New subject: Fwd: SM proposed: Crimean crisis

22 Mar 2014

Hello to everybody!

Crimean question is a hot topic on Russian Wikipedia now and we want to
share some basic Wikipedia principles from our Facebook page (
https://www.facebook.com/russian.wikipedia), would you agree to share it
via Wikipedia account in Facebook/Twitter?

I haven't posted it at Russian Wikipedia page yet and want to discuss it
before.There are a lot of questions received by our community and local
chapter and I think that this post will be useful.
Do you agree with such post or not?

Best regards,
Linar

----------------------post below----------------------------------
Everybody knows what Crimea crisis is and everybody has his own opinion
about what happened and who was right and wrong.

Unfortunately, such situations do happen sometimes, but what should we,
editors of Wikipedia (and especially Russian Wikipedia), do?

it's important to state the following principles to understand this
question better:

1. Russian Wikipedia is Wikipedia in Russian language, not Wikipedia of
Russian Federation. We have active editors and sysops not only from Russia,
but also from Europe, Asia and America.
Due to this fact we have different opinions that help us to produce neutral
point of view with all aspects shown.

2. Wikipedia isn't looking for absolute truth, it should represent "fairly,
proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the
significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic".
That means that we are not stating, for example, that Crimean referendum
was legitimate or not, we provide different points of view: what Ukrainian
view is, what Russian view is, what other countries do and think, according
to the reliable sources.

3. Wikipedia describes disputes but doesn't engage in them. So we want to
state once more, that we are not looking for absolute truth and we won't
agree with personal attacks of one group of editors to another group of
editors: all of them have equal rights.

4. We don't encourage mass edits in such a hot topic without prior
discussion with other editors: that's why a lot of articles of this
category are protected from editing - propose your adjustments at the talk
page and discuss them with other editors, that's
the most constructive and effective way of editing.

5. We admit that such articles require additional attention and that's why
our community is discussing nominations for the new mediators of this
topic. Nevertheless, even now editors and sysops invest much time and
effort to keep Wikipedia neutral and true.

6. Wikipedia already had some similar situations and our previous
experience prooves that "discuss, then edit" is the best practice here. For
example, the similar disputes are connected with Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo,
etc.

Dear editors, we kindly ask you to stay calm, show respect to other editors
and discuss all your edits based on the reliable sources.
Wikipedia has all rules and policies required and we hope that our editors
and readers are able to cope with this.