QUOTE(Snowey @ Mon 11th May 2009, 7:58am)
Sam Blacketer arrives to tank Jay's well-deserved sanctions. He also voted for topic banning G-Dett but against the same for Jay. Seems he's convinced Vassyana to switch votes, too. Can he peel away two more votes?
Well, Vassyana has always been a quivering pile of indecision. It is still 9-2 to sanction Jay, and I think that a 7-5 vote to sanction him, thus
failing because of ArbCom's arcane voting system, would destroy any remaining shreds of confidence in the ArbCom, if there are any.
QUOTE(Cla68 @ Sun 10th May 2009, 4:27pm)
To be fair, it's not just the pro-Israel editors causing trouble in those articles. A couple of months ago I added a paragraph ... I cited the New York Times. My edit was reverted ... within a few minutes. ... Yes, I know some of you would say that any involvement at all anywhere in Wikipedia is a waste of time.
To be really fair, no one is claiming that the pro-Israel partisan editors are worse than the pro-Palestinian editors
in their editing. Both of them are a pox on the truth. The issue here is that one side is protected by an ultra-powerful WP admin/checkuser/oversighter, and the other isn't. Said admin has never been reticent in using the tools of the WP trade to push his partisan agenda.
And yes, we have well established that Wikipedia is at its (cough) best in the accumulation of easily-sourced yet non-controversial facts about trivial subjects. I use it all the time to find out what actor was in which episode of random television programs. It's not as good as IMDB, but it is pretty good for that. For any subject beyond trivia, Wikipedia varies from bad to merely questionable.
I know that you and others do much work on (mostly) non-controversial areas of military history, and it is a shame that little one reads there can be trusted -- not because of lack of hard work on your part -- but because of the ultimate bankruptcy of the Wikipedia model, a state to which Jayjg and his ilk have contributed much.