[WikiEN-l] Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (some responses)

[Stan Shebs]

Abe Sokolov wrote:

> Stan Shebs shebs at apple.com wrote:
>
> And the bulk of the content is from - you guessed it - 172! This
> is the hallmark of his style; while there are usually no gross
> misrepresentations of fact, the wording is so relentlessly slanted
> it would take a week to clean up, at the end of which he would just
> revert it all in one fell swoop. It's completely exasperating; I
> finally stopped looking at anything he touches, scrubbed it all
> out of my watchlist, and regained Wikipedia-nirvana. Even so, I still 
> worry that the unabashed socialist viewpoint will
> hurt WP's credibility as an impartial recorder.
>
>
> None of the sources are "socialist" by any stretch of the imagination. 
> Go check them. All of them fall with in the mainstream of the academic 
> literature, in the mainstream of Western political science and Russia 
> studies, which you'll find is quite often far harder on Yeltsin than 
> this article. (see, e.g., the analyses of democratization inspired by 
> Guillermo O'Donnell's "delegative democracy").
>
I have indeed compared your wording with the purported sources
(not on this article, but on others that we have discussed
previously), and there are significant differences. Your additions
almost always describe rightwingers in ways that suggest that they
have dishonorable ulterior motives, while leftwingers are described
in ways that suggest their motives are pure and aboveboard. For
instance, if a rightwinger gives a reason, you usually put it in
doublequotes and follow up immediately with an counterstatement,
while leftwingers' stated reasons for an action are usually given
without qualification or counterstatement. It's a sly technique -
nothing untrue is ever being said, but the audience gets a message
nonetheless.  As a leftwinger myself, I don't really mind that
rightwingers get a few putdowns, but I think objective reporting is
sufficient to demonstrate their evil :-) and rightwingers reading WP
will seize upon slanted wording as "proof" that WP as a whole is not
to be believed.

When Jimbo posted his message, from the way he described his reaction,
I knew right away where the content must have come from. As scientists
know, the best evidence for a theory is its predictive power!

> All fair minded users will recognize that Stan Shebs, along with Fred 
> Bauder, have been haplessly sniping at me for over a year and a half. 
> As usual, not one iota's worth of evidence is offered, but Stan 
> launches into the ad hominem bluster.

You know full well there's been all kinds of evidence offered, both
on this mailing list and on the talk pages. It's not really a good idea
to try to mislead people about this sort of thing, because it's all been
logged, archived, and indexed by Google even. For instance, there was
the episode where Somoza was a dictator but Stalin was not, and then
where the Berlin Airlift was mainly a publicity stunt.

>
> And I sincerely hope that this does get other users into the fold on 
> recent Russian history. Our articles in this area are very 
> underdeveloped and I'm not getting very far very fast being virtually 
> the only one making substantial contributions to them.

Perhaps they've been discouraged by your unenviable track record of
reverting other people's work? I certainly wasn't going to put an
hour of effort into something that you would revert in a second
without discussing it first.

Stan