[Wikipedia-l] The last word on RK

Sun Oct 5 18:31:16 UTC 2003

JT wrote:
>1. Abe made a very useful and thought-provoking point about 
>the useful of having RK on wiki, if only because his virtual 
>waging of war on anyone who disagreed with him tended to 
>lead people to be restrained in what they wrote on the Israel-
>Palestinian issue. Unfortunately RK went way to far. Far from 
>being a useful restraining force he became a destructive 
>individual who scared people away from wiki.
>...

I tend to agree. My first bad experience, in fact, with another user on 
Wikipedia, was with RK over such an article. Luckily I was already hooked on 
this crack pipe otherwise known as Wikipedia, so I just dealt with it (Larry 
also helped to defuse the situation by neutralizing the disputed article - 
which I thought was hopelessly POV against Palestinians). Since that time I 
have refrained from doing any substantial work on these articles other than 
reverting vandalism or fixing really bad formatting/organization. 

It would still be a real pity if RK never came back; when he actually worked 
in his area of trained expertise (biology) we made excellent to superior 
contributions. 

Many of us know a lot about certain controversial things that we may be /way/ 
to biased to write neutrally on. I for one, find it very difficult to write 
neutrally for articles on homosexuality even though I know a lot about the 
subject (from biased sources, of course), so I tend to stay away from making 
substantive changes to those articles. 

I wish RK could do the same thing with Israeli-Palestinian articles.... 

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)