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

Fri Sep 3 22:19:47 UTC 2004

On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 17:38:58 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>It's often not explicitly stated, but it's irritating when you can 
>obviously tell the political leanings of the person who wrote the 
>article just through a casual reading.

That's a pretty good indicator of when an article has POV problems.

>FWIW, the use of that Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand is a 
>common culprit.  It belongs some places, but it shows up a lot more 
>places than it belongs, as if someone is really trying to work it in 
>everywhere.  Some of the circumcision stuff also reads like it was 
>written by anti-circumcision activists.  The tone is just wrong, even if 
>the facts (and even the conclusions) are fine: you can tell when an 
>article was written by someone who has a strong personal opinion about 
>the matter.

Many (most, probably) Wikipedians have strong personal opinions 
about things. It's best if they have self-knowledge about this and 
can consciously restrain an POV-pushing that they might 
subconsciously do.

> Generally, it'd be nice if people avoided editing articles 
>they had a very strong personal opinion about, or at least let someone 
>who didn't care much do a thorough re-editing afterwards.

Of course, people tend to edit articles about subjects they are 
interested in. I'm not particularly interested in curcumcision, for 
example, and have never read that article -- so obviously I'm not 
going to have edited it.

-- 
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than 
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)  