User talk:Ravpapa/Tilt

Label your enemy -- not
I find here once again this recommendation to use judgmental prefixes on quoted people. I find this recommendation naive and very biased. People change their mind over time. Most intelligent people are too complex to be fairly labeled with one word. I say a wikilink to the author's page is enough. Emmanuelm (talk) 15:40, 18 December 2010 (UTC)


 * No, he's actually describing the technique well as it is implemented on Wikipedia. Another good example is the (ultimately unsuccessful&mdash;because he was topic banned) attempt of User:Wikifan12345 to label Norman Finkelstein as simply a supporter of Hamas. This goes hand in hand with the protips on being vague and (mis)quoting only fragments of what the opponents say. See Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive75 and the endless talk page of that article. Tijfo098 (talk) 03:35, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The stuff about "left winging" is also spot on. A hilarious example was SP Rose's article. Tijfo098 (talk) 04:00, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Practicing what is preached
I'm afraid this essay is an example of the bias it intends to satirize. For example the assertion that Anti-Israel lobby in the United States is the same article as Arab lobby in the United States is rather offensive in implying both (1) that the only US group who could be opposed to Israel must be Arabs, and (2) that the political interests of US Arabs are limited to opposition to Israel. Similarly, the principle that it is a "tilt" to have different articles about different aspects of the same subject is clearly wrong: or do you think there is some wiki-political agenda between having different articles on Constantinople and Istanbul? --GRuban (talk) 16:15, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Given that there's also an alleged Jewish anti-Israel lobby in the US started by George Soros (according to the Anti- article), it's indeed a somewhat poor example of overlap. Tijfo098 (talk) 12:25, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
 * However, the example from the essay is overlap with Opposition in the United States to the Israeli Occupation in addition to the Arab one, and that's more compelling. Tijfo098 (talk) 13:28, 27 January 2011 (UTC)


 * The sad truth is that, in order to create an argument for two articles, the editors involved have in fact misrepresented the scope of policy actions by the organizations involved. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, for example, which appears only in the article on the Arab lobby in the United States, takes a definite position on the Middle East conflict. Take a look at their website. This and other organizations see US Middle East policy as an integral factor in an overall discriminatory attitude toward Arabs and Arab Americans, and I believe rightly so. However, editors of the two articles in question have focused exclusively on ADC's domestic campaigns, and ignored its international campaigns (the article on the ADC itself is much more balanced). Since I was involved in the early stages of editing these articles, I can tell you that this was a deliberate distortion of ADC's views, in order to preserve justification for two separate articles. --Ravpapa (talk) 16:30, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Many articles
That is also a good tip. I only fails in the face of a WP:ROUGE admin who doesn't abide by vote counting at AfD; otherwise "no consensus" => article kept => win. The only fail to this rule that I know of is Hamas and the Taliban analogy (had the same editor not created Islamization of the Gaza Strip right before). Tijfo098 (talk) 04:34, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Arab Salad
The funniest thing about that article is the ridiculous number of stub notices. Every Arab country is entitled to one, lest they be disenfranchised of their salad. Tijfo098 (talk) 11:30, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

a lot good about the article
Your main points are quite good, and I think can fairly describe propaganda anywhere...not just at wiki. Google anything controversial in Wikipedia and you will get controversial everywhere.


 * Another important part of looking at the big picture is to create consistency across articles. "Label" your oponents[sic]
 * make your enemies look bad, and you must protect your friends from attacks
 * Prefer the vague to the specific.
 * avoid giving the enemy a platform for his or her views
 * Describing an enemy as a generic "critic ..." makes that enemy appear to have a general bias. This is a good way to denigrate that enemy's opinions.
 * Always treat issues as though there is only one thing involved, and everything else is irrelevant.
 * Downplay controversy,
 * Attack the source
 * Never quote your enemy
 * Fork

I do think the article would be stronger if you had stuck with multiple examples, and not so much on G Levy and your disagreements with Jaakabou. Be that as it may, I put something below that illustrates that your article carries well beyond wiki into the real world of propaganda...

I was reading Erskine Childers 1971 (I think) essay called The Other Exodus where he mentions Y. Leo Kohn, who is mentioned in Childer's essay ''The Other Exodus"

"While in Israel, however, I met Dr. Leo Kohn, professor of political science at Hebrew University and an ambassador-rank adviser to the Israeli Foreign Office. He had written one of the first official pamphlets on the Arab refugees. I asked him for concrete evidence of the Arab evacuation orders. Agitatedly, Dr. Kohn replied: "Evidence? Evidence? What more could you want than this?" and he took up his own pamphlet. "Look at this `Economist' report," and he pointed to a quotation. "You will surely not suggest that the `Economist' is a Zionist journal?"

I decided to turn up the relevant (October 2) 1948 issue of the 'Economist.' The passage that as literally, gone around the world was certainly there,....

I decided to investigate this Dr. Kohn as I did not know who he was and the first place that turns up is this wonderful Palestinian site. Turns out Kohn has a serious resume as a Weizmann Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was assigned to write out a draft constitution for the new state of Israel and then "headed the Israel Delegation to the United Nations Mediator on Palestine in June, 1948. .. served as a member of the Israel Delegation to the Fifth General Assembly of the United Nations and as Chairman of the Israel Delegation to the UNESCO General Conference held in Florence in May 1950. ... "

Notice how Childer's denigrates Kohn in his essay, referring to him as a "political science" professor, and an "ambassador-rank advisor". (make your enemies look bad) Besides his numerous articles, Y. Leo Kohn has also written a book Israel and the new nation states of Asia and Africa (1959) and another called The constitution of the Irish free state (1932), this one in German with two others, apparently about the Arab refugees and this one calledThe Emerging Constitution of Israel and this one in Hebrew (I don't read Hebrew so I can't do anything with this). He says he wrote one of the "first official "pamphlets" on the Arab refugees, though he never gives us either names nor a quote. (*Be vague)  His only quote was made "agitatedly,"(make your enemies look bad) to point to an article that in fact existed.  Childers then goes on to disparage the source.(*Attack the source) Childers quote of Kohn's has zero substance (Never quote your enemy).  By the way, when I Google for "Leo Kohn" & Hebrew I get a jillion hits to Childer's comment above, and almost none for Kohn.  Kohn, btw has no article in Wikipedia but Erskine Childers does.  172.129.41.216 (talk) 04:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Another practice to go within or after forking: "Teaching the Controversy -- the lesser fork"
Wonderful essay. It was posted today on reddit and that's how I found it.

So, I realize that this essay has a sort of historic permanence, but I thought it was missing something important and peculiar to wikipedia which you ought to discuss for completeness -- specifically the practice of "teaching the controversy." I mean the practice of adding a section to an article (such as a bio) which is devoted to some controversy that otherwise wouldn't merit discussion in the article itself.

While many of the practices you describe are quite subtle and sophisticated, this one is blunt but easy to spot. If forking is for when "all else fails," then this is the fallback for when THAT fails: create a section in the article about the "X controversy" as a sort of "internal fork" within the article, a ghetto which shelters that embarrassing fact, making it extremely difficult to delete and preventing editors from delegitimizing its presence in the article.

Just a thought. If you respond, please mention it on my talk page because I don't login much these days and I rely on the automatic emails. Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 02:13, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Nice suggestion, Andrew. I just want to say thanks to Rabpapa for writing this well written, interesting and very informative essay. Shalom11111 (talk) 04:08, 30 November 2013 (UTC)