[WikiEN-l] Stan Shebs/172
Abe Sokolov
abesokolov at hotmail.com
Sat Jun 5 06:38:02 UTC 2004
shebs at apple.com wrote:
Re: "Well, I've spent a bunch of time in the library checking 172's content,
and found some serious problems. Unfortunately, my attempts to discuss
it were so frustrating that I turned away from those articles, and it
now falls to others to fix them."
Since a lot of users buy into your distortions of the truth (users with whom
I'd like to work cooperatively) , I've enclosed in this e-mail excepts from
our two longest running interactions of the year. Despite your claims, I'm
sure that fair-minded users will see once and for all that I have struggled
to be as fair and helpful to you consistently. I think that they'll find
that in the end I should've really been the one guilty of all the things of
which you accuse me.
The first is from the talk page of History of the United States (1980-1988)
and the second is the discussion on the proposed reogranization of the Cold
War series.
-172
-------------
Taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:History_of_the_United_States_%281980-1988%29&action=edit
-------
==18 Feb 2004 [2]==
As long as somebody is sufficiently unsatisfied to put the notice up, it is
simply dishonest to remove it without their agreement; you have to get
positive agreement, not just declare that you think the arguments are
without merit.
:I simply stated that there were no arguments made against the current
version of the article. Now that you have cited some in this posting, a
justification for the neutrality dispute has been made. [[User:172|172]]
09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have asked repeatedly for you to add references to the scholarly works
upon which the various claims are based, still haven't seen anything.
:And I stated repeatedly that the endnotes would be inserted along with a
new section outlining the historiography. However, I now finally have some
concrete inquiries from you. I'll start you off with the following; ask if
you want more. I also took the time to find you some free access articles
online if you want quick (and free) overviews. [[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21
Feb 2004 (UTC)
The Sunbelt stuff is full of sweeping illogicalities; if the West is
conservative, then how is it that California is not? I live in Nevada, and
it's actually become '''more''' liberal in the past couple decades, because
of people moving in from elsewhere - it's certainly not a solid base for the
Repuglicans.
:''Reread'' the section on the Sunbelt and the New Right. These exceptions
are addressed. In other words, the increasingly Democratic voting patterns
in California in more recent years are briefly mentioned later in the
section. For a discussion of changing voting patterns in the Sunbelt in more
recent years, see Paul Starr, "An Emerging Democratic Majority" in Stanley
Greenberg and Theda Skocpol, eds., ''The New Majority'' (Yale University
Press, 1997) for . Starr's article was adapted and reprinted in
[http://www.prospect.org/print/V8/35/starr-p.html ''The American Prospect''
no. 35 (November-December 1997)]. On gentrification, the Sunbelt, and
cities, see Daphn Spain (1992) "A Gentrification Research Agenda for the
1990s." ''Journal of Urban Affairs'' 14:125-134 for a good general overview.
For the other side of the coin, see Douglas Glasgow's ''The Black
Underclass'' (1980), which studies the plight of African Americans in the
inner cities. For a more recent journal article see W.J. Wilson's "Studying
Inner-City Social Dislocations: The Challenge of Public Agenda Research."
''American Sociological Review'' 56:1-14. Going back a generation, the
political implications of the rise of the Sunbelt were heralded by
Kirkpatrick Sale ''Power Shift'' (1975). More recently, you have Lisa McGirr
''Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right'' (2001) I found
you a site with reviews and excepts from at the Princeton University Press
website if you want to take a look:
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7031.html. For more on the rise of
conservative sentiments in the late '70s early '80s, see ''The Politics of
Social Policy in the United States'', eds Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff
and Theda Skocpol. For your convenience once again, here are
[http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/4196.html more reviews]. Abramson,
Paul R., John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde. Change and Continuity in the
1980 Elections. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1983 comes to mind for
the elections of 1980 as a major political realignment. [[User:172|172]]
09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Supply-side economics is still being described as if "everybody knows" it's
bad, but I'll bet it has lots of respected defenders today who would take
exception to the description here; so it needs to be described neutrally,
not negatively.
:This shot seems to be coming from nowhere. Where is the article attacking
supply-side economics? The debate is over whether to blame either tax cuts
or runaway government spending for the deficit. However, this is merely a
side note in an article that provides a very general overview.
[[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC) Thomas Byrne Edsall's ''The
Political Economy of Inequality'' and Sidney Weintraub and Marvin Goodstein,
eds., ''Reaganomics in the Stagflation Economy'' (1983), discuss the Reagan
administration's economic policies. George Gildner's ''Wealth and Poverty''
(1981), deals with the economic ideology of the Reagan revolution. See also
Robert Heilbroner et al. ''The Debt and the Deficit'' (1989). On the
presidency, Ronnie Dugger, ''On Reagan'' (1983), is a hostile account.
Ackerman, Frank. Reaganomics: ''Rhetoric vs. Reality''. (1982) is another
hostile account. Roland Evans and Robert Novak ''The Reagan Revolution''
(1981) is an admiring chronicle. Laurence I. Barrett, ''Gambling with
History'' (1984) is another good source on Reagan in the White House.
[[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
And of course there's the extreme irony of casual references to "rightwing
military dictatorships in Latin America" by the same person who steadfastly
resists characterizing certain socialist leaders ([[Josef Stalin]]) as
dictators. I'm not quoting everything that I think is slanted, just an
assortment, because once again I've wasted my WP editing time trying to
convey the scope of the problem.
:First, the next time I hear this bullshit about me being a Stalinist, I am
taking it up to the mailing list. BTW, this paragraph was removed. To go on,
LaFeber's ''Inevitable Revolutions'' (1983) is still the seminal work on the
US in Central America. I found you a site citing reviews
[http://www.usd.edu/~amorriso/lafeber.htm here]. The articles cited don't
come with free access. Raymond Bonner's ''Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and
El Salvador'' is also a leading work on this subject, though starting off
with LaFeber would probably be best. [[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21 Feb 2004
(UTC)
::You said "Stalinist", not me, and the sentence "The Reagan administration
supplied funds and weapons to rightwing military dictatorships in Latin
America." is still there as I write, so that's a pretty definite use of the
D-word, plus the sentence after that says "Somoza family dictatorship". I
have no problem with the D-word, but it's certainly biased to accept it for
the rightwingers and not the leftwingers. Maybe just a word, but given your
energy to remove it from certain articles, I assume that you agree it's an
important word. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 14:12, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I know that this article is not representative of professionally-written US
history, because it's not at all like the books I've read - in fact most of
this I remember reading in nakedly-biased and poorly-researched articles in
leftie newspapers of the period.
:Well, what do you expect for a general overview on the past twenty years of
recent US history? And what books were those, BTW? For a general outline,
however, it isn't at all unorthodox. Do a search for course syllabi on yahoo
and google, for example, and you'll see similar outline sketches. If this is
too much to ask from you, I'll send you some more links. [[User:172|172]]
09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
::I'm going to have a pretty high expectation from someone who claims to be
a professional, reverts changes by others for being "emotional", and has a
habit of telling people not to give the "Fox News version". I haven't read
any book purporting to be a "general history of the US since 1980", I was
comparing to US history in general. I don't think course syllabi from the
net are authoritative; there are a lot of, shall we say, "less-abled"
professors. WP can only be as good as its sources, so we need to rely on the
leading authorities, not the assistant prof from Podunk U. [[User:Stan
Shebs|Stan]] 14:12, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
That's why it's important to know what books are to used as authorities -
I'll buy/checkout copies and compare content. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]]
06:25, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
:Thanks for the refs - LaFeber was already on my list, am visiting the
library this weekend. I note that your Reagan-era books are from
'''during''' his presidency, which isn't really adequate for perspective -
has nobody written anything in the 15 years since? [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]]
14:12, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
---------
---------
==18 Feb 2004 [2]==
As long as somebody is sufficiently unsatisfied to put the notice up, it is
simply dishonest to remove it without their agreement; you have to get
positive agreement, not just declare that you think the arguments are
without merit.
:I simply stated that there were no arguments made against the current
version of the article. Now that you have cited some in this posting, a
justification for the neutrality dispute has been made. [[User:172|172]]
09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I have asked repeatedly for you to add references to the scholarly works
upon which the various claims are based, still haven't seen anything.
:And I stated repeatedly that the endnotes would be inserted along with a
new section outlining the historiography. However, I now finally have some
concrete inquiries from you. I'll start you off with the following; ask if
you want more. I also took the time to find you some free access articles
online if you want quick (and free) overviews. [[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21
Feb 2004 (UTC)
The Sunbelt stuff is full of sweeping illogicalities; if the West is
conservative, then how is it that California is not? I live in Nevada, and
it's actually become '''more''' liberal in the past couple decades, because
of people moving in from elsewhere - it's certainly not a solid base for the
Repuglicans.
:''Reread'' the section on the Sunbelt and the New Right. These exceptions
are addressed. In other words, the increasingly Democratic voting patterns
in California in more recent years are briefly mentioned later in the
section. For a discussion of changing voting patterns in the Sunbelt in more
recent years, see Paul Starr, "An Emerging Democratic Majority" in Stanley
Greenberg and Theda Skocpol, eds., ''The New Majority'' (Yale University
Press, 1997) for . Starr's article was adapted and reprinted in
[http://www.prospect.org/print/V8/35/starr-p.html ''The American Prospect''
no. 35 (November-December 1997)]. On gentrification, the Sunbelt, and
cities, see Daphn Spain (1992) "A Gentrification Research Agenda for the
1990s." ''Journal of Urban Affairs'' 14:125-134 for a good general overview.
For the other side of the coin, see Douglas Glasgow's ''The Black
Underclass'' (1980), which studies the plight of African Americans in the
inner cities. For a more recent journal article see W.J. Wilson's "Studying
Inner-City Social Dislocations: The Challenge of Public Agenda Research."
''American Sociological Review'' 56:1-14. Going back a generation, the
political implications of the rise of the Sunbelt were heralded by
Kirkpatrick Sale ''Power Shift'' (1975). More recently, you have Lisa McGirr
''Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right'' (2001) I found
you a site with reviews and excepts from at the Princeton University Press
website if you want to take a look:
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7031.html. For more on the rise of
conservative sentiments in the late '70s early '80s, see ''The Politics of
Social Policy in the United States'', eds Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff
and Theda Skocpol. For your convenience once again, here are
[http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/4196.html more reviews]. Abramson,
Paul R., John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde. Change and Continuity in the
1980 Elections. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1983 comes to mind for
the elections of 1980 as a major political realignment. [[User:172|172]]
09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
::Heh, there's no lack of stupid stuff - but which of these are
authoritative? As someone who was personally in the Democratic caucus last
week that was so large that it had to move out onto the football field (got
to shake Kerry's hand, my wife practically mauled him :-) ), I'll say that
people who characterize Nevada as a conservative state don't know what
they're talking about. Dem/Rep split in Nevada is very nearly 50/50, and if
Bush hadn't come and told baldfaced lies about Yucca Mountain, Nevada would
have gone Demo and Gore would be in the White House today. [[User:Stan
Shebs|Stan]] 06:14, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
:::They're all "authoritative." They may be writing from one of competing
schools of thought or approaches, but if you can recognize this, it's no
problem. I can give you more, but this should be enough to give you steer
you in the direction of finding other works on the subject matter. BTW,
Who's describing Nevada as solidly conservative? No one's denying that there
aren't exceptions in "the Sunbelt." Nevada has Las Vegas and the gaming
industry. Often forgotten, Democrats can be competitive in Montana as well,
given the legacy of a strong union activity in the Western mining region of
the state. [[User:172|172]] 07:18, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Supply-side economics is still being described as if "everybody knows" it's
bad, but I'll bet it has lots of respected defenders today who would take
exception to the description here; so it needs to be described neutrally,
not negatively.
:This shot seems to be coming from nowhere. Where is the article attacking
supply-side economics? The debate is over whether to blame either tax cuts
or runaway government spending for the deficit. However, this is merely a
side note in an article that provides a very general overview.
[[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC) Thomas Byrne Edsall's ''The
Political Economy of Inequality'' and Sidney Weintraub and Marvin Goodstein,
eds., ''Reaganomics in the Stagflation Economy'' (1983), discuss the Reagan
administration's economic policies. George Gildner's ''Wealth and Poverty''
(1981), deals with the economic ideology of the Reagan revolution. See also
Robert Heilbroner et al. ''The Debt and the Deficit'' (1989). On the
presidency, Ronnie Dugger, ''On Reagan'' (1983), is a hostile account.
Ackerman, Frank. Reaganomics: ''Rhetoric vs. Reality''. (1982) is another
hostile account. Roland Evans and Robert Novak ''The Reagan Revolution''
(1981) is an admiring chronicle. Laurence I. Barrett, ''Gambling with
History'' (1984) is another good source on Reagan in the White House.
[[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
And of course there's the extreme irony of casual references to "rightwing
military dictatorships in Latin America" by the same person who steadfastly
resists characterizing certain socialist leaders ([[Josef Stalin]]) as
dictators. I'm not quoting everything that I think is slanted, just an
assortment, because once again I've wasted my WP editing time trying to
convey the scope of the problem.
