World War II, The anti-US version Options

[Emperor]

When will Oberiko and his group stop?

He's won just about every argument he's had, and still keeps going.

He's got the article under constant semi-protection.
He's deleted the American picture from the lead montage, and now there are 2 Soviet, 2 Commonwealth, and 2 Japanese.
The Intro and infobox refuse to say that the war started in 1939, and the 1937/39 debate continues.
The Intro and infobox don't list the major combatants
The major commanders aren't listed anywhere in the article. (For fun, try to find "Eisenhower" or "Zhukov" anywhere on the page using Edit --> Find on this Page.)

The entire article is written in Oberiko's weird wiki-summary style where the proper names of events are hidden within Wiki-links. See the Normandy Invasion coverage, in its entirety:

In June, 1944, the Western Allies invaded northern France

And check my favorite passage:

The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad which was in the path of the advancing German armies and by mid-November the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad in bitter street fighting when the Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad[94] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously.[95

I've been following the article for years now, and seen people come and go but basically anyone who doesn't agree with Oberiko gets frustrated and leaves. He's not afraid to swing his administrator status and have people blocked who edit war with him or Parsecboy.

I could go through line by line and point out not only anti-Western and anti-American bias, but also outright errors. Take the first line of the Background section:

In the aftermath of World War I, the defeated German Empire signed the Treaty of Versailles.[7]

How does anyone not notice this for months and months? I've been watching it as an experiment to see if Wikipedians will ever get a clue, but, well, you see. Later in the background you'll find out that Germany's goal with Austria was to make it a "satellite state". Both of these statements are referenced too?

Insult to injury: the Holocaust is described as "the systematic purging of Jews in Europe". Well I'm pretty sure English isn't Oberiko's first language, but then why doesn't anyone help him? Oh right, because it's so obvious that the article is Owned that you'd be an idiot to try to help.

I know this breaks my rule of thumb not to help Wikipedia myself, but it is the number one search result and I'm feeling a bit of remorse just letting it fester, with it being around D-Day this week and having just recently talked to guy who was a B-29 pilot based in Saipan. I can't believe a generation of kids might be seeing their first encyclopedia article about WWII on Wikipedia.

This post has been edited by Emperor:

[Mister Die]

WWII is one of those Wikipedia articles that I don't know why anyone without an amateur interest in revisionist history would touch. Besides what has already been mentioned in this thread (the necessity of having a thorough knowledge of a whole damn lot of source material among them), this article is pretty much guaranteed to be in a constant state of flux. You could make the most amazing article that has ever graced this planet and at best it'd be featured, but still doomed towards an unending stream of mediocrity by a combination of people who can't write well, people who want obvious biases to show through, and people whose knowledge of WWII is one-sided and descends into personalities (Hitler, Rommel, Churchill, Stalin, etc.) or is just lame to begin with.

So basically, unless one were to hover over and defensively protect said article every single day for the rest of Wikipedia's existence, there's not one bit of guarantee that it'll survive the month without being made dumber in some section, since Wikipedia apparently cannot differentiate the concept of "owning" an article into two parts: between some random guys who game a system, and those who actually know what they're typing about. Wikipedia therefore gives you the freedom to make an article suck and gives the opposing party the freedom to engage in oftentimes long and irritating bureaucratic processes just to rectify said suckness, and if you're unlucky then you'll just get outmaneuvered anyway.

But yeah I'd be able to write a bit about Albania's small contribution to the Allied war effort at least. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

BTW Emperor, what do you think of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia's take on WWII? See: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com...+War+II+1939-45

I wonder if it's better than Wikipedia's in terms of giving information (if obviously at times biased in favor of the USSR.) It probably is.

This post has been edited by Mister Die:

[radek]

WWII is one of those Wikipedia articles that I don't know why anyone without an amateur interest in revisionist history would touch. Besides what has already been mentioned in this thread (the necessity of having a thorough knowledge of a whole damn lot of source material among them), this article is pretty much guaranteed to be in a constant state of flux. You could make the most amazing article that has ever graced this planet and at best it'd be featured, but still doomed towards an unending stream of mediocrity by a combination of people who can't write well, people who want obvious biases to show through, and people whose knowledge of WWII is one-sided and descends into personalities (Hitler, Rommel, Churchill, Stalin, etc.) or is just lame to begin with.

So basically, unless one were to hover over and defensively protect said article every single day for the rest of Wikipedia's existence, there's not one bit of guarantee that it'll survive the month without being made dumber in some section, since Wikipedia apparently cannot differentiate the concept of "owning" an article into two parts: between some random guys who game a system, and those who actually know what they're typing about. Wikipedia therefore gives you the freedom to make an article suck and gives the opposing party the freedom to engage in oftentimes long and irritating bureaucratic processes just to rectify said suckness, and if you're unlucky then you'll just get outmaneuvered anyway.

But yeah I'd be able to write a bit about Albania's small contribution to the Allied war effort at least. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

BTW Emperor, what do you think of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia's take on WWII? See: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com...+War+II+1939-45

I wonder if it's better than Wikipedia's in terms of giving information (if obviously at times biased in favor of the USSR.) It probably is.

Actually, the WWII article is pretty stable and editing frequency is pretty low. This is pretty much because some folks have agreed that any kind of edit that may be deemed controversial needs to be (pretty much extensively) discussed on talk page first. It's a bit of a WP:OWN kind of thing, but actually here I think it makes sense - otherwise the article would degenerate in much the way you describe.

My main beef is that there's too little stuff on Nazi occupation - that's a woefully short section on what really was the experience of most of the people who found themselves unfortunate enough to live during this period. Connected to that, too little stuff on resistance movements/partisans.

Other than that there's a bit of the typical Western bias, which manifests itself mostly by the disproportionate attention being paid to Western front and the Pacific (it seems to do a good job of covering the land war in Asia, though that's one side of it that I know less about) - but that's pretty much how WWII is written about in English language sources.

Oh yeah, there's been a very long running dispute - conducted with a level of professionalism and respect that is very unusual for Wikipedia - about how to describe the role of Soviet Union in the early stages of the war. It cycles a bit and I haven't checked lately at which point in the cycle it is currently, but that's about as close as you get to "constant state of flux"

This post has been edited by radek: