On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 03:55:24PM +0200, elian wrote:
Hello,
<discussion of perceived pro-Israeli bias on pages about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict snipped>
The problem is that most of the people who know a lot about the issue are strongly partisan one way or the other, and that on the wikipedia most of the people are strongly pro-Israeli. As much as they *try* to be NPOV about things, it's understandably very hard to do on issues close to your heart, particularly when you don't have people forcefully and *knowledgably* putting dissenting views.
I think you find that if you try and edit these pages for extra balance, you find yourself trying to justify this with people who have spent a lot more time studying the issue, even if it is only one side of it, and consequently it's very hard to win an argument on the topic. Additionally, most of us *know* we don't know enough about the issues to be able to justify editing them. On other topics, such as, say, computer related topics, I have enough confidence in my own knowledge to argue with people about issues. I suspect this problem applies to many of the more prolific Wikipedia contributors.
I can't see these articles improving until we have more contributors with genuine expertise and a broader set of perspectives on the issue.
This is not to demean the people who have worked on these articles - I believe you have all tried your best in good faith. However, I also honestly believe that they are not NPOV at this stage.