I'm going to be a bit firm here, but I want to push for a more peaceful way of interacting that's more likely to lead to productive solutions. Both RK and Jtdirl are valued contributors in their own right.
Robert, I really think you should moderate your tone, because I think that doing so will make your comments more effective.
Robert wrote:
For reasons I do not understand, Jtdirl is being dishonest about my work on Wikipedia.
It would be better to say "For reasons I do not understand, it seems that Jtdirl has misperceived that nature of my work on Wikipedia."
'misperceived' leaves open the question of a moral judgment: was it deliberate? Was it an oversight? Was it stupidity? Was it forgetfulness?
'seems' leaves open the possibility that with further discussion, it may turn out that you were wrong. 'seems' has you only expressing your current understanding of the situation, as opposed to a formal and final judgment.
Making a moral judgment in a case like this is likely to turn people off. And, really, it runs a very strong risk of being _not true at all_. It strikes me as more likely that jtdirl is mistaken, rather than actively dishonest. Or that you are mistaken.
"rv yet more RK censorship. Does he ever stop? Does he have a clue what NPOV means?"
I would also recommend jtdirl to avoid such terms as 'censorship' and 'does he have a clue'? These are inflammatory and likely to give rise to hard feelings rather than productive co-operation.
Better would be 'rv RK. RK, I'm unconvinced that your edit here is NPOV, can we chat on the talk page to reach a compromise?'
--Jimbo
The problem was that an important line lost in an edit had been reinstated by me in a carefully worded NPOV manner. The issue was being discussed on the talk page. As he regularly does, RK swept in and deleted the paragraph including my line without discussion, announcing with his usual infallibility that it had previously been discussed, without comment on the talk page. This is his regular behaviour on this and related pages. If he doesn't approve he denounces it as "anti-semite" or "pro-Arab" and deletes it on sight. As Fred Bauder pointed out, the page is rather too POV in its pro-Israeli contents. Any attempts to so much as mention that there is any problem fall foul of RK.
The line I had added in related the fact that Israel, which was created as a typical 'nation-state', suffers from the same problem that exists or has existed in Ireland, Poland, Germany and some other names, namely that the 'state' (the civil governmental entity) and the 'nation' (a shared sense of culture, identity, heritage, idenfication etc) are not coterminus. Normally they are. Where they are not, and the state governs only part of the nation, or a territory larger than the nation - the case in Israel - problems arise over how does one deal those who do see themselves as part of the nation but aren't included in the state, or, and this is Israel's problem, those within the state who don't define themselves as part of the nation, in Israel's case the Palestinians. The Oslo Accord proposed one solution; those places in what is now Israel where there is a different sense of national identity and sense of nationhood, are given their own right of self-government, in effect their own 'nation-state'. The sentence was not perscriptive (there are articles on the detail of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute) merely descriptive and NPOV, a basic political science analysis of the theorectical basis of the modern problem (as to the original problem, claims of Israel 'displacing' Palestine; no-one seriously suggests displacing Israel, which has a clear and unambiguous right to exist, a right which must be acknowledged in any solution.)
I called RK's behaviour censorship because I have to say that it how it looks. On the Israel page and on many others, RK seems to spend most of his time removing other people's work, calling it POV (ie not his POV which he thinks is NPOV), anti-semitic and pro-Arab, ie not pro-Israeli enough for his own liking. I can understand the sensitivity of the Jewish people, given all they have experienced in terms of rascism and bigotry. Some pro-Israeli contributors have been excessively protective. (One on the talk page regards everyone in Israel as part of what he called the "Jewish nation", which he equates with Israel. That would come as a surprise to Palestinians, who most definitely do not regard themselves as part of the Israeli nation, much less a Jewish one.
But RK goes way overboard (as shown by his disgraceful treatment of Anthere), removing what he does not like and calling everyone who disagrees with him anti-semitic. By his actions he damages the very cause he fights for, reducing the charge of anti-semitism from a serious charge to a term of abuse, while keeping out from 'his' pages anything that might seriously offer intellectual insight, as opposed to a pro-Israeli slant. Wiki will suffer, and the cause for which RK so passionately believes will suffer, by RK's self-righteous suffication of debate.
JT
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