JT wrote:
>1. Abe made a very useful and thought-provoking point about
>the useful of having RK on wiki, if only because his virtual
>waging of war on anyone who disagreed with him tended to
>lead people to be restrained in what they wrote on the Israel-
>Palestinian issue. Unfortunately RK went way to far. Far from
>being a useful restraining force he became a destructive
>individual who scared people away from wiki.
>...
I tend to agree. My first bad experience, in fact, with another user on
Wikipedia, was with RK over such an article. Luckily I was already hooked on
this crack pipe otherwise known as Wikipedia, so I just dealt with it (Larry
also helped to defuse the situation by neutralizing the disputed article -
which I thought was hopelessly POV against Palestinians). Since that time I
have refrained from doing any substantial work on these articles other than
reverting vandalism or fixing really bad formatting/organization.
It would still be a real pity if RK never came back; when he actually worked
in his area of trained expertise (biology) we made excellent to superior
contributions.
Many of us know a lot about certain controversial things that we may be /way/
to biased to write neutrally on. I for one, find it very difficult to write
neutrally for articles on homosexuality even though I know a lot about the
subject (from biased sources, of course), so I tend to stay away from making
substantive changes to those articles.
I wish RK could do the same thing with Israeli-Palestinian articles....
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)