:First, the next time I hear this bullshit about me being a Stalinist, I am
taking it up to the mailing list. BTW, this paragraph was removed. To go on,
LaFeber's ''Inevitable Revolutions'' (1983) is still the seminal work on the
US in Central America. I found you a site citing reviews
[http://www.usd.edu/~amorriso/lafeber.htm here]. The articles cited don't
come with free access. Raymond Bonner's ''Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and
El Salvador'' is also a leading work on this subject, though starting off
with LaFeber would probably be best. [[User:172|172]] 09:01, 21 Feb 2004
(UTC)
::You said "Stalinist", not me, and the sentence "The Reagan administration
supplied funds and weapons to rightwing military dictatorships in Latin
America." is still there as I write, so that's a pretty definite use of the
D-word, plus the sentence after that says "Somoza family dictatorship". I
have no problem with the D-word, but it's certainly biased to accept it for
the rightwingers and not the leftwingers. Maybe just a word, but given your
energy to remove it from certain articles, I assume that you agree it's an
important word. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 14:12, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
::::Just luck-of-the-draw about Stalin - Mugabe and Jong-il also came to
mind, I chose randomly. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 06:14, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
:::::I don't use the "D-word" ''arbitrarily''. But I am sorry about using
the using it ''inconsistently''. However, the biases affecting my usage of
"the D-word" go back to Max Weber, not Karl Marx. Let me elaborate. Going
back to Weber's concept of "sultanism," comparativists point out regimes
resting on patrimonial leadership, rather than rationalized modern
bureaucracies with generalized norms and procedures. Consider the Somozas,
the Trujillos, Saddam and his sons, Assad and his sons, Papa Doc and Baby
Doc, Batista, Ceausescu, the Kims, Macros, Idi Amin, Iran under the Shah,
and "Turkmenbashi." Since the defining feature of leadership here is low
institutionalization, this concept is not applied to all authoritarian
regimes. Among Communist regimes, I've only seen Romania and North Korea
classified as personalistic. BTW, for the benchmark work on this concept,
see Juan Linz and Alfred Stephan's ''Problems of Democratic Transition and
Consolidation'' (1996). Similarly, Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle
use the concept of "neopatrimonialism" in their account, which is the most
comprehensive work on the subject for Afica. To illustrate my point with an
example, I would avoid the "D-word" vis-à-vis China today, while using it
more loosely vis-à-vis the Somoza dynasty. Although this isn't the
ideological bias that you made it out to be, your post clearly highlighted
the confusion generated by the term's usage. Thanks for alterting me to
this. I'll try to avoid it all together on Wiki. And sorry for the "massive
verbiage." [[User:172|172]] 07:13, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I know that this article is not representative of professionally-written US
history, because it's not at all like the books I've read - in fact most of
this I remember reading in nakedly-biased and poorly-researched articles in
leftie newspapers of the period.
:Well, what do you expect for a general overview on the past twenty years of
recent US history? And what books were those, BTW? For a general outline,
however, it isn't at all unorthodox. Do a search for course syllabi on yahoo
and google, for example, and you'll see similar outline sketches. If this is
too much to ask from you, I'll send you some more links. [[User:172|172]]
09:01, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
::I'm going to have a pretty high expectation from someone who claims to be
a professional, reverts changes by others for being "emotional", and has a
habit of telling people not to give the "Fox News version". I haven't read
any book purporting to be a "general history of the US since 1980", I was
comparing to US history in general.
:::I wasn't referring to solely covering 1980-present. Survey US history
texts, however, will give you a brief overview in a single chapter. The more
general the better. Keep in mind, e.g., that we're often trying to sum up in
a single sentence what's being presented in any several of some of the
sources that I provided. In effect, writing such a general overview is a
process of summarizing and outlining. [[User:172|172]] 07:13, 22 Feb 2004
(UTC)
I don't think course syllabi from the net are authoritative; there are a lot
of, shall we say, "less-abled" professors. WP can only be as good as its
sources, so we need to rely on the leading authorities, not the assistant
prof from Podunk U. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 14:12, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
:::You're still confusing my point. The point is to compare course syllabi.
Perhaps I should've been more clear. Downloading about a dozen would enable
you to compare the syllabi, giving you a good idea of what's widely
published. Moreover, I wasn't saying that my standards are low for this
article. The Stalin crack left me a bit irritated, so perhaps I was getting
a bit snappy at the expense of clarity. Anyway, let me clarify my point.
Given such restrictive space constraints, the article can merely provide an
outline sketch of the Reagan years. It cannot be on par with the academic
literature; the historiography merely helps you sort out what belongs in
such a brief outline sketch.
That's why it's important to know what books are to used as authorities -
I'll buy/checkout copies and compare content. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]]
06:25, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
:Thanks for the refs - LaFeber was already on my list, am visiting the
library this weekend. I note that your Reagan-era books are from
'''during''' his presidency, which isn't really adequate for perspective -
has nobody written anything in the 15 years since? [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]]
14:12, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)
::Not all of them are from the eighties. Maybe I forgot to note which texts
had new editions. I'll add some more recent stuff, but I'm running short of
time now. [[User:172|172]] 02:08, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
----
[[User:172|172]], six weeks ago you agreed that it was POV to call rightwing
regimes "dictatorships" but not their leftwing counterparts, and yet after
all that time your only effort on this article has been to '''remove''' the
NPOV dispute notice. Since I'm not the sort to revert other people's changes
without prior discussion, I'll wait one day to see some changes in content
before re-adding the dispute notice. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 21:01, 6 Apr
2004 (UTC)
:Don't misrepresent me. I said that I tend to use the term more freely when
referring to personalistic regimes, irrespective of whether they're dubbed
"rightwing" or "leftwing" by some. If you have a problem with some of the
diction in the article, change it. That'll work out better than expecting me
to read your mind. [[User:172|172]] 10:25, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::I'm not going to bother touching the text unless you promise to improve on
my edit and not just revert the whole change without discussing it first.
