[WikiEN-l] Mother Teresa article

Mon Oct 27 04:28:53 UTC 2003

No Steve. Though the current article has been roundly criticised as POV by 
most people who have commented, including people who make clear they have 
little time for Mother Teresa but still find the article blatently flawed 
and unfair, but one user, Erik, is determined to ignore everyone else and 
defend his POV text come what may. I called the vote so that people can 
clearly and unambiguously express their opinion on the text, what should be 
in and what should be out.

Though even doing that was a nightmare as Erik tried to move the vote, 
change the vote, add in 'disputed' to questions he doesn't approve of, etc. 
Though as the debate showed, notwithstanding Erik's endless lectures to 
everyone, the vote is going as expected, with voters stating that the 
current text is POV, the picture selection is POV, the caption use is POV, 
and that the article needs NPOVing. Maybe /this/ time Erik might get the 
message that there is a problem, as he has consistently ignored everyone's 
comments, people's attempts to fix the problem and delivered increasingly 
bizarre interpretations, most recently using Pol Pot (!) as an example of 
something or other. Even MT detesters like the author Christopher Hitchens 
would not attempt to prove a point about Mother Teresa by referring to a 
mass murderer like Pol Pot. But Erik did so! And you wonder why there is a 
problem trying to NPOV Erik's edits, and why so many people are so 
despairing of salvaging the article at this stage from Erik's agenda! I know 
Erik has strong views against religion (and is entitled to), but his verbage 
at this stage is perverse.

As Daniel Quinlan wrote, in an attempt to bring some sense to the article,  
"Just because the critics aren't getting to add all 45 pages of criticism 
and it's just half the article, does not make it okay. Only here on 
Wikipedia can Mother Teresa get more criticism than Saddam Hussein, Joseph 
Stalin, Idi Amin, or Moammar Al Qadhafi. Check those articles."

As Delirium observed, "*  I personally think Mother Theresa's reputation is 
overblown, but the article as currently written is entirely unacceptable. It 
reads as an anti-Mother Theresa piece, and is clearly written by someone 
with an agenda."

Or in Andrewa's words, "I don't think I have an axe to grind either way, but 
my personal impression of the current article is that it is POV and anti 
Mother Teresa. . . . They are documents of fact, yes, but they aren't 
important to this article. I've probably been photographed with criminals 
too... actually I certainly have, I'm involved in a prison ministry! They 
are trivial in an article on her life. They are very important to an essay 
questioning the significance of her life or the validity of her likely 
sainthood, and they might even belong in an article reporting this debate, 
but they don't IMO deserve inclusion in the main article. The fact they are 
there is a symptom of its being used to promote a POV."

Maybe the vote will /finally/ get Erik to listen to someone other than 
himself and Christopher Hitchens for once. But after the last week, that is 
more of a hope than an expectation.

JT
>
>"Once and for all?" LOL. Did we forget this was a
>wiki? -- Or did we forget the possibility of some
>other upstart coming along and rewriting it?  Heck I
>may take a crack at the intro pgphs.
>
>~S~
>
>--- James Duffy <jtdire at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi, I've called a vote on [[Talk:Mother Teresa]] to
> > clarify once and for all
> > what people think about the current article and what
> > we should do about it.
> > Please express your opinion. lol
> >
> > JT
> >
> >
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