[WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

Tue Oct 28 23:13:22 UTC 2003

Mirko Thiessen wrote:

>NPOV in the articles concerning all events and locations along the
>German-Polish border has always been difficult to attain. I don't know
>what the trigger was, but for almost two weeks now many articles are
>in the permanent state of edit war. Wikipedians interested in
>anything, but not in neutral articles, are reverting and re-reverting,
>insulting each other and ignoring the basic Wikiquette. Take Silesia
>or Gdansk as some examples.
>  
>
To be fair to those working on the Polish-German articles, this is 
quickly becoming a major problem with all articles relating to ethnic 
disputes on Wikipedia.  Some I remember:

* [[Macedonia]], [[Aegean Macedonia]], and [[Republic of Macedonia]] -- 
There is a country that calls itself the Republic of Macedonia, and a 
Slavic ethnic group who call themselves Macedonians, while Greeks 
consider both of these misnomers, claiming that the term "Macedonian" 
refers to a subset of Greek people, much like "Peloponnesians", 
"Athenians", or "Spartans", and so referring to Slavs as "Macedonians" 
is just plain wrong.

* [[History of Bosnia and Herzegovina]] and related articles -- Some 
people want the article to be about the historic region of Bosnia; 
others want it to cover more topics; there's disagreement over what 
exactly to cover and how.  Lots of Serb vs. Croat vs. Muslim nationalism.

And of course [[Israel]] and related articles are in a perpetual state 
of dispute.

The best solution I can see to these is to have some people who are 
relatively neutral take input from the various sides, try to research 
the facts independently a bit, and then mediate the dispute.  I've tried 
this a bit with the Polish articles (not being Polish or German), but 
since it's not my area of expertise I've invariably made a few mistakes 
and antagonized some people in the process.

I think one of the major issues is what names to use for places that 
historically had different names than they currently do.  My personal 
preference would be to use the name at the time of the event being 
documented, with a parenthetical note of the current name.  To pick a 
relevant example, "Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (modern-day 
Gdansk)".  If the ethnicity of a particular person is reliably known, 
I'd defer a bit to their names as well: a German born in that city in 
the 18th century should probably be said to have been "born in Danzig", 
while a Polish person born in that city at the same time period should 
probably be said to have been "born in Gdansk."

I'd also tend to use only the contextual names in most articles where it 
makes sense: for example, an article on the 13th century Byzantine 
Empire can just talk about Constantinople: it doesn't need to keep 
saying "Constantinople (present-day Istanbul)".  Perhaps since it's such 
a well-known city that one hasn't been a major issue, but there have 
been some others that are issues (for example, using Slavic names in 
articles on the Macedonian Empire, despite the fact that those names 
hadn't even been invented at the time; or using the old Arabic names 
when discussing modern-day Israeli cities).

But as for solving the conflicts themselves -- ethnic conflicts are much 
older than Wikipedia, so I doubt we're going to come up with a magic 
bullet.  But we can keep on top of things hopefully, with the NPOV 
dispute page and non-aligned mediators.

-Mark