Hoi,
Vandalism is defined as anything else: by majority. If you have enough
people to make a policy you make it, and it gets applied. BTW, most of the
times it works and it makes a pretty democratic way of life, yet simply
expressing the will of the majority does not automatically lead to label the
Holocaust as "Holocaust". Hitler and Mussolni were democratically elected,
the "democratic" rulers who followed them weren't, so... It really depends
on your community and on how you can analyze the subject all toghether.
In your case I'd say people seem more interested in ending a war than in
having a majority POV expressed as such. Probably the best thing to do in
such cases is to define an external authority (as an independent source of
information) that can be trusted as "mainstream" on the subject. I have to
warn you that no such choice is going to be perceived as "perfect" (cfr. ISO
and languages), yet at least you won't have a few local wikimedians "playing
God" over the others.
There cannot be an immediate list of all such possible external references,
because the field is too wide. Possibly you might want to ask your ArbCom to
analyze such edit wars and to define such a source for a given subject when
needed. In this case you can have a simple "step aside when conflict is too
high" policy and an associated dynamic list of authoritative sources for the
issue. Maybe it would be better if you avoided national sorces any time a
wider international source is available, it would help keeping out of the
mine field that originates most of such edit wars.
Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andre Engels
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 5:01 AM
To: wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Sensitive subjects on some Wikipedias
2007/7/14, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra(a)ukr.net>et>:
Minorities don't win edit wars. If they get even
close to win... they get
banned for vandalism, and that's it. That's the way a wiki works and we
all
find it normal.
Hmmm... Does it? So how is one to define vandalism so that it includes
this? I'm quite interested, because in one case where I'm involved (I
got asked to come in and look at the matter) that's certainly not how
it worked. The page got locked because of the edit war until they
would agree. Since they are not going to do that, the page will be
locked until eternity, in the version that I think is by far the
minority one.
--
Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
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