I'm simply '''not''' going to get into an edit war on content here, which
means that if you revert me, my effort will have been completely wasted -
there are 200K+ articles that I could have been working on instead.
[[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 15:56, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
:::You're getting really jumpy. Please, just calm down. This isn't a big
deal. Make your changes, and I will compare the versions line by line.
[[User:172|172]] 23:09, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::::"Jumpy"? Not hardly - I'm leaning back in properly bad posture, full of
Cherry Garcia and a little drowsy... So, does the "compare the versions line
by line" amount to a promise that you will critique on the talk page first
rather than mass-revert? You may not think reverting is a big deal, but let
me clue you in - the people you revert really really hate it. [[User:Stan
Shebs|Stan]] 05:04, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
:::::If you insert something like "MUHA PINHEADS YOU ALL R WIERD U WIERDING
WIERD WIERDOS," a winner that I found off the deletion log, you'll get
reverted. Not having any idea about what you want to do, I cannot say how
I'll react to your changes. Really, I don't know what you want for me as of
this point. [[User:172|172]] 05:26, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Ya know, I've cleared out far more vandalism than you have, turned more junk
stubs into useful articles, am #44 among the most active editors on WP as a
whole, developed some of the standards by which other people write their
articles, and despite all this activity, have been involved in maybe 2 or 3
edit wars at most; it says a lot about you, that you think there's even the
remotest chance that I would vandalize this article. What I want is simple;
a promise not to revert my entire edit without discussing it here first. Is
that really so hard an undertaking? [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 17:48, 8 Apr
2004 (UTC)
:All a correlation implies causation fallacy! You seem to be suggesting that
you're characteristically civil and reasonable, whereas I'm not, as
evidenced by your observations that (a) you're a more active user than I am
(b) but get into fewer edit wars. Ironically, such assertions ''really''
cause arguments to turn personal, accomplishing nothing while generating
personal feuds on a daily basis on WP. While I try to brush off these lines
of attack more often than not, this time I'll defend myself for the hell of
it.
:Yes, I get into more edit wars. But the reason I'm more likely to get into
edit wars has more to do with the particular articles on my watchlist, and
my corresponding practices as a user, than personality, hasty reverts, a
lack of civility, or wherever you're pointing fingers. Given my background,
I focus on the history and politics articles, which spark the lion's share
of edit wars. Although you work in these fields as well, consider your role
in, say, the [[Stamps and postal history of New South Wales]] article (great
job, BTW), and then juxtapose it with, say, the role of Slrubenstein, John
Kenney, and me on [[Fascism]] for the past couple of weeks. The article on
Fascism (a controversial and widely familiar topic), attracts trolls and
partisans, extreme POV rants, and scores of arbitrary, poorly written,
asinine edits for, say, several weeks running. But the page history of
Stamps and postal history of New South Wales is - how should I put it? -
very stable. And BTW, notice that I avoid edit wars when working on a
relatively obscure subject on WP, say, [[Li Ruihuan]], rather than, say,
[[Karl Marx]].
:Maintaining encyclopedic standards is an uphill battle when partisans enter
the fold in [[Fascism]], [[Catholicism]], [[East Germany]], [[Red Scare]],
etc. Since I grapple with this more often, I get into more edit wars.
Consequently, you're completing many articles in the time that I spend
struggling to ''remove'' a paragraph or two, a sentence or two, and even a
word or two from a single article. But this is worthwhile, as these are the
articles in my fields that generate the largest volume of hits.
:Also, I tend to spend a far smaller share of my time on WP proofreading
articles for grammar, clarity, and style. Unlike me, you've made thousands
of minor edits fixing grammatical and spelling errors. However, I'm simply
not the best when it comes to proofreading content ''online''. I need
stronger glasses, skim text too fast for my own good, and lack experience
using computers. So, we're both doing different things on WP, and hence
picking up different habits as users. [[User:172|172]] 09:08, 9 Apr 2004
(UTC)
:All true, although as someone versed in the ways of politics it seems like
it ought to be easy for you to negotiate with the people on the various
sides, and to find out more about people before dissing them (for instance,
in addition to insinuating vandalistic tendencies, you lumped Stan the big
Democratic donor and convention delegate in with the Fox News crowd -
oops!). Anyway, getting back to the point, I'm still waiting for a promise
not to mass-revert without prior discussion. Without it, I won't edit,
except to add the POV dispute notice back, which I'll do tomorrow if we've
made no progress. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 15:10, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::If you're enticing me to sign a contract before reading it (i.e. promise
to get your permission before I make another change), you must think that
I'm a real dupe! You've worked in some pretty damn competitive fields, so
I'm probably no match to you. But I'm not that bad! Anyway, if you're
worried about an ''arbitrary'' "mass-revert" (whatever that is), don't
worry. Unless it's an accident, I don't make changes arbitrarily.
