Catherine Munro (artslave(a)usa.net) [050210 00:08]:
OK, so it's not nearly as compelling as Neo-Nazis
breathing hard outside
the door, but I ran across this today on the "Excessive Sweating and Facial
Blushing" site (it was linked from the talk page of another WP user):
A group with an agenda (opposition to a drastic type of surgery to treat
sweating disorders) discovered Wikipedia, said, "hey, we can support our
agenda there"...."but wait, they have an NPOV policy"...."that's
ok, we can
do that"..."in fact, let's invite the doctors who support the treatment to
come work on it"....
http://www.esfbchannel.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=ETS_General&actio…
And now, two months later, we have a fairly balanced little article on
[[Endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy]], which the group is now telling other
ETS/anti-ETS sites they can use and copy (WITH proper GFDL linking and
credit, no less!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endoscopic_thoracic_sympathectomy
Obviously these are rational people, and not ideologues of any stripe --
still, I thought it would be a nice bit of evidence that the system /does/
usually work. :)
Yep.
It's an important point to remember: talking about Wikipedia on an activist
(i.e., POV-pushing) mailing list, and even responding to a recruitment call
to come to Wikipedia, *is not* evidence of POV-pushing edits. Only the
edits themselves are.
Even then, the editors should generally be cluifiable. Most people aren't
actually out to wreck things in the name of their cause, but to do good.
Assume good faith.
- d.