[WikiEN-l] Armenian Genocide

[Wily D]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 5:43 PM, White Cat
<wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to point out the ridiculous amount of hostility surrounding topics
>  related to Armenia/Azerbaijan. There had been multiple cases of abusive
>  sockpuppetry and other forms of disruption. There had been two arbcom cases
>  over the matter and the issue has been before the arbitration committee
>  not-stop with clarifications and appeals for well over a year now.  As
>  arbcom is unable or unwilling to pass useful remedies community attention is
>  particularly necesary. The community had been avoiding these topics like
>  plague. The problem isn't unique to this article but to a wide range of
>  articles no mater how vaguely related.
>
>  I do believe that the "minority opinion" clause of NPOV should be very
>  carefully applied (if applied at all) on this issue. There is a lot of
>  misinformation due to the highly political nature of the matter. Content of
>  the "Armenian Genocide" article and the Holocaust article has very little in
>  common so using Holocaust as a model may be very problematic. At its current
>  state the article in question fails the core principle of NPOV miserably. I
>  do not believe there is a disagreement on this.
>
>  Consider an unrelated case, the content of
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasakiavoids
>  using the words "genocide" and "massacre". Massacre is only used as a
>  category (that category should be deleted). US willingly and intentionally
>  incinerated 200K people on that incident according to the article. Rather
>  than wasting time by name-calling genocide/massacre article explains "The
>  radius of total destruction was about 1.6 km (1 mile), followed by fires
>  across the northern portion of the city to 3.2 km (2 miles) south of the
>  bomb" and the reader can decide weather or not that was mass
>  murder/massacre/genocide/whatever. Facts can stand by themselves without
>  colorful language and petty pov pounding.
>
>  Wikipedia is not in the business of passing judgement on what is a genocide,
>  what is a massacre, what is a terrorist and so forth. Article should present
>  sourced material and the reader can decide.
>
>  People without a conflict of interest should be working on this article
>  which pretty much disqualifies most of the people editing or that had edited
>  the article. I would hope to see this article as a featured one.
>
>
This really isn't true.  The "Turkish Nationalist" POV doesn't just
dispute the "use" of the word genocide, it disputes that it was a
genocide under the usual English language meaning of the word.   It
generally disputes that the documented intential mass killings of
Armenians (and the related Pontiac Greek and Assyrian ones) took place
at all, that the number of deaths was much smaller, that the deaths
were combat deaths rather than the massacres and death marches and
what have you that actually took place, that the documented
organisation of the effort took place, et cetera.

To go back to Hiroshima, if extreme American Nationals started
claiming that only 10 000 died in the accident at Hiroshima, we'd tell
them to take a long walk off a short pier.  The same principle applies
here.

At some point, explanations just need to use the appropriate words to
convey meaning.  We call World War II as such, not "Military Actions
from 1937 - 1945" because it was a war, and is agreed upon as such by
everyone who knows what they're talking about.  We call apples fruit
because they are fruit, and everyone who knows what they're talking
about agrees as such.  We call the Armenian Genocide a genocide
because it was a genocide and eveyone who knows what they're talking
about agrees as such.

The principle of Undue is that sometimes we just need to be honest and
present true information even when some minority opinion disagrees,
and just note that they're doing so.  If we have any hope of
credibility, we simply can't present thoroughly discredited positions
as though they're legitimate.  There's a reason pedophilia advocates
are cracked down on harder than animal rights advocates.  Those who
deny genocides are far closer to the former than the latter.

Cheers
WilyD