On 02/13/04 at 12:16 PM, Delirium delirium@rufus.d2g.com said:

I'm a bit undecided here, but I'd suggest assuming good faith. It's clear that OneVoice has a particular political ideology, but I'm not convinced he's unwilling to work with others.

OneVoice may be sincere about wanting to work with others but as far as actually discussing the issues goes I have found I get absolutely nowhere with him on the Talk pages. A sense of working together in a collaborative fashion towards a collective goal -- describing the issues in a neutral way without taking sides -- simply doesn't emerge. For example, see the discussion on [[Talk:Elon Peace Plan]]. The text as it now stands seems pretty innocuous, but OneVoice kept insisting on removing any specific details of the plan and only including platitudes. Assertions he made were even contradicted by information presented on the plan's website, and he studiously avoided meaningful debate. After getting nowhere, I asked for the page to be protected and it remained so for a couple of weeks.

The situation repeated itself with [[The People's Plan]]. In his first version, OneVoice included specifics of the initiative, but then immediately removed them. I reintroduced them, as it seemed like vital information. He insisted otherwise and tried to impose a quid pro quo with the Elon article which made absolutely no sense, as can be seen on the Talk page. Now, the amount of background information to be included in each of these articles was debatable, but in no way could we dispense with a brief summary of the details (ie, citizenship issues) -- fundamental information after all.

More recently, an article called [[Terrorism against Israel in 2004]] was started in early January by an anon user and OneVoice (companion articles for earlier years were also created). As can be seen from the page histories, initially it was a timeline of Israeli victims of atrocities. Danny was furious about this article and left an angry comment at the top of the Talk page. I agreed: I thought it was basically a propaganda exercise. User BL took it upon himself to salvage the thing by renaming it [[Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2004]] and adding Israeli atrocities to give it more balance. OneVoice insisted on removing the Palestinian listings for a variety of convoluted reasons given on the Talk page. I agreed with BL's actions, and reverted OneVoice, and also reverted his repeated efforts to undo the redirect from [[Terrorism against Israel in 2004]]. As a reward for our efforts, OneVoice listed BL and me on [[Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress]], accusing BL and me of being the same person.

The situation was similar with [[Terrorism against Israelis]] which Eloquence renamed to something else last year, someone else named back, and last week Eloquence again renamed again to [[Violence against Israelis]]. OneVoice refused to accept the name change and kept trying to undo the redirect leading to the situation where people were editing ''both'' versions (!). Again, I had Ed protect the redirect. Tim Starling pointed out to me that there still many links pointing to the article's old name, and so I started renaming the links to the article under its current name, but OneVoice started reverting those as well. As can been seen on the Talk page of [[Violence against Israelis]], OneVoice and another like-minded recent arrival, StarOfDavid, insist not only that every description of atrocities against Israeli's in Wikipedia include language which implies passing moral judgement against those who perpetrate the crimes but that Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression are in no way comparable. In OneVoice's worldview, Israelis are always the victims and the Palestians are all terrorists.

This afternoon, OneVoice kept trying to delete the following text from the first paragraph of [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict]]

<quote> The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians revolves today around these two issues:

* The fate of the occupied Palestinian territories - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. * The fate of the Palestinian refugees.

While the latter issue has always been a part of the conflict the aforementioned issue was introduced into it in 1967 during the Six day war. Other conflicts related to these two have also sprung up at a later stage. It is those two issues that both parties agree must be solved before a just and lasting peace can be established. </quote>

His argument was: "The article starts with a statement that the conflict is based upon occupation and refugees. This is disputed. [...] The conflict began not later than 1929 and perhaps no later than 1920. At that time there was neither occupation nor refugees. The bases of the conflict can not be events that would not take place for another 20 years."

In vain I tried pointing out to him that the operative word was TODAY -- it wasn't an analysis of historical roots. He refused to acknowledge this, and after several reversions I asked another sysop to protect the page. Why he wanted the text deleted I still don't completely understand; it wasn't like he was offering an alternative reading.

Perhaps Delirium is nonethless right in assuming good faith, but I think it will take a herculean amount of coaching for OneVoice to ever genuinely fully understand and embrace the NPOV philosophy. Personally, I don' t think I have the patience and stamina for the task.

V.