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)