[WikiEN-l] Articles like "Violence against Israelis"

Mon Aug 30 13:14:05 UTC 2004

The problem with articles like "Violence against Israelis" is not so
much that the material they contain is false, but that the topic of
the articles is unfixably POV.  People like Lance6Wins and
MathKnight who devote many hours to maintaining these lists
do not do it out of a desire to make Wikipedia a fine encyclopedia.
They are on a political mission, and do not consider that the NPOV
rule is relevant to them.

If these people were well-motivated, they would also be including
violence against Palestinians as well.  Try to find the following in
Wikipedia, for example (I went to the web site of the Israeli
human-rights organization B'Tselem and entered a random month):

8 February 2003
Mustafa Ibrahim Abu 'Adwan, age 10, died of wounds inflicted by IDF
gunfire in Khan Younis, in the south of The Gaza Strip, on 7 February,
2003. Did not participate in fighting

11 February 2003
Hassan al-Ghoul, age 8, from Qalqiliya, killed by IDF gunfire shot in
response to stones and molotov cocktails thrown at soldiers, in
Qalqiliya, 
The West Bank. Did not participate in fighting

And so on for a total of 11 children killed by Israeli forces in April
2003.
The list of adults killed, including both combatants and
non-combatants,
is much longer.  April 2003 was not an unusual month.

The reason these are not listed in Wikipedia is that there is nobody
with
the dedication and time to match the efforts of Lance6Wins and
MathKnight.
(Actually, such a person or persons would need several times as much
dedication because several times as many Palestinians are killed as
Israelis.)
Would we want such a competition between lists anyway?  From experience
we know that articles like this cannot be deleted.  My preferred
solution
would be to kick out the political fanatics, and good riddance, but it
won't
happen.  The problem in fact will not be solved and this open sore will
remain.  Sorry to bring bad news.

Zero.

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