Including side-notes about every well-known controversial opinion can clutter up an article and detract from its usefulness. "The Earth is generally accepted to be a spheroid with average radius 6360 km. The [[flat-earthers]] think it is a flat plane, but debate whether it circular, square, or has edges at all. Some flat-earthers think that both sides of a flat earth are inhabited." It might be appropriate to start a custom of having a section titled "Other Perspectives" or some such at the end of an article, before the references and see-alsos. The body of the article can then present accepted collective understanding of a subject, which most readers will expect to find in a respectable resource, while allowing space to note controversial or popular fringe view. References to that section could be made from the rest of the text. [To this end, and for other reasons, it would be nice to auto-generate footnotes...] For instance, one might write: [with autogenerated footnotes] "Famous impossible constructions include trisecting the angle[[Footnote:#Other perspectives]] and squaring the circle." ==Other perspectives== There are a number of amateur mathematicians, known to others in the field as 'angle trisectors', who continue to work on constructions for trisecting an angle, disbelieving a long-standing (and three-page-long) proof that this is impossible. They are infamous for the persistence of their correspondence with any mathematician willing to review their constructions. -- +sj+

Phil Sandifer wrote: In this case, I don't think it's directly analogous. The views of the right-wing Israeli settlers are pretty relevant to the issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations... -Mark

Phil Sandifer wrote: Has the ArbCom actually ruled that LaRouche ought not to be mentioned in articles that do not directly pertain to LaRouche? Or is it more accurate to say that one particular user with a history of problems was instructed not to do that? It's an important distinction, because it is not for the ArbCom to make broad rulings on matters of content alone. --Jimbo

My take on it right now is that lance6wins edits from what can be generally termed a partisan viewpoint. It is difficult to adequately characterize his viewpoint in simple terms, for example I don't think he is a settler, although he may be. Lance6win's perspective is similar to that of [[Daniel Pipes]], a relatively well know commentator. I think that perspective is significant and ought to be included in articles relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but ought to be identified either by reference to the perspective taken or the source of the material, in the case of the radio station its perspective is well known to Israelis but can be difficult to characterize to those unfamiliar with such nuances. At any rate identifying the perspective of material added to an article is the responsibility of the person who adds it. Simply taking that perspective and inserting it into the article as the truth is not acceptable; it needs to be attributed in some way which identifies it. Fred

Somewhere in between - the ruling was that "Original work which originates from Lyndon LaRouche and his movement may be removed from any Wikipedia article in which it appears other than the article Lyndon LaRouche and other closely related articles." and that "Supporters of Lyndon LaRouche are instructed not to add references to Lyndon directly to articles except where they are highly relevant, and not to engage in activities that might be perceived as "promotion" of Lyndon LaRouche." So the ruling was not targeted at one specific user, but rather at the class of users who support LaRouche. -Snowspinner On Sep 23, 2004, at 4:19 AM, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote: