Talk:Checkpoint Charlie Museum

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110612104322/http://www.berlin.de/landespressestelle/archiv/2009/11/13/145973/ to http://www.berlin.de/landespressestelle/archiv/2009/11/13/145973/

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Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://www.mauermuseum.de/img/flyer_mhacc_eng.pdf. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and, if allowed under fair use, may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, providing it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore, such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. IamNotU (talk) 02:23, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Disputed edits and NPOV
I'm copying your edit summary from and  so I can respond to your concerns:
 * "This change in the changes before: It is unclear and irrelevant how much revenues the museum has. Furthermore, you can not only take Sybille Frank as a source - no credibility. You need to have wide ranging, balanced sources. This museum is more than a museum - the revenues are used to help the people in dictatorships just as in the past - Sybille Franks assumption it is used as a cash machine is nonsense. The exhibition is used to educate future generations what happened in Germany and show them how to learn from Germanys example, the examples of non-violent resistance in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. Please stay with the facts and stop deleting and stop with the fake news. Thank you"

I completely agree that the article needs a range of balanced sources. And I'm sure the museum has accomplished many great things, and will continue to do so. But it has also been involved in numerous controversies covered in the press, and Wikipedia doesn't say only nice things - it reports what reliable sources say about the subject, good and bad. It doesn't report its editors' personal opinions or knowledge of the subject. There are also clear rules about evaluating the reliability of a source, and a reliable source can't be dismissed or deleted simply because an editor disagrees with it, unless they can find a more reliable source that says something different - and in that case, both sources are often kept. This is part of one of the most important "pillars" of Wikipedia, neutral point of view.

The sentence about the "chaotic" style of the exhibitions is sourced from the New York Times article that you yourself provided the citation for. As such it's a reasonably unbiased description of the museum. The sentence is also based on the citation of Sybille Frank's book. Her description is similar and not especially negative or critical either. It has never aspired to be the Pergamon Museum! As far as I understand, "Sybille Frank, Prof. Dr. phil., is Junior Professor for Urban and Regional Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Technical University Berlin", and is considered an expert in heritage and tourism studies. The cited book "Wall memorials and heritage : the heritage industry of Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie" received an "excellence award" for an "outstanding humanities and social science work". It is published by academic publisher Routledge. It is therefore absolutely beyond question that it meets Wikipedia's standards for credible and reliable sources. You are of course welcome to provide additional reliable sources, or to make use of the range of 18 existing ones, such as the citation from the conservative National Review I added, which paints quite a glowing picture of the museum. There is always room to improve the balance of viewpoints on a subject.

The organizational structure of the museum, and its attendance and revenue figures, are relevant and indispensable to every article about a museum. It must be explained whether it's a non-profit, public/government funded institution, or isn't. If it changed from one to another, that must be explained in the History section. As Prof. Dr. Frank is a credible expert in the subject, citing her scholarly analysis is completely appropriate. It has also been widely reported in the German press that the museum gave up its Gemeinnützigkeit (in the public interest/charitable status), so it's hardly a controversial claim. Neither is the estimate of revenues controversial, as anyone can multiply the attendance figures by the ticket price to check its accuracy. Again, you're more than welcome to cite opposing research from other credible experts or journalists, but it's not acceptable to simply delete reliably sourced material because you disagree with it, nor to add or replace it with unsourced or unverifiable statements. If you can provide evidence for the statement that a significant part of the museum's revenue is used for directly "providing assistance to dissidents around the world, in particular in unfree countries such as Russia, Cuba and North Korea", other than mounting exhibitions about their cases, that would also be useful, as none was found in the citation given, nor anywhere else, and therefore the claim was removed.

This sentence: "The museum seeks to keep alive the memory of all those who rose up against [the Berlin Wall] and everything it represented; many of these people paid for their resistance with their life", while essentially true, reads like a "mission statement" of the museum spoken in its voice, which would need a quotation. It seems to convey a subjective moral statement and persuasion rather than a neutral and unemotional statement of relevant facts. As there is already a quotation above from the museum about its mission, it was deleted.

Please note also that the requirements for citations may be much stricter on English Wikipedia than on German Wikipedia. Any edit that reads like promotional material or advocacy, that uses language such as might be found on the museum's flyers or website, or seems to be a personal reflection or speculation, that is not verifiable or lacks citations, is likely to be removed. Lastly, if you might prefer to edit on the German Wikipedia, I'd be happy to help translate any encyclopedic material to here. Thanks. --IamNotU (talk) 22:20, 9 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Note: I would revert the latest removal, but I'm from Germany and am personally afraid of out-of-wiki consequences for reinstating possibly actually defamatory material. I guess the user removing the content isn't exactly doing something forbidden when they call this "Defamation/Verleumdung" and "urge to desist", but the discussion is coming close to legal threats here, in my personal opinion. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 15:01, 28 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Note 2, directed at the angrily removing user: "Verleumdung" implies knowingly adding defamatory material. As in, knowing that it is wrong. de:Verleumdung_(Deutschland) – I don't believe this to be the case here, even if the information turns out to be false. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 15:05, 28 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Note 3: User has been indefinitely blocked by an uninvolved administrator. This might lead to a very interesting unblock request. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 15:13, 28 March 2018 (UTC)


 * thanks for the comments, it was a bit lonely here :) I've restored the paragraph again and added additional citations. The article doesn't say anything about what the profits are used for, only that they are earned, and that the museum changed legally from being a non-profit to a private enterprise that is financially very successful and independent of public funding. It hardly seems like criticism, let alone defamation! Actually I think it doesn't go far enough in reporting the widespread controversies (see the sources), but I don't have the inclination to expand the article now. My impression is that their edits were intended to make the article read like an advertisement, likely due to a conflict of interest. --IamNotU (talk) 21:32, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Disputed edits
, I don't agree with the content you've added to the article: a long list of names of celebrities who have purportedly visited the museum. You have not provided an inline citation of a reliable, published source, as required by Wikipedia policy. Even if you could provide a source, I feel that the long list is undue weight, and seems to be promotional in nature. I am not going to engage in an edit war with you. Please remove the list until you have established consensus to add it. Thank-you. --IamNotU (talk) 00:28, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

PS, in the edit summary the third time you made this edit, you say "Yad Vashem highlights it’s visitors", but the link you gave is only to a self-published book by the museum's owner. It's not a reliable source, and again in any case, although it's not impossible to mention a few well-known visitors, such a long list is not appropriate for Wikipedia for the above reasons. --IamNotU (talk) 11:25, 20 December 2020 (UTC)


 * FYI, Martinakess (and others) engaged in the same kind of edit war on German WP, also on Alexandra Hildebrandt and Rainer Hildebrandt. Quite clearly conflict of interest and no understanding nor interest in WP. --Fuchs B (talk) 20:23, 7 January 2021 (UTC)