QUOTE(pedrito @ Wed 6th May 2009, 3:00pm)
QUOTE(Cla68 @ Mon 4th May 2009, 2:55am)
Well, if they hadn't edit warred they would probably be ok. I think the "Palestinian side" like MeteorMaker and Nishidani are a little stunned that they won the argument, but ended up topic-banned along with the "Pro-Israel" editors. Perhaps one lesson for interested observers to take from this is that edit warring will not be looked upon nicely by this committee.
Have they really "won the argument"? There are no findings regarding [[WP:NCGN]] or stone-walling, so there's been nothing won by everybody getting banned.
Cheers, Pedrito
As far as ArbCom is concerned, you're right, they are not stating implicitly or explicitly that you won the argument.
QUOTE(trenton @ Wed 6th May 2009, 2:43pm)
QUOTE(Cla68 @ Sun 3rd May 2009, 7:55pm)
Well, if they hadn't edit warred they would probably be ok. I think the "Palestinian side" like MeteorMaker and Nishidani are a little stunned that they won the argument, but ended up topic-banned along with the "Pro-Israel" editors. Perhaps one lesson for interested observers to take from this is that edit warring will not be looked upon nicely by this committee.
Yes, but what exactly do you do if you don't edit war? The other side will have the article the way it wants, and they can talk indefinitely. Try to find consensus? They have a large enough group of editors so that you won't find consensus that the earth is not flat. Take it to arbcom? They'll reject the case because everybody's talking and there's no edit warring. Is it any wonder that some people snap and act rude and edit war?
That's the nature of a wiki. Sometimes you can't win even if you're right. Edit warring is not the answer. I recently lost an argument
here about mentioning the Nazis in the lead for the Martin Luther article. Me and several others don't believe that the Nazis should be mentioned in the intro. Unfortunately, there are enough editors opposing my view to keep me from declaring consensus and removing it. Me and the few editors that take my side could start edit warring, but that's against the rules. So, I/we lose. That's the wiki.
There are other ways I could address this, I could file an RfC (which I might do), go to one of the content noticeboards, or request mediation. One or all of those might work, or they might not. Anyway, that's the within-the-rules process. If I don't like it, I can leave. Or, I can secretly recruit a bunch of like-minded people to come and support me. That's against the rules. If I get caught doing that, however, I deserve to be banned. Catching people doing that is kind of difficult, isn't it? As you can see, Wikipedia has some glaring weaknesses.
This post has been edited by Cla68: