shebs at apple.com wrote: I have indeed compared your wording with the purported sources (not on this article, but on others that we have discussed previously), and there are significant differences. Stan Shebs claims that there is a discrepancy between my work on Wikipedia and my sources, yet he insults the intelligence of mailing list readers by only offering this as evidence, "For instance, there was the episode where Somoza was a dictator but Stalin was not, and then where the Berlin Airlift was mainly a publicity stunt." [I've made over 10,000 edits to Wikipedia, so it's easy for someone with an ax to grind to cherry-pick examples and then throw in gratuitous accusations] (1) Stan Sheb's disingenuous claims of bias on the Berlin blockade and airlift are emphatically refuted by Wikipedia's article on the Berlin blockade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade), which I wrote. (2) I shy away from the term "dictator" altogether on Wikipedia (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Fidel_Castro&diff=4721758&am…) I also changed the reference to Pinochet as a "dictator" to "military ruler" on the in the news box on the main page several days ago. Yet, this matter is more complicated than Stan Shebs is making it out to be (as usual). Notice the following conversation taken from Talk:Fidel Castro: ::Not exactly. Dictator is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact, so it's not POV (though some try to twist the facts). While Batista is called a dictator in Britannica, BSE and probably other encyclopedias, Fidel is not. Fidel is not a dictator, because no matter how popular he is, he doesn't rule Cuba, the party does (and people too). Batista, on the other hand, was clearly a dictator (the second time he was in power) because of the way he ruled. So I think we should call Batista a dictator, but not do the same for Fidel. [[User:Paranoid|Paranoid]] 06:56, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC) :::Good point, Paranoid. Cuba is a single party state, not a personalistic regime. (Not to say that this is mutually exclusive. Ceausescu's Romania and North Korea, where the power of the party was strongly subverted by the leader, are considered "sultanistic" and "personalistic" regimes by a number of prominent comparativists, e.g., Linz and Stepan, who have drawn from Max Weber's concept of personalized power in a "sultanism.") However, many Wikipedians aren't going to grasp these nuances, and will be suspicious that the term is being applied arbitrarily. So, it's best to just shy away from the term altogether, even in obvious cases, like the Somozas, Idi Amin, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, Bokassa, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu, etc. [[User:172|172]] 07:38, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC) Perhaps I might have slipped up a few times and referred to the "obvious cases" (personalistic leaders) as dictators over the past year and a half that I've been working on Wikipedia. Fair-minded users will put this in context, tough, and note my substantial contributions to this site; note that my articles tend to make the best use of references on Wikipedia (e.g., history of post-Soviet Russia has over 30); and note that I have garnered praise even from fair-minded, conservative U.S. users for being able to write neutrally on difficult, controversial topics (e.g., Franco-U.S. relations). In close, Stan is only bringing up these red herrings to distract everyone from the real issue. He launched into a personal attack against me over my work on Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 on the mailing list with no evidence, no command of the facts, and no inclination to do any reading or check the list of sources I added to the article. Once again, his unwarranted defamation is a dishonor only to him, not to me. -172 _________________________________________________________________ Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/