This thread basically encapsulates my frustration over the occasional
POV disputes that flare up on [[Malaysia]]-related articles. When I
first came here more than a year ago, I felt many of our articles
covering Malaysia were fine, i.e. [[Bumiputra]], [[Malaysia]],
[[Mahathir bin Mohamad]]. A year later, I'm horrified at the state of
these articles. Two of them have NPOV notices; all of them have been
subject to pointless edit wars and constant NPOVing and POVing, wasting
a tremendous amount of time. Recently, one anon has been reverting
[[Malaysia]] to his biased version (which practically everyone involved
on the article was and is reverting - recently, Malbear rephrased some
of the factual statements the anon made, which hopefully will pacify
this POV warrior). But I'm truly fed up with being a tiny drop in an
ocean of editors who would almost certainly be unchecked in their POVing
if not for me and two or three others. I wonder what these articles will
look like around this time next year, as I've given up doing any NPOVing
work on articles related to Malaysian politics that doesn't involve a
quick revert.
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])
Delirium wrote:
I don't think we're doubting that there are
Wikipedians. What's
doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system,
producing quality articles on controversial topics. A quick look
reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either:
engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable
people abandon them. [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in
edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people
have given up on that mess. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles
seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some
"pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a
group of advocates. There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still
pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of
people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a
controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off
eventually, so the article quality suffers.
The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but
POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good
contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular
issue, are a major problem. The neutral arbiters tend to be people
without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them
to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring
to the editing process.
-Mark