[WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality

Wed Jul 16 03:56:20 UTC 2003

It strikes me as increasingly obvious that some concerted effort to be 
as NPOV as possible on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is necessary, as 
it's starting to be one of the more frequent edit wars, and distributed 
throughout the wiki, even in places you might not expect.

Two issues in particular that have come up lately, one from each side:

1. [[User:BL]] is mass-adding the contents of palestineremembered.com -- 
massive lists with hundreds of subpages comprising every village 
(defined as 10 or more people) destroyed in the 1948 war, every 
"massacre" (defined as 10 or more people) committed or purportedly 
committed during that war (little effort is made to distinguish), and a 
whole host of other information that's difficult if not impossible to 
verify.

Even if it weren't for the difficulty in verifying this information, it 
strikes me as somewhat odd that we'd have 300 pages dedicated to Arabs 
killed in 1948, and only a single page dedicated to the Armenian 
genocide, or the Pontian Genocide, or the Hutu-Tutsi genocide, and so 
on.  I don't think it'd be a good idea to add 10,000 pages or so, one 
for each village ("village" defined as 10 people or more) destroyed in 
each of those conflicts.  And if we're going to have a separate page for 
every instance of civilian deaths during a war, WW2 alone would be 
another 10,000 pages or so.

2. [[User:RK]] is, as is probably obvious, somewhat of a pro-Israeli 
activist, and is becoming difficult to clean up.  The latest thing I've 
noticed is him adding 2-paragraph-long attacks on Arab anti-Semitism to 
articles such as [[George Washington]] and [[Benjamin Franklin]], in the 
guise of "defending" their "tarnished" reputations against charges of 
anti-Semitism stemming from little-known fabricated quotes.

Not to single out these two users in particular; they're the two that 
come to mind at first.  And these two issues in particular are also 
being dealt with on talk pages.  But it's becoming clear that it will be 
very difficult to catch all of these, so perhaps some more concerted 
effort is needed.  I'm not sure exactly what to propose, but it seems as 
a minimum we need a group of several people who are not particularly 
partial to either side -- but who are knowledgeable about the issues -- 
to essentially police (hopefully in as unconfrontational a way as 
possible) this sort of stuff.  The problem is that those most 
knowledgeable and interested in spending a great deal of time writing 
articles on these topics are often those who are most partisan to one 
side or the other.

Suggestions?

-Mark