Wikipedia and Christian Abuse of Wikipedia

Asymetric Controversies

(The More General Case)

DWEEC activities can be seen as an example of a much wider problem, identified on Wikipedia by Nikodemos.

According to Nikodemos there are a number of subjects about which one group of editors care passionately and everyone else cares hardly at all. The result is that related articles come to be "owned" by the group of passionate enthusiasts. Here it is in his own words:

I believe that one of the major sources of POV in wikipedia articles is what I call asymmetric controversy.

An asymmetric controversy is a controversy between two sides, one of which is particularly interested in the issue and fanatical in defending its POV, while the other doesn't care about the issue a whole lot. Articles on such issues will inevitably be biased in favor of the fanatical side, because they put most effort into writing about it.

Unsympathetic visitors, typically with a passing interest and a NPOV approach, are soon made to feel unwelcome. Generally they will give up and move on - since they simply don't care enough to stay and get involved in constant edit wars.

This is a perfect description of what has happened on all of the pages in which devout Christians have an interest. On the one side is a federation of DWEECs, on the other a stream of occasional visitors who typically spend a few weeks getting frustrated and then leaving.

Wikipedia does not officially recognize the phenomenon of Asymetric Controversies, but there can be no doubt that they exist. A few spectacular examples, apart from DWEEC owned pages, are, in no particular order:

• Gun Politics in the US
• Race and Intelligence
• Market Economy
• Democratic Peace Theory
• Circumcision

Since there is no official recognition of the problem, there is also no attempt at solving it. This is likely to become a major problem for Wikipedia since, until it is resolved, Wikipedia will remain unreliable and will never gain the credibility that is essential to any good encyclopedia.

Other Articles Allegedly prone to Imbalanced POW Wars

A number of correspondants have alleged massive imbalance in other Wikipedia articles, beyond the scope of this site. Here are some of them, quoted as presented to us, without comment (mainly because we don't have the time to confirm them).

Names are withheld unless the correspondant explicitly asks to have their real or user name included.

Notable Jews - Reported April 2006

Note the alleged involvement our old POV Warrier friend Jayjg

There is also a more detailed assessment of this topic at Adrian's Space an extremely articulate blog by yet another critic of the abuses tolerated at Wikipedia

It seems to pretty well established incidentally that Slim Virgin is an Anti-Semite masquerading as a Jew.

I was interested to see your web page. A very similar thing is occurring on Lists of Jews. There have been repeated attempts (often successful) to delete any article that is a list of notable Jews. Where this fails, names are deleted on the grounds that there's no evidence that they're Jewish, even when an impeccable source is provided. Apparently, "having Jewish parents", "coming from a Jewish family", etc are not proof that someone is Jewish.

Excellent examples are

• List of Jewish jurists
• List of British Jews (note the recent attempt to discredit the Jewish Year Book as a source, and the denial that David Miliband is Jewish although it has been conceded that his brother is and his father was).
• List of Jewish actors and actresses
• List of Jewish Fellows of the Royal Society (twice nominated for deletion, then arbitrarily renamed as List of Fellows of the Royal Society)
  

Leading editors involved are SlimVirgin, Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters (though not lately), Grace Note and Antidote. The latter has survived an extensive RfC. Recently, Jayjg (who fought Lulu over the list of Jewish jurists) has changed sides and is deleting names on the List of British Jews.

SlimVirgin is reported to be Jewish and accuses people who add names to these lists of anti-Semitic motives. This is very offensive to these editors, many of whom are Jewish.

Happy to discuss further if you're interested.

Israel-Palestine Conflict - Reported April 2006

Hey,

I just noticed your website and the situation you are tracking. I have noticed the same thing with the Israel-Palestine conflict. A bunch of individuals, including one aggressive but smart administrator, aligned together to enforce a particular viewpoint over a number of articles. It is the exact same phenomenon just with different people and a different subject. I guess that's the problem with religion, it acts to align people together in passionate support of something which isn't always that based in reality.

I wish there was a more general way to automatically track this type of ideological collusion. Something like an automatically generated guide to who supports whom and a central registry for tracking indicents related to specific individuals.

Best,