VeryVerily wrote:
if this were a Nazi denying the Holocaust I had fought, I'd be being feted as a hero on the mailing list right now, and everyone would look the other way if any "rules" were broken.
Hmm. Does Godwin's Law apply now? :-)
I'm going to make some observations. VeryVerily, please understand it is *not* *you* I am talking about here. (I've never interacted with you; I haven't looked at your edit history; I don't know what kind of editor you are.)
There are some editors who are: (1) extremely knowledgeable about a significant subject area, (2) passionate about that subject and about improving the Encyclopedia, but (3) in the end, sadly, unable to participate in the project. Their participation is impossible because they are simply incapable of working within the structure which Wikipedia has set up, where partisans on opposite sides of a contentious issue (partisans who, in real life, might well want to be killing each other), work together cooperatively to craft an NPOV article. You need more than just knowledge and passion to conduct that mission: you also need things like diplomacy and humility and patience, and not everyone possesses all of those skills.
It takes two to make an edit war. If you are engaged in an edit war, no matter how Right your cause is, no matter how True your facts are, no matter how Wrong your opponents are, you are partially at fault.
Wikipedia *can* *not* afford too many edit wars. They are ridiculously expensive and destructive and timeconsuming. They take up everybody's time (especially the beleaguered arbitrators), they discourage other editors from participating, they leave the contested articles unreadable for long periods of time. Even after the cases are arbitrated, the toll continues, because the aggrieved parties can never accept the results, and continue to appeal their cases by posting long, overwrought messages to Jimbo's talk page and the like.
For example, there's an article [[Palestinian exodus]] describing the flight of Palestinians from what is now Israel after the 1948 war. It appears to have been edited primarily by people sympathetic to the Palestinian side of that conflict, and reads (to me, at least) with a pretty significant POV bias. There's an editor by the name of Zeq who has been trying to fix it, which ought to be a laudable cause, because it (probably) does need fixing. But he hasn't been able to do it dispassionately, and he ended up getting banned from editing that article.
On several counts, I believe he is in the right. The article is biased, and his opponents have worked to keep it that way. But the difference is that his opponents appear to have done better at playing by Wikipedia's rules than he has, which is why he has been banned and they haven't, and their view (for now) prevails. This is very sad, very wrong, and not how the Encyclopedia is supposed to work. But until an editor comes along who is knowledgeable and passionate about the Israeli side of that conflict, *and* who is able to edit a contentious Wikipedia article dispassionately and diplomatically, the lopsidedness is likely to remain.
And of course that's hardly the only example; this pattern recurs all the time. There's ample documentation of the problem; there's ample help available in the form of lists of suggestions for editors who want to learn how to work more effectively within Wikipedia's environment; I'm certainly not the first to be pointing any of this out. But, of course, one of the traits of the problematic editors is that they don't have enough self-reflection to realize that they're the ones those lists of suggestions are aimed at, and they don't have the disposition necessary to actually adopt and apply the suggestions.
It's all too easy for outside observers to recognize when one of these disputative situations has cropped up, which is one reason that the aggrieved parties often feel they're being discriminated or conspired against. The same hallmarks ought to make it easy for the participants to recognize themselves as well -- if only they could. I was going to describe some of the hallmarks here, but they'd break the flow of an already too-long message, and VeryVerily would think I was talking about him, so I'll list them somewhere else.
The bottom line, however, is that *it is possible to edit a Wikipedia article on even a highly contentious subject without having all these horrible problems*. If you are having these problems, *you are doing something wrong*. You can't blame it on your opponents or on "the system"; *you are part of the problem*. You are going to have to change your attitude and the way you work on Wikipedia.
It's too bad when a passionate and knowledgeable but disputative editor can't be perfectly accommodated. But the process of trying to accommodate disputative editors does not scale -- Arbcon is under increasing amounts of pressure as more and more aggrieved editors demand their right to be heard, and it's only going to get worse as the numbers of editors increase.
Steve Summit [[en:User:Ummit]]