::BTW, if you want to know why you've been having trouble dealing with me,
it's the result of attacking my credibility for months. Often, you do this
before I have a scant idea about how you specifically want to change an
article. This is read as a bullying tactic, i.e. an attempt to seize a
rhetorical high ground. One can either fight back or give into bullying.
''Because'' I take you seriously, I'm often left having to respond to your
attacks on my credibility rather than your concerns with content. I can
dismiss the antics of trolls, vandals, and the "Fox News crowd," but it's
harder to dismiss you. But I can work with you if I'm given specifics,
facts, and sources instead, I can follow the rational give-and-take.
[[User:172|172]] 10:56, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
:::I just asked for discussion, not permission - as you say, it would be
foolish to agree to something unseen in advance. I'd be more trusting except
that I have seen you mass-revert good faith changes by other people without
discussion. But I think you generally understand me, and that's good enough.
[[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 14:07, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::::Why do we keep going in circles with this? Just make your changes
already. I have no idea what you're up to. [[User:172|172]] 23:27, 10 Apr
2004 (UTC)
----
Bleah, first pass done, but what a pain - nothing like going through
line-by-line to see the flaws. There is still a lot of redundant material -
for instance 1980 election results are more accurately covered in [[U.S.
presidential election, 1980]], and this article links to that one. The basic
percentages and electoral numbers are more than enough. There is still some
leftover junk from the subdivision process - 1991 is not between 1980 and
1988, and this article needs just a sentence to presage 1991 and link to the
appropriate article. It's also sort of funny to have a history of the 1980s
that doesn't mention the introduction of the IBM PC... one of the reasons to
prune ruthlessly is so we can hear about the doings of more US citizens than
just the one with the initials RR. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 05:18, 11 Apr
2004 (UTC)
:Nice job. And that wasn't a big deal. In fact, you could've used the minor
change feature. You're changes gave the article a much needed round of
copyediting. [[User:172|172]] 23:07, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)
[[Talk:Cold War/temp]]
Taken
from:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Cold_War/temp&action=edit
I added a couple example sentences that I think are plausible "lead
sentences" for their respective sections. Also, as a way of forestalling
partisan edits, I had the idea of addressing partisanship issues at the top,
right after the normal lead content, and linking to a historiography
article. I suspect a lot of people who have strong opinions on the Cold War
don't know that all of the issues have already been debated intensely, many
years ago in some cases, and so by putting historiography up close to the
top we let them know that there is a body of scholarship that they ought to
know about before scribbling on the article.
Another thing that I think we'll want to do is to address the distinction
between objective facts (which tend not to be in dispute) and their presumed
motives and causes, over which the historians call each other bad names. :-)
A size limit of 20K or so will mean that the main article will have to stick
mostly to facts and offer opinions on motivation less often, and the
connected subarticles would then get the more in-depth analysis about cause
and effect - they can also cite the more specialized books and literature
for the benefit of the truly fascinated. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 04:46, 15
Apr 2004 (UTC)
I like it and think it would be a great improvement. The one thing I do not
like are the many purely date headings with some though I think most of them
can be made into names like Détente or the [[Vietnam War]], or descriptions
like "Interventions in the Third World" or "Renewed Tensions." A danger with
articles like this is that they become nothing more than timelines and leave
out the crucial links and interconnections between events. -
[[User:SimonP|SimonP]] 05:17, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)
I also think we should eventually have a great number of topical spin-offs.
Both because they are important topics that would not be adequately covered
in 4000 words, and because we have much of the content already written. e.g:
*[[Historiography of the Cold War]] (your suggestion)
*[[Space Race]] (already exists)
*[[Cold War in the Third World]] (and perhaps [[Cold War in the Middle
East]], [[Cold War in Latin America]], [[Cold War in South Asia]])
*[[Nuclear arms race]] (currently a poor redirect)
*[[Intelligence services in the Cold War]]
*[[American Cold War foreign policy]]
-[[User:SimonP|SimonP]] 05:17, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)
Right now, I lean in favor Stan's proposal. Organizing the article by region
is a bad idea. I'm not aware of any survey text that does this either. I
favor a roughly chronological organization, but with topics in the headings
instead of dates. Below is my ''very rough'' (and unfinished) draft.
