pro-catholic bias' for trying to do a professional editing job on sloppily written one sided articles, whether they are pro- or anti- catholic, pro- or anti- MT.
On this article, comments made on your massive add-in include
In this article, 1/3 described her life and work, and 2/3 described detractor's claims. And this is for someone who won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Is this NPOV? --Kaihsu 16:35, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Why is there such a long DIATRIBE against this person in an aricle which is supposed to have a neutral POV? The criticisms are written with such bias that even as a stand-alone article it currently violates NPOV.205.188.208.72 21:38, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I think the best solution would be to summarize the controversies here, and move the whole text to another article. This one has gotten way too long in my opinion. Dori 19:06, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Who said anything about hiding. Like most other people, I see an article that long (which looks more like a book report) and I shy away. I said summarize and link to the long article. If you want to write your PhD thesis here, then go ahead. Dori 21:43, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)
In moving the text, I was doing no more than reflecting the will of those users you ignored and told " It is not a place for apologetics" as if they too were part of some big pro-catholic conspiracy to stop you telling 'the truth'. If you want to lecture people on NPOV, start practising it. If you want to accuse everyone else of bias, start looking just how neutral /you/ are in your edits, and just how many facts as opposed to opinions you have. And don't lecture everyone else on your behaviour when your approach is to break sysop rules if you can't get your own way, accuse everyone else of bias if you can't get your own way, and throw around POV allegations like confetti against those trying to fix a poorly written article that veers between glorification and demonisation of the subject and misses NPOV by a mile.
JT
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James-
Not so. NPOV requires balence in content.
Actually, NPOV requires that views are attributed. We have no obligation to "invent" positive views if all we have is negative information. For example, there is no obligation for us to write 10K about how great a painter a dictator was to compensate for the 10K we write about how many people he killed. Certainly we should strive for balance especially in a case like Mother Teresa, and I would have been the first to agree that more should have been written about her life and work. In fact, I have always stated that - all sections should be continually expanded - as soon as a certain length is reached, the article should be split into different sections regardless of their content.
It does not matter who or when people protested against the controversies being listed on the Mother Teresa page, what matters is whether the course of action to split away *only the controversial* parts of the article is proper and in line with our established policy or not. I think it is quite clear that it is not. The simple reality is that most people do not know much about the criticisms concerning Mother Teresa, and there is a large gulf between the reality of her work and the media portrayal thereof. It is therefore to be expected that people will assume that an article is biased when it presents more critical information than they would expect. However, there is clear precedent on what to do in cases like this, for example, the [[Scientology]] article, where individual sections were split away as the article became too long. It is not NPOV to split away only the controversy section.
You repeatedly insist that your only commitment is to neutrality and academic standards. Why, then, do you not mention with a single word the objections that have been raised by other contributors to your actions? Both Bryan Derksen and Jiang, long-term Wikipedia contributors with a positive track record, have objected to your splitting away. Clearly there was no consensus for your actions, yet you persisted in reverting to your preferred version. Are you seriously trying to tell me that this was in the spirit of cooperation and Wikiquette? I think even you know that it was not, since you seem to imply that it was OK because I would do the same (use consensus only when it suits me).
I did not edit the page for the next few hours and nor did you,
You know I am not on during the daytime.
I don't watch your edits. My unprotection of the page had a single purpose, to allow other contributors to continue working on the article because of the beatification on Sunday in spite of our silly edit war. The protection did not stop me or you from editing the page, but it stopped others, so it seemed very unfair to uphold it. You will have to admit that this is not even close to being abusive behavior.
In addition to that, you continue to play your usual games, which consist of
- personal attacks (always singling out one contributor, even though
several users have expressed disagreement with your actions)
I have to say at this point that a ban of Jtdirl is no longer out of the question for me.?Eloquence 22:07, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)
At the point where your behavior became so crass and clearly in violation of what this community stands for, it was only logical for me to bring up the question of whether you should be allowed to persist in this kind of behavior, as we have clear rules on these matters.
To compare a tongue-in-cheek remark like "valiant defender of truth" to the kind of personal attacks you have made against me -- that I don't know what I'm talking about, that my prose is poorly written, convoluted etc., that I tried to rewrite the article based on the claims of a single person, that I wanted to turn all of Wikipedia into some kind of anti- Catholic bashfest -- is quite obviously inaccurate. You have a long history of rudeness and it would be helpful if you would begin to acknowledge at least that, for this would be the first step towards better cooperation.
So why then accuse me of a 'pro-catholic bias' and censoring criticism of MT, when I was doing nothing of the sort, merely trying to NPOV an article and give stuff not about MT its own article?
Because moving away everything that is critical while then providing a one-paragraph-summary thereof is not even close to neutral.
Which is why, I suppose, every edit I made for ages tonight was screwed around when you went in and began changing past tense to present tense
Oh please. I don't give a hoot about past or present tense. I have told you a zillion times before that you should not complain about lost changes if you don't try to resolve one matter before making the next change.
That cannot always be done, of course, but there are reasonable courses of actions in the cases where it can't (act based on established precedent, hold a vote, ask Jimbo etc.). Just trying to get "your way or the highway" will not lead to any kind of solution.
More threats from 'The User Who Does Not Make Threats', eh?
Huh? Where exactly is the threat in the above paragraph?
I have co-operated with many people on wikipedia. The only fights I have had here in ages have been with you
That's funny. My mailbox is full of long flames written by you which have not been directed at me. Look, James, everyone who knows even a little bit about you knows that you frequently resort to attacking people personally. You often apologize later when these attacks are directed at regulars, and that is good. But why do you attack people in the first place? Isn't it obvious that this whole conflict would never have arisen if you had just made your suggestion for changes on the talk pages and tried to find a solution together with me? Do you think that I am so incredibly biased that it is not possible to work with me?
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
The simple reality is that most people do not know much about the criticisms concerning Mother Teresa,
For whatever it is worth, I can personally testify to the truth of this part of what Erik is saying. Ideologically, I'm the sort of person likely to be eager to be critical of Mother Theresa, and yet, until a couple of years ago, I had not the least clue of the secular (Hitchens) criticisms of her work and her order.
--Jimbo