[WikiEN-l] articles about Serbian history

Fri Sep 26 18:36:43 UTC 2003

Hello to all.

I subscribed to this list in order to give my word about what I see some 
people perceive as a problem made by my actions. By the way, I tried to 
subscribe yesterday, but it seems that that didn't work for some reason.

I noticed that there are two separate issues here: the NPOV of the articles 
and the links on them. I think that they are separate enough that I could 
discuss them separately.

About NPOV: the site is like it is, some of its contents might be 
"propagandistic, wrong and/or biased", it might even contain, as someone 
said, falsifications of history, but the particular articles that I copied 
from the site are not such. Some of them contain simply raw data that has no 
POV at all, and those that were not such I NPOVed and, after I was kindly 
asked by Eloquence, I NPOVed them even more then I think is needed. And they 
could be even further NPOVed by other contributors. I think that this subject 
is closed.

Now, about the links.

First, some people misunderstood the issue: these links are not ==External 
links== which, of course, (at least that is my opinion) could be freely 
removed by anyone who doesn't think that they belong where they do. These are 
links to the site which is the ==Source== of the article, from which the 
articles are copied, which is the same case as with the articles that are 
copied from, say, FOLDOC. As I understood it, such links are requirement for 
copying the data from the site (I used standard permission text, you can see 
it at [[User:Nikola Smolenski/FreeSrpska]]).

I understand that some people don't like to see links to such a site here, or 
perhaps anywhere on the web, while at the same time don't mind if there are 
no articles about the topics. But some other people don't mind the links and 
like the articles (and I'm one of them, obviously). I can say that article 
about [[Prince Lazar]] is already twice its size, and it did not exist at all 
before I copied it from FS. As I said already, the articles would take days 
instead of hours to make if they were not copied from the site. And some of 
the pictures from them would be very hard or impossible to find elsewhere.

Personaly, I doubt that anyone will click on that links in order to find more 
information about the subject (the article is based on a text from the site; 
obviously, there is no more information about the subject on the site) or in 
order to find information on similar subjects (they are warned that the site 
is biased; and if they don't mind reading biased data then why shold we 
mind?).

So, to conclude it, I don't think that extracting NPOV data from POV sites is 
something wrong or that it will hurt credibility of Wikipedia. To the 
contrary, I think that we could be proud for being able to remake even such 
sources into brilliant prose.

Finally, I feel the need to stress that, to the best of my knowledge, I have 
broke no Wikipedia policy. It is, again to the best of my knowledge, allowed 
to copy to WP any material that violates no copyright law, is NPOV, and 
encyclopedic in nature, which is what I did. Perhaps new policies have to be 
made, but I did nothing wrong.