Dear Wikipedians,
I've wanted to write this letter for a long time, but has delayed it deeming the upkeep of Wikipedia principles more important than my comfort. But the principles become broken anyway, and my comfort is as well gone; therefore I'll tell you what troubles me below.
It is not a secret that Wikipedia is at occasions the scene of massive content wars between the supporters of various positions. This is natural and expectable, the resolution coming at the end of each such war being an improvement to the original article. However, there's one content war that is unique, in several ways. It concerns the Arab-Israeli, and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.
During the recent months, Wikipedia has been the target of almost daily twiddling, in sum amounting to vandalism, from different supporters of the Arab position on the internet, most often editing the page anonymously. I do not oppose them stating their views; however, their style of modifying bits here and there, copy & pasting copyrighted articles, linking to pages of explicitly propagandist nature, coupled with the fact that they do not have a clue of what NPOV and Wikipedia in general is all about, creates a serious problem.
On the other side of this equation, however, there's me. There aren't too many people who are aware of the complex history of the region on Wikipedia; out of them, there are fewer less who are ready to share they knowledge (by risking to pace on the mine-field of political discussions). Although I do not claim to be deeply knowledgeable, it is often only up to me to include the Israeli perspective in these articles.
This is not to say that I don't get any help from you - I often do, and I'm deeply grateful for it. But unfortunately, I am one man, yet what I face is a whole horde of anonymous trolls. Just removing random changes and fixing "omissions" takes all the time I can spare for Wikipedia; considering the growing popularity of the site, I have to admit that my outlook on further contribution grows grimmer; needless to say that this disappoints me, as I have a deep sympathy to the Wikipedia effort, and politics (in forms relevant to this discussion) are far from being on the list of my favorite topics.
The basic premise of the Wiki concept is that in an open environment, an article which can be edited by many participants, enjoys peer cooperation, and as a result becomes better. I feel that this premise cannot work in this case, as the troll cut-ins are random, and they certainly are not interested in improving the article. The situation is too heated-up to allow normal cooperation.
I should make it clear that in such an environment, my own ability to write good-quality content (that is belonging to a NPOV, researched, carefully-worded) is impaired. It is not just my personal comfort that suffers; trolling does hurt Wikipedia by creating biased content, which could, if uninterrupted, in the long run jeopardize Wikipedia's reputation as a source representative and respective of different perspectives, and showing understanding to various positions, not just one.
My request for you, then, is to block some of the most contested articles (the list can be discussed elsewhere) from being edited by anonymous ("IP-only") users. Logged-in users will have access; whoever wishes to include his points, will be able to do it in the traditional Wiki fashion - by debate and cooperation. It seems to me as the optimal way of promoting the peaceful conclusion of this content war - by disarmament, and minimal impairing of Wiki rights.
If you have any other proposals - I'll be glad to know them. I do not know which course we shall ultimately take, but I am confident that it is in our power to bring about a proper, comprehensive solution for this situation.
With deepest respect, Uri Yanover
At 10:18 AM 7/31/02 +0200, Uri Yanover wrote:
A long eMail about problems with the [[controverial issue]]s of Palestine and Israel.
I'm not sure folks should be blocked from making anonymous contributions, but what I would like you to do, if you have the time and expertise is to do something about the shape the articles have gotten into.
For example, the Palestine article has become quite long and unwieldy, impossible really to read or edit. Is there some graceful way it would be broken up into managable pieces? For example, could some of the history get moved, perhaps into articles on Canaan, or the Philistines or Judea or Roman occupation of Judea?
There is no need to feel like the Little Dutch Boy. You are not alone in your view that the pages should be accurate nor are your opponents.
Fred Bauder
On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Uri Yanover wrote:
It is not a secret that Wikipedia is at occasions the scene of massive content wars between the supporters of various positions. This is natural and expectable, the resolution coming at the end of each such war being an improvement to the original article. However, there's one content war that is unique, in several ways. It concerns the Arab-Israeli, and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.
During the recent months, Wikipedia has been the target of almost daily twiddling, in sum amounting to vandalism, from different supporters of the Arab position on the internet, most often editing the page anonymously. I do not oppose them stating their views; however, their style of modifying bits here and there, copy & pasting copyrighted articles, linking to pages of explicitly propagandist nature, coupled with the fact that they do not have a clue of what NPOV and Wikipedia in general is all about, creates a serious problem.
On the other side of this equation, however, there's me. There aren't too many people who are aware of the complex history of the region on Wikipedia; out of them, there are fewer less who are ready to share they knowledge (by risking to pace on the mine-field of political discussions). Although I do not claim to be deeply knowledgeable, it is often only up to me to include the Israeli perspective in these articles.
I hold opinions opposite to your viewpoint in these matters (pro-Palestine), and from this end the problem looks very different. There are tons of Middle East articles, and they're far too large, and (IMO) are generally only NPOV on the surface, the deep bias is Israeli.
When I touched some of these articles, my additions and changes were generally reverted, and the original (imo) biased viewpoints often strengthened. There were at least four people doing this, you included, and it made me feel very powerless and depressed about Wikipedia in its entirety. (This is part of the reason I've called for an npov-dispute page, to be linked to from articles like this).
However, it appears the situation has changed. Browsing a few of the articles lightly today I find they're less biased than they used to be, and from your comments it appears there are fewer stone-walling people maintaining them.
Any conclusions? I still think most of these pages aren't really npov. Someone suggested splitting up the articles and shortening them - I think that would be a very good idea. I also think these articles should be marked much more clearly as being controversion - so that people won't so easily be provoked by the content being passed off as encyclopedic facts.
While I'm not up to date as to the current content of these articles, I consider the earlier (and perhaps current) large scale bias in the article to be just as big a problem as small but numerous vandalisms.
-- Daniel
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