[Wikipedia-l] Sensitive subjects on some Wikipedias

[Andrew Gray]

On 14/07/07, Ronald Chmara <ron at opus1.com> wrote:

> The english language wikipedia, for example, doesn't really take the
> perspective that the biggest number of civilians ever outright
> slaughtered by an external  government in *one single event* is
> really a nightmarishly terroristic, immoral, and wrong thing,  to do.
> Instead, it equivocates and quibbles, repeating old party lines
> *justifying* the action, and combines articles on two separate events:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

I was thinking about this particular structural aspect just yesterday,
in fact (wanting to link an article to specifically the Hiroshima
bombing - it's odd the little cul-de-sacs work can take you into).

What this probably needs is moving the "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki"
sections out to daughter articles (discussing the
operational/technical details and the effects, together with such
subsequent history as is specific to the city or that particular
bombing) but mostly keeping the rest intact. Splitting it fully into
two separate articles would be unwieldy - the recap of the pre-attack
planning and the long-term effects, which make up more than half the
content, would have to be duplicated for both.

----

As to the editorial tone being equivocal... we have to remember that
*history* is pretty confused on this one. Were the bombings
"terroristic"? There are lengthy debates on that, and indeed one
ticking over on the talk page just now. Was it "immoral and wrong"?
That's a pretty well-supported view, but there are sane
counterarguments put forward by the most unexpected people. Did the
moral aspects differ between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or what about a
putative third bombing? Could one be right and the other wrong? Was it
genocide? If not, why not? Historians and philosophers argue over all
of these - we quote a general consensus that "the Nagasaki bomb was
gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst", but that's still pretty
equivocal in terms of drawing a hard bright line between "was right"
and "was wrong".

And as a result we have a lengthy "Debate over the bombings" section.
Sometimes, the best we can do is reflect that there is no
fundamentally accepted answer... we might not do that very well, and
it is something that lends itself to rambling muddiness, but that's a
matter for pruning. We shouldn't decree what academic consensus
*ought* to be in order to write a neater clearer article.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk