User:Egfrank/stuff/Tobefair

To be fair
I am deeply saddened that after three weeks you continue to believe that the editors with whom you disagree do not share your concern for WP:NPOV. The editors which you recently labeled "Progressive POV editors" have gone out of their way to give your claims a fair hearing. I'm sorry you cannot see that:


 * When they disagree with you they have always provided reasons based on reliable, verifiable sources or Wikipedia policy. Sometimes doing so has taken considerable time.
 * If you have given a reason for your changes they have never out and out reverted you without discussion, no matter how much they disagree with your decision. This has been true even when the deletion of large amounts of material would be justified under WP:V.
 * Before re-adding cited material you have deleted, they have attempted to address your concerns and provided an explanation on the talk page of those changes and how they address the concerns.
 * Before re-adding uncited material you have deleted, they have always added supporting citations in accordance with WP:V.
 * Even if *no* reason was given for your changes, they have still tried to "guess" at what might have been the reason before returning the material in either exact or modified form.
 * When conversation has reached an impasse, they have frequently proposed moderation or RfC's or invited outside comment.  When you have proposed the involvement of third parties they have supported you as well.

As I look back on the interaction I am increasingly feeling that there are inherent contradictions in your behavior towards those editors. I am having trouble reconciling these contradictions with the assumption that you have given those editors the same fair hearing:


 * 1) POV pushing. In Wikipedia land neutrality is highly valued and POV pushing is a very serious negative charge. An experienced editor such as yourself surely knows that and surely knows all the criteria Wikipedia uses to detect POV pushing.  Given the significance of the claim, I have to assume that you checked the work of the other editors and found it lacking in one of the POV criteria.
 * 2) * But if so, you have never actually stated where the work was lacking. Nor could you have.  The work was all heavily cited using the most reliable sources possible.  Claims that group X believed Y were supported by their own mission statements.  Other claims of a more synthetic nature have always been supported with academic citations by leading sources in the appropriate field.   On the few occassions where a synthetic claim was made without citation, a  tag was added by the editor writing the claim.  I can't understand how a fair minded person would see that as POV.
 * 3) * So perhaps you meant they were POV because only one position was stated. However, you have never made that claim either.   To the contrary, you have actually removed material that was intended to reflect the full range of POVs on a group of religious denominations and how they are named,  You explained these deletions by claiming that these statements were of no real import to readers (not encyclopedic).  And yet you have considered the "name" used to refer to these denominations so important that you have continued a dispute for three weeks.  If the name itself is not of encyclopedia import, why spend time on it? Surely we weren't spending all this time and effort on resolving something you consider a mere preference or personal spat?
 * 4) * Or perhaps you meant that the material was POV because it "sounded different" than material in another article which you felt covered the same topic. Several editors explained to you that (a) it was not the same topic and (b) in any case, the material in the second article was an uncited synthesis.  Even if you disagreed with the editors about it being a different topic, you did not disagree that the material in the second article was an uncited synthesis.  You are an experienced editor, so surely you know that a well cited description of a topic always trumps an uncited synthesis.  You might fairly complain about a content fork but what possible good faith grounds would you have to complain that the writers of the cited material were pushing a POV? If there was any POV to be had, wouldn't it have been more reasonable, fair, and in accordance with Wikipedia policy to assume that the uncited synthesis was the POV?
 * 5) Integrity of Wikipedia. When pressed you have indeed changed your argument and claimed that what you meant was a "content fork".  I would therefore presume that you are the sort of editor who is very meduyak (exact) about avoiding content forks.  But then I look at a long list of edits each of which actually increased the risk of content forks:
 * 6) * when after a week of discussion an article was broken up into sub-articles, you filed a Wikiquette complaint when a user tried to avoid a content fork by removing content that had been refactored from the original article. Surely if your main concern was content forks you would appreciate that material in two places is not a good thing - why then was this deletion the trigger for the Wikiquette complaint?
 * 7) * on numerous occasions you have copied large blocks of material from one article to another rather than just providing a one or two sentence summary and linking to the material in the other article. Surely you know that duplicating large amounts of material increases the risk of content forks?
 * 8) * To assume good faith here, I have to assume that you understand that there are sometimes larger issues at stake than the avoidance of content forks and you were acting out of concern for one or more larger issues. But if you believe that other things can take precedence over concern for content forks, then why wouldn't you extend the benefit of the doubt to others?   You had ample reason to believe that others had larger reasons - they spent countless words trying to explain them.  Why then would you assume that only you cared about the integrity of wikipedia (no content fork) and they did not? (e.g. "Please don't ruin the hard work...")