[[User:172|172]] 10:42, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
* Origins
** Britain and the expansion of Tsarist Russia
** The U.S., Russia, and the development of Manchuria
** The Bolshevik Revolution and Allied intervention
** The First Red Scare in the U.S.
** Soviet-U.S. trade in the interwar years
** The Munich Conference and the Non-Aggression Pact
** Wartime mistrust
** Atlantic Charter
** Yalta
** The end of the Great Depression and international trade
** Potsdam
** Germany
** Atomic control
** United Nations
** Postwar reconstruction in Central and Eastern Europe
** The Iranian and Turkish crises of 1946
* Kennan and Containment
** George Kennan, Kennan's 'long telegram', and the "X" article in ''Foreign
Affairs''
** The crisis in Greece
** The Truman Doctrine
** The Marshall Plan and the Molotov Plan
* Truman and NSC-68
** Chinese Revolution
** The Soviet atomic bomb
** NSC-68
** Korea
** McCarthyism
* Eishenhower-Dulles Cold War
** Rise of Khrushchev
** Eisenhower-Dulles "new look"
** Francis Gary Power's U2 mission and the Paris Summit
** Sputnik
** H-Bomb
** De-colonization
** Defense pacts in the Third World
** Covert action in the Third World
** Mossadegh
** The CIA in Latin America
** The Suez Crisis and rifts within the Western alliance
** Indochina (The Eisenhower administration, Dienbienphu, and the Geneva
Conference)
*Cold War of Kennedy-Johnson
**Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis
**Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
**Vietnam and "flexible response"
**Vietnam War...
* Rise and fall of Détente
** Threats within both blocs
** Oil shock of 1973
** Vietnam spending and "Vietnamization"
** Arms control
** Islamic Revolution
** Afghanistan
* End of the Cold War
** Reagan administration
** "Low intensity conflicts"
** Summits
** Perestrokia and Eastern Europe
** Collapse of the USSR
** Legacies
Cool, I'll merge all these in later today or tomorrow and we can see what it
looks like then. A great many of these subjects have their own articles
already, although they are, uh, "variable" :-) in their depth and quality...
[[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 17:26, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
:Great! Our goals seem to be one-in-the-same. But perhaps we need a little
more time before we start merging things. I sketched the above outline
pretty hastily, so we'll probably need to play around with the arrangements
a bit. Also, just to make sure, we're creating a NI-style series with
daughter articles, right? If that's the case, the existing content in the
series, for the most part, runs parallel to the above outline. So writing
the summary on the main page will require the most work. [[User:172|172]]
18:10, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::BTW, I'm making some changes the outline draft above in this posting.
[[User:172|172]] 18:41, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I've now merged the bits, tinkered with some section titles. Still need to
get in list of 3rd world involvements by name. Interesting that some of the
key terms apparently have no article... [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 06:09, 17
Apr 2004 (UTC)
Jonah speaking, I don't know where a McCarthyism link fits in to your
template, but I noticed it wasn't in the current Cold War section either. I
guess someone was bound to bring it up eventually, but I'm just giving my
two cents. 04 May 2004
==Kingturtle, Stan, 172 (moved here from Talk:Cold War (1947-1953) and its
origins)==
This article is called ''Cold War (1947-1953) and its origins''. But the
first 3/4s of the article deal with events before 1947. I think this article
should be split up into ''Cold War origins'' and ''Cold War (1947-1953)''. I
am going to take this bold step Friday night if no one objects.
[[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]] 03:15, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
:I agree. Stan and I are working on a possible reorganization. I'm still
drafting my proposals on MS Word at home. My idea is the following split:
Origins of the Cold War (to 1941), Origins of the Cold War (1941-1947), Cold
War (1947-1953), Cold War (1953-1957), Cold War (1957-1962), Cold War
(1962-1973), and Cold War (since 1973). Before this is done, we need to
expand on some aspects of the current content.
:And this article - [[Cold War (1947-1953) and its origins]] - is hardest to
split out of the three articles that exist right now. The three articles
that I'm proposing (Origins of the Cold War (to 1941), Origins of the Cold
War (1941-1947), Cold War (1947-1953)) will need to expand a great deal on
content already posted here.
:I'd favor different organization as opposed to the one in place right now.
For example, here's my idea for the organization of the to 1941 origins
article:
*Origins of the Cold War (to 1941)
**Tsarist Russia and the 'New' Imperialism (to the 1890s)
**Manchuria
**The Russo-Japanese War and the West
**Wartime alliance
**Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
**The First Red Scare
**"Socialism in One Country"
**U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union (1933)
**The Munich Pact and the Non-Aggression Pact
:For the next article in the series...
*Origins of the Cold War (1941-1947)
**Lend-lease payments and the second front
**The Atlantic Conference
**Breton Woods
**Yalta
**Potsdam
**Hiroshima and Nagasaki
**The Iran Crisis
**Germany and the Oder-Neisse boundary
*Reparations payments and the Berlin blockade
**Greece
**Domestic pressures on Soviet foreign policy
**Domestic pressures on U.S. foreign policy
**The Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act, and the proposal of the
Marshall Plan
Just to reassure you, this is all very tentative. I appreciate advice while
I'm drafting my proposals. [[User:172|172]] 06:00, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
*Ok, glad to hear this is already in the works. I won't make any bold moves.
