Well, good luck. As far asproportion of massacre
articles -- get used to it. We live in an age now
where even minor massacres of 40 people or less -- (
hardly newsworthy )-- will be recorded for posterity.
Its likely that the only thing that should be done
with these is to organize them -- challenges to their
validity will no doubt come about -- and we need to
have some sort of borroboration. But as far as
factual entries -- If my neighbors cats were massacred
last night , as a matter of fact -- by what right
could one argue to scrub this fact? The challenger
tends to use a lack of "verifiable substantiation" as
a fact -- but frankly there are things in this world
that are very real -- and the facts written about
these cases sometimes do not reflect the reality.
Its a tough call. The important thing is to treat the
issue reasonably -- ascertain, certify and maintain a
level of reasonability of the parties -- and keep it
civil. With issues not personally of attachment,
there is a danger of taking a stand too quickly --
picking one "side" over the other will moreoften
excacerbate things.
Acrimony or bias, or spite, disingenuousness,
disinterest, and misinformation -- are all easily
picked up on, and defeat the purpose of moderating a
debate.
-S-
It strikes me
as increasingly obvious that some
concerted effort to be as
NPOV as possible on the Israeli-Palestinian issue
is necessary, as it's
starting to be one of the more frequent edit wars,
and distributed
throughout the wiki, even in places you might not
expect.
Two issues in particular that have come up lately,
one from each side:
1. [[User:BL]] is mass-adding the contents of
palestineremembered.com --
massive lists with hundreds of subpages comprising
every village (defined
as 10 or more people) destroyed in the 1948 war,
every "massacre" (defined
as 10 or more people) committed or purportedly
committed during that war
(little effort is made to distinguish), and a
whole
host of other
information that's difficult if not impossible
to
verify.
Even if it weren't for the difficulty in verifying
this information, it
strikes me as somewhat odd that we'd have 300
pages
dedicated to Arabs
killed in 1948, and only a single page dedicated
to
the Armenian genocide,
or the Pontian Genocide, or the Hutu-Tutsi
genocide, and so on. I don't
think it'd be a good idea to add 10,000 pages
or
so, one for each village
("village" defined as 10 people or more)
destroyed
in each of those
conflicts. And if we're going to have a
separate
page for every instance
of civilian deaths during a war, WW2 alone would
be
another 10,000 pages or
so.
2. [[User:RK]] is, as is probably obvious, somewhat
of a pro-Israeli
activist, and is becoming difficult to clean up.
The latest thing I've
noticed is him adding 2-paragraph-long attacks on
Arab anti-Semitism to
articles such as [[George Washington]] and
[[Benjamin Franklin]], in the
guise of "defending" their
"tarnished" reputations
against charges of
anti-Semitism stemming from little-known
fabricated
quotes.
Not to single out these two users in particular;
they're the two that come
to mind at first. And these two issues in
particular are also being dealt
with on talk pages. But it's becoming clear
that
it will be very difficult
to catch all of these, so perhaps some more
concerted effort is needed.
I'm not sure exactly what to propose, but it
seems
as a minimum we need a
group of several people who are not particularly
partial to either side --
but who are knowledgeable about the issues -- to
essentially police
(hopefully in as unconfrontational a way as
possible) this sort of stuff.
The problem is that those most knowledgeable and
interested in spending a
great deal of time writing articles on these
topics
are often those who are
most partisan to one side or the other.
Suggestions?
-Mark
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