Futhermore I am concerned that you seem to be trying *at all costs* to redefine the scope of every article to force the "umbrella" article to be something containing the word "reform". Am I misreading any of the following actions?


 * First you spend over a week arguing with editors that the Reform Judaism should be the umbrella article and accused an editor who added cited material to the Progressive Judaism article of creating a "POVFork" (or content fork) and editing against the status-quo.


 * When it was pointed out that Progressive Judaism had been the umbrella article for 2 years, that there was no overlap in the article content, and editors had repeatedly told you that Reform Judaism was inappropriate for an umbrella article on the world wide movement, you then accused the editor of Progressive Judaism of inserting overlapping content. In reality you had thinly paraphrased material from Progressive Judaism and placed it yourself into Reform Judaism.   Until that point there had been no overlapping content.  Accusing someone of creating redundancies is one thing.  Creating the redundancy yourself and then accusing another editor of doing it is ...?


 * When you failed to convince anyone that Reform Judaism should be the umbrella article, you tried to AfD all the articles that had been spun off from it even though there were valid WP:LENGTH reasons for spinning the articles off and the spin-off had been discussed for a week.


 * When you were told this was not the best way to handle a dispute, you rescinded the AfD. But then you removed the belief section from Progressive Judaism and merged with a large amount of uncited and biased material to create Jewish beliefs and practices in the reform movement.  Assuming good faith, editors did not delete material (though deletions would have been justified under WP:V) and instead discussed concerns and waited for you to try to bring some order to the large amount of material.  They even asked for an outside opinion.


 * When a third party told us that the scope of the article was too large and should be broken down into several articles, you abandonned that article and instead began inserting a large amount of historical information into the Reform Judaism articles. Once again you copied large amounts of material from Progressive Judaism. You also added material on communities (Denmark, Hungary) that have never had a formal denomination named reform, not now or in the past.


 * That material was refactored into appropriate sub-articles -- some of the material rightly belonged in the sub-articles Reform Judaism (North America) and Reform Judaism (United Kingdom). Your judgement call that there needed to be an article giving a historical overview of reforming activities across Europe was accepted.  However, this material described a historical movement that was the basis of all non-Orthodox Judaisms, not just those called "Reform". Accordingly, the material was moved into an article using a notable term in the field of Jewish history.  Seeing that there was a genuine argument that the term "Reform Judaism" was ambiguous, you decided to accept the refactoring (thank-you).  But still not willing to give up the idea of an umbrella article containing the word "Reform", you then modified the introduction to expand the scope to include all of the Progressive Judaisms as well as the historical process, thus creating once again a new "mega-article".


 * And just for good measure you accused the editor who wanted to keep the scope focused on the historical process of "polemics" because the introduction limited the scope to the historical process and explained the notability of the title in that context..

Please try to understand that these articles are being split up because they have a lot of material, not because of some "progressive POV". They need room to grow and breath and to do that they have to stay focused. Please also have good faith and understand that your fellow editors are trying to create a series of tight focused articles that can expand naturally and whose titles are more likely to invite knowledgable people to join us and help them expand. I'm sure you understand the value of this and will cease accusing editors of polemics when they try to define well scoped articles with notable names appropriate to the topic of the article. Thank you, -- Egfrank (talk) 17:03, 16 November 2007 (UTC)