[WikiEN-l] Re: Can we ban 172 now? And VV too!

Fri Jun 4 16:22:42 UTC 2004

Viajero wrote:

>Too much of the current discussion is centered on 172's alleged shortcomings and not enough on his abilities and contributions.
>
>There is, IMO, not a single other contributor to Wikipedia who has a similar grasp of the Big Picture; no one else has his resources and ability to tackle these big, overarching topics like New Imperialism; no one else has his virtually encyclopedic knowledge of Third World politics and social movements. Abe is not interested the personification of history, trite Big Man bedtime stories, he is interested in analyzing complex, long-term trends in economic and social development, something far more difficult but far more rewarding. Without these kinds of articles, we are basically just a bunch of stamp collectors.
>
>
Indeed, I applaud him for making the effort. However, troubled by
the obvious leftwing slant (keep in mind that I lean left myself),
and wondering if maybe I was just ignorant, I went to the university
library and did a paragraph-by-paragraph comparison of various accounts
of US history in the 1980s, and various accounts of the Cold War,
particularly Gaddis and LaFeber. I found that it was indeed possible
to write US history without mentioning trivialities like Nancy Reagan's
astrologer (no personification of history? uh-huh), and that it was
possible to have accounts of the Cold War that didn't cast every
incident as ultimately due to US aggression against the Soviets.
I brought these observations up on the relevant talk pages, and got
a combination of nonresponsiveness, excuses, and truculence from 172,
and in the end I decided I was wasting my time.

Something to think about when sneering at "Americans living in
tooth-fairy land" is that for every editor that tries to "fix"
an article and is reverted, there are 500 readers that are silently
drawing conclusions about WP in general. When article content
is different from the actual authorities and doesn't have a good
explanation or references (172 is very bad about adding supporting
references to these articles), those Americans are not going to
become better informed, they're just going to dismiss WP as a whole.

So I feel a little cowardly about not continuing to stand up to 172
on content, but discussion has not proven productive and I'm not
going to engage in edit wars. I've thought about trying to recruit
more academics; it would be a big win to have Gaddis work over the
Cold War article for instance.

Stan