User:David.Monniaux/group POV pushing

Editors from certain groups (political, religious, etc.), understandably, edit the pages describing those groups. This is perfectly understandable, and even commendable, for they have first-hand knowledge of what happens inside these groups, the way they are run, their organization, etc.

However, some editors go further and start pushing the point of view of their organization. There is a whole gradation here – obviously, one tends to be more sympathetic to the point of view of a group to which one willfully belongs. However, this can reach the point where the editor's behavior is contrary to Wikipedia's objectives of neutral point of view (NPOV).

Typical behaviors of problems editors pushing group POV are:
 * 1) The official point of view and discourse of the group is overemphasized. Whole sections are copied from official group documentation, without any effort of perspective.
 * 2) The editor deletes information that does not support the official point of view, for instance information suggesting that the group, while pretending to be acting in a certain way, acts in some other way.
 * 3) The editor does not make a difference in seriousness and objectivity between references. The editor will, for instance, quote an opinion site, or another site with obvious errors, as a reliable source of information. In particular, the problem editor, when discussing matters where an objective reality check is easily possible (for instance, the actual wording of a legal text), will not try to get first-hand information, even when it is available for free through a Web search, but will stick to  evidently erroneous quotes. The problem editor will protest the removal of dubious "references", or their tagging as unreliable.
 * 4) The editor will put a disproportionate burden of proof on other editors, while not putting it on himself or herself. For instance, the editor will copy entire sections from pages whose honesty, objectivity or reliability can be reasonably doubted, but will delete short mentions of opposing points of views as long as they are not supported by iron-clad references.
 * 5) Because editors with different points of view from the problem editor will have had to justify everything they wrote and will have had to give counter-argument to every crude POV statement from the problem editor, some sections of the article will have become unduly lengthy and cumbersome. The problem editor will then complain about this fact, of his own making.
 * 6) The editor will continuously make inappropriate references to NPOV and policies against "weasel terms" to justify his deletion of the writings of others editors, while he will largely ignore these rules for himself. The editor will fail to note that the policy against "weasel terms" includes substantial exceptions: when the belief or opinion is actually the topic of discussion; when the holders of the opinion are too diverse or numerous to qualify; when contrasting a minority opinion. This is especially true if the edit stated majority of a given population holds, by all reasonable accounts, a certain opinion; typically, the editor will ask for a list of people or groups holding this opinion, which sounds ridiculous. In some cases, polls are available, but it's not always the case.
 * 7) On the other hand, the editor will forget those policies when making broad claims that his group is unfairly considered.
 * 8) The editor will try to portray all points of views opposed to his group as arbitrary, backward, or motivated by revenge or ideology. Information mitigating or negating that portrayal will be deleted.
 * 9) The editor will claim that his group has received unfair legal treatment. His coverage of the case will only include the group's argumentation and will grossly distort the actual issues.
 * 10) The editor only edits articles pertaining to his own group or close associates, and considers these articles "his own", or that of a narrow clique.
 * 11) The editor will edit articles discussing his group on Wikipedias in other languages, even though he does not speak these languages well enough to understand the articles correctly, or to contribute to them meaningfully.
 * 12) The editor understands the notion of "consensus" as "My friends and I write the article, then the others just have to accept it".