User:Southkept

I am watching wikipedia as a social experiment.

Here is someone who should be quoted:

"Statement by uninvolved party Ken Arromdee:

I find this whole thing to be both ludicrous and one-sided. About the only legitimate criticism of the CAMERA list is the admin-stacking part, and even that is used to blame people who don't seem to have anything to do with it other than being on the list.

What's wrong with people using the phrase "war"? Come on, they were phrasing private emails. They didn't expect someone from Wikipedia to look at their message, pick on their wording as being too hostile.

And the statement about getting pro-Palestinian editors in trouble by making accurate, well-sourced edits and getting them in trouble when they try to delete them? That's the equivalent of saying "I can get rid of a gang of shoplifters by selling items in my store and when gang members walk away with them, I can report them to the police." Making good edits and catching vandals by watching them vandalize the good edits isn't "baiting". At most, the only thing wrong with this is that they may be assuming that the pro-Palestinian editors are vandals when they're not... but if they're wrong, the plan doesn't hurt anyone; it just produces some extra good edits.

In fact, a *lot* of the CAMERA quotes are very reasonable when read as being about how to handle vandals. Would it be evil to declare war on vandals? Who wouldn't want to keep a list confidential from vandals? What's wrong with saying "I want to gather some more people to keep vandals from introducing bias in these articles"? And if there actually is a "major Palestinian offensive" towards making articles biased, what would be wrong with CAMERA members watching out for signs of it? CAMERA is, generally, saying "we want to take bias out", and everyone here is reading that as "CAMERA actually wants to put bias in, but just calls that taking bias out", which is blatantly anti-AGF.

It also seems to me like a lot of this witchhunt is related to dislike of CAMERA, which is leading people to read every statement from anyone associated with them in the worst possible way. If you look at what they're actually saying (again, aside from the admin-stacking), almost all of it amounts to a statement that they want to stop POV-pushers who are pushing the opposite POV of their own. It's just being read as POV-pushing on their own parts. Even the actual quotes from CAMERA above support this; look at CasualObserver48's section above--it's entirely composed of quotes by CAMERA about their intent to be fair, along with commentary about how that's obviously a lie since nobody who is actually fair could favor Israel that much. Ken Arromdee (talk) 20:26, 8 May 2008 (UTC)"