Addressing bias in Malaysian political articles - WikiEN-l

5 Oct 2004

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 on 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]])