I have looked at a couple of articles, [[Anwar Ibrahim]] and [[Education in
Malaysia]]. I see a few sharp words but nothing like the protracted deadlock
that can result from contested points of view in certain instances on
Wikipedia. You all seem polite and restrained.
Fred
From: John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 21:05:04 +0800
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Addressing bias in Malaysian political articles
I have posted two or three times to [[WP:RFC]] (a few months apart),
twice to [[WP:VP]] (two or three weeks apart), and once on [[WP:PR]]
(regarding [[Anwar Ibrahim]]'s potential to become a featured article)
for help on addressing this, but since there's still no response, I have
no choice but to ask for help on the mailing list.
Several Malaysian editors have expressed doubts about the (N)POVness of
several articles related to Malaysian politics. Since I arrived last
year, things have only deteriorated. Even [[Malaysia]] has not been
spared - the second half doesn't mince its words in showing its open
criticism of the government, declaring the court that judged Anwar to be
a kangaroo court (the least that could have been done was to explain
that the justice involved was unknown and inexperienced and other such
reasons for accusing the government of unfair manipulation), and at one
point, makes the blanket statement that "almost anything to do with the
government involves corruption". I'm in the process of NPOVing this.
[[Anwar Ibrahim]] and [[Bumiputra]] both have NPOV notices on them, and
there's been a furious discussion on both Talks where much has been
hashed out but little has come out to improve the NPOV value of both
articles, beyond the effort of those who originally complained. (An
excellent deal of other work was done on [[Anwar Ibrahim]], though.) A
storm is brewing in [[Malaysian New Economic Policy]] which is overtly
pro-NEP in the beginning and suddenly switches to full-blown opposition
with completely inappropriate wording, directly stating the Malays are
"robbing" the Chinese and Indians.
The main issue here is that several editors have been doing great work
expanding these articles, but are not wording their edits in accord with
our NPOV policy. Sometimes crucial facts and opinions of those
supporting the government are not available at all, creating an
unbalanced impression, such as in [[Anwar Ibrahim]] (I NPOVed the last
section as a lot of material was available on it before complaining on
the Talk, whereupon it just degraded into all hot air and no actual work
done on NPOVing the article).
Another issue is that [[User:Malbear]], one of the few users other than
me actively involved in these articles has accused me of deleting
material that I don't agree with, such as on [[Education in Malaysia]].
Malaysian politics is highly impassioned, so I would really appreciate
if someone could tell me and [[User:Jpatokal]] that we're just paranoid
and overreacting, or that there really is an issue with how NPOV
Malaysian political articles are.
Thanks very much,
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l