Hoi,
Vandalism is defined as anything else: by majority. If you have enough people to make a policy you make it, and it gets applied. BTW, most of the times it works and it makes a pretty democratic way of life, yet simply expressing the will of the majority does not automatically lead to label the Holocaust as "Holocaust". Hitler and Mussolni were democratically elected, the "democratic" rulers who followed them weren't, so... It really depends on your community and on how you can analyze the subject all toghether.
In your case I'd say people seem more interested in ending a war than in having a majority POV expressed as such. Probably the best thing to do in such cases is to define an external authority (as an independent source of information) that can be trusted as "mainstream" on the subject. I have to warn you that no such choice is going to be perceived as "perfect" (cfr. ISO and languages), yet at least you won't have a few local wikimedians "playing God" over the others.
There cannot be an immediate list of all such possible external references, because the field is too wide. Possibly you might want to ask your ArbCom to analyze such edit wars and to define such a source for a given subject when needed. In this case you can have a simple "step aside when conflict is too high" policy and an associated dynamic list of authoritative sources for the issue. Maybe it would be better if you avoided national sorces any time a wider international source is available, it would help keeping out of the mine field that originates most of such edit wars.
Berto 'd Sera Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andre Engels Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 5:01 AM To: wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Sensitive subjects on some Wikipedias
2007/7/14, Berto 'd Sera albertoserra@ukr.net:
Minorities don't win edit wars. If they get even close to win... they get banned for vandalism, and that's it. That's the way a wiki works and we
all
find it normal.
Hmmm... Does it? So how is one to define vandalism so that it includes this? I'm quite interested, because in one case where I'm involved (I got asked to come in and look at the matter) that's certainly not how it worked. The page got locked because of the edit war until they would agree. Since they are not going to do that, the page will be locked until eternity, in the version that I think is by far the minority one.