[Wikipedia-l] NPOV and the israeli-palestinian conflict

[Robert Graham Merkel]

On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 03:55:24PM +0200, elian wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
<discussion of perceived pro-Israeli bias on pages 
about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict snipped>

The problem is that most of the people who know  a lot 
about the issue are strongly partisan one way or the other,
and that on the wikipedia most of the people are strongly
pro-Israeli.  As much as they *try* to be NPOV about things,
it's understandably very hard to do on issues close to your
heart, particularly when you don't have people forcefully
and *knowledgably* putting dissenting views. 

I think you find that if you try and edit these pages for
extra balance, you find yourself trying to justify this with
people who have spent a lot more time studying the issue, 
even if it is only one side of it, and consequently it's
very hard to win an argument on the topic.  Additionally,
most of us *know* we don't know enough about the issues
to be able to justify editing  them.  On other topics, 
such as, say, computer related topics, I have enough confidence
in my own knowledge to argue with people about issues.  I 
suspect this problem applies to many of the more prolific
Wikipedia contributors.

I can't see these articles improving until we have more
contributors with genuine expertise and a broader set of 
perspectives on the issue.

This is not to demean the people who have worked on
these articles - I believe you have all tried your best
in good faith.  However, I also honestly believe that they are
not NPOV at this stage.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

"...the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an
environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more
serious than those raised by sex" -- Peter Singer
------------------------------------------------------------