User:Dbachmann/Wikipedia and nationalism

Wikipedia's policies of WP:NPOV and WP:ATT (and WP:UNDUE, which is a corollary of the two combined) allow any two editors in fundamental disagreement to work together productively, provided they are intelligent and have a certain minimal social competence.

In most cases where fruitful collaboration breaks down, except for patent silliness, at least one party is strongly motivated either by an irrational sentiment of either religion, nationalism, or, psychologically probably related, the cranky (nerdy, ADHD) mind caught in pseudoscience

Religion, nationalism and pseudoscience overlap:
 * Religion and pseudoscience in topics like Creation science;
 * religion and nationalist feelings in ethnic nationalism (including supremacism and irredentism or national mysticism), such as Hindutva, Islamism, Zionism or "America and Christianity".
 * Nationalism and pseudo-scholarship, finally, in various topics surrounding Historiography and nationalism (in particular ancient history) and historical revisionism.

Religiously motivated editors are most welcome on Wikipedia, since they will mostly invest their energy in covering the faith of their choice in brilliant detail. Problems will arise only when their religious motivation spills over in topics of either nationalism or political conflict, or science and scholarship. Since my involvement on Wikipedia is mainly with the humanities, my involvement with the complex outlined above has been mostly with pseudo-scholarship motivated by nationalist or ethnic ideology. Since the population of Wikipedia editors is generally strong in scientific education,  pseudoscientific edits, be they motivated religiously or just by crankiness, are as a rule recognized and neutralized very quickly. Since there are far fewer editors with a background in humanities, pseudo-scholarship related to linguistics, ancient history, archaeology etc. have a much greater chance of passing. This is a systematic problem of Wikipedia; there is no straightforward remedy, but it needs to be recognized and taken seriously.

Distribution
In my experience, edit-wars involving nationalism on Wikipedia can be ranked roughly as follows:


 * significant
 * Macedonia, Greeks arguing with Slavic FYRO  Bulgaro-  Skopjean Macedonians over who has the historic right to use the name "Macedonia".
 * Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia related issues.
 * Indo-Pak/Indian nationalism, mostly Hindutva (Indigenous Aryans, Aryan Invasion Theory), but also some Dalitstan and other "communalism", and Pakistani patriotism.
 * Assyrian/Aramaeans/Syriacs/Chaldean/Chaldean Christians and related articles
 * some Turkish nationalism (vs. Greeks, denial of the Armenian genocide etc., and Pan-Turkism, Turko-Scythia, Turko-Sumerian etc.)
 * some Iranian
 * some Irish vs. British
 * persistent Afrocentrist (Race and Ancient Egypt, Olmec alternative origin speculations)
 * some Armenian
 * occasional bursts of activity due to individual editors
 * various Slavic, Polish vs. Russian, Polish vs. German (Gdanzig)
 * scattered Albanian, particularly relating to Kosovo and Greek minorities in Albania
 * Kurds
 * occasional Hungarian (vs. "Finno-Ugric")
 * occasional Baltic (vs. Russian, "Balto-Slavic")
 * occasional Dutch
 * the occasional Germanic mysticist, white supremacist or Neo-Nazi (Stormfront)

Arbitration
known arbitration cases surrounding nationalist editors:


 * Dbachmann (Afrocentric/Indian)
 * Hkelkar 2 (Indo-Pak reloaded)
 * TinMing (Taiwan)
 * Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram (Taiwan)
 * Transnistria
 * Zeq-Zero0000 (Arab-Israeli)
 * Mudaliar-Venki123 (Indian castes)
 * E104421-Tajik (Perso-Turkic)
 * Freedom skies (Indian)
 * Occupation of Latvia March 2007
 * India-Pakistan March 2007
 * Armenia-Azerbaijan February 2007
 * Piotrus-Ghirla (Polish/Russian) February 2007
 * Hkelkar (Indo-Pak) December 2006
 * Kven (Kven?) November 2006
 * Ulritz (German/Dutch) November 2006
 * GreekWarrior November 2006
 * Kosovo October 2006
 * Zeq (Arab-Israeli) March 2006
 * AndriyK (Ukrainian) January 2006
 * Stereotek (Turkish) October 2005
 * Rajput (Indian) February 2006
 * Antifinnugor (Hungarian) February 2005
 * IZAK (Israeli) January 2005