And I am happy to help figure things out. [[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]]
06:04, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
*Not to be too negative, but we '''really''' don't want to do series - a
series is just chapters in a book, and here we're supposed to be doing
articles, not book chapters. So for instance to pick on the 1941-1947
segment, there are thirteen topics. In a single-article design, each will
get 1-2 sentences saying what it was and how it connects to the others. All
in-depth stuff would go to the topics, for instance [[Yalta Conference]],
which at present seems OK in terms of basic facts, but is sorely lacking the
explanation of why anybody might think it was the beginning of the Cold War.
Yalta's significance ''could'' be put in the main Cold War article, but
that's how the main narrative becomes bloated. It also does the reader a
disservice when they link to [[Yalta Conference]] from somewhere else, then
can't learn about its significance without trudging through a long narrative
about other things. To make the single-article goal, we have to be very
disciplined. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 00:57, 8 May 2004 (UTC)
::We have to have place for weaving it all together in contexts that can be
more specified than in a single article/summary page. Everything that I'm
outlining could be a daughter article of an executive summary page, like on
[[New Imperialism]]. Just to reassure you, I'm certain that the vast
majority of the content in all the articles I'm proposing will come from the
three existing articles.
::BTW, perhaps you're misunderstanding what I'm proposing in those outlines.
I'm including, say "Yalta" and "Potsdam" in the headings, but the way
everything's organized makes it a more or less chronological arrangement;
really you can read the subheadings as milestones acting as stand-ins
signifying place and time. Thus, we wouldn't be ''just'' giving an overview
of Yalta under the "Yalta" heading - to use this as an example again - in
the text of the daughter article I'm proposing, but rather staying focused
on developments in the spring of '45 and how they relate to the course of
the emerging Cold War. [[User:172|172]] 02:11, 8 May 2004 (UTC)
:::I think we have a misunderstanding here. My goal is to have a single 20K
article that covers everything. An article entitled "Cold War (1947-1953)"
is completely wrong for an encyclopedia, whether as an "article in a series"
or as a "daughter article". The point is not to write more and more into a
single narrative, but to be succinct. The "weaving it all together" happens
in the single main article. Specific events have text that connects back to
the main article and to related events - that's how most of Wikipedia is
written, there's no reason for this to be different. I want to be clear on
this, because it seems like you generally have the urge to write single
long narratives, to the point of duplicating material that is already
present in existing articles. My whole point here is '''not''' to do the
ever-expanding narrative; the single main article should be complete at 20K,
and further expansion will occur in topical articles like [[Yalta
Conference]], not in "Cold War (15 April 1950 - 23 May 1950)". [[User:Stan
Shebs|Stan]] 05:30, 8 May 2004 (UTC)
::::Well, these articles don't even exist yet, and we might as well agree to
disagree until then. I'll help you out with the 20K summary page, but
there's no harm having additional daughter articles, which will be able to
draw the vast majority of their content from the existing pages.
[[User:172|172]] 11:41, 8 May 2004 (UTC)
== End of participation ==
I'm no longer going to work on this, it's going to be way too frustrating.
Use, delete, whatever. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 16:47, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
:Okay, I'm not going to delete it - you had a number of good ideas that I'd
like to adopt at some point. I hope that this isn't an overreaction to one
disagreement on Vietnam War. I think that you are being a bit cranky about
that article, but that doesn't taint my opinion of your contributions to
other articles, the vast majority of which are supurb, IMHO.
[[User:172|172]] 16:54, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
::This is an overall reaction to all your reverting and arguing on various
articles; just looking at it makes me want to quit working on WP altogether,
so I'm cutting loose instead, will spend time in areas where I find the
people more enjoyable to work with. [[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 17:32, 21 May
2004 (UTC)
:::Do you have disagreements of substance with any of my recent changes to
other articles, aside from Vietnam War? Or are you just coming here to mouth
off and insult me? [[User:172|172]] 17:43, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
::::I have a whole host of disagreements with your edits, but it would give
me an ulcer to deal with all of them, and WP doesn't pay me enough for that.
Your reference to "insult" here is a perfect example; I just gave you the
straight facts about how I felt, anything else is in your own mind.
[[User:Stan Shebs|Stan]] 12:11, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
:::::I have a whole host of disagreements with your edits as well, but you
don't see me taking it personally and negative character judgments against
you. Lighten up. [[User:172|172]] 21:49, 22 May 2004 (UTC)
::::::Now that we have that [[Vietnam War]] disagreement behind us, do you
want to start work on this article again? [[User:172|172]] 04:46, 24 May
2004 (UTC)
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