Viajero,
List me as "abstaining" from the VfD vote: so it wasn't unanimous, there was at least one abstention. If I thought VfD was a helpful process, I'd have voted "keep".
I agree that the article wasn't well written, but I don't think /voting to eliminate it/ is the answer. Perhaps BLANKING the content and starting fresh, with a stub would be better.
Part of the problem in politics is that advocates (like Arafat) espouse various positions. Sometimes the change is gradual over time, or sudden at a particular point. There have even been claims that a politician will say different things to different audiences on the same day!
The hardest political position to describe is one which the advocate doesn't want to be "caught" advocating; he tells his supporters one thing and his critics another. The so- called "secret agenda". In American politics, some people think Bush and Cheney have a secret agenda in Iraq, e.g., of self-enrichment via Haliburton. In Middle Eastern politics, some people think Arafat seeks the full elimination of Israel and talks peace only as means to that end.
It's exceedingly difficult to figure out what a politician is /really/ saying, in such a case. Is he telling the truth, and his opponents are TWISTING his words? Or is he speaking with forked tongue, and his opponents are REVEALING the deception?
I don't think Wikipedia is called upon to make the ultimate judgment. Rather, we should say things like:
* Former Israeli prime minister X believes that Arafat says one thing and does another * Islamic leader Y believes that Arafat has always sincerely sought to live side by side in peace with Jews
If it's a question of statements being taken out of context, we can help by quoting lengthier passages. But it's up to the /reader/ to decide whether the man /really/ means what he says.
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
On 01/09/04 at 11:58 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com said: > Viajero,
List me as "abstaining" from the VfD vote: so it wasn't unanimous, there was at least one abstention. If I thought VfD was a helpful process, I'd have voted "keep".
I agree that the article wasn't well written, but I don't think /voting to eliminate it/ is the answer. Perhaps BLANKING the content and starting fresh, with a stub would be better.
Ed,
In THEORY I agree with what you say.
In PRACTICE however I have problems with your ideas.
First, that article was listed for a week or so. Neither you nor any other of the half dozen or so people who have said on this list today that the article shouldn't have been deleted took the trouble to try to salvage it. Neither did I. I simply didn't have the time or energy for it. Previous to that, it lay in the gizzard of WP for a good three, four months untouched.
It is fine in principal to be against deleting articles but that implies ACTION in concrete terms, but since we are a collection of volunteers, this doesn't always follow. While I have nothing against incomplete articles, of which there are obviously many in WP, I am strongly against have genuinely *bad* articles -- such as the Palestinian viewpoints article -- in the encyclopedia. They should be fixed immediately or deleted -- one or the other.
Not having a mechanism for deleting "bad" articles places the onus on the WP community to fix them. Any crank can come along and write up some nutty POV and leave it for the rest of us to deal with. Maybe for 99% of the articles in WP that is acceptable; for the remaining 1% on controversial subjects such as the Middle East, it isn't.
To repeat what I said above: I could have devoted an afternoon or an evening to salvage the article; so could have you, or Danny, or Zero or another user. But no one volunteered. At the risk of offending the author, it was better that it was deleted.
Pragmatically yours,
V.