User:Dbachmann/Wikipedia and nationalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

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[1]

Religion, nationalism and pseudoscience overlap:[2]

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.

Contents

[edit] Distribution

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

[edit] Arbitration

known arbitration cases surrounding nationalist editors:

Further information: Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Completed_requests
Active Arbitration Cases    (recent changes · purge  · view · edit · talk)
Evidence and Workshop
(•/ t) (p/ t) (w/ t) C68-FM-SV (t) 16 May 2008  JV
(•/ t) (p/ t) (w/ t) Giovanni33 (t) 4 May 2008  AGK
Voting
(•/ t) (e/ t) (w/ t) Homeopathy (t) 29 Apr 2008  Co
Motion to close or dismiss
(•/ t) (e/ t) (w/ t) Footnoted quotes (t) 28 May 2008  AGK
Recently closed (see all)
CAMERA lobbying 28 May 2008  RL
Initials indicate the Clerks involved with the case.
See also motions in previous cases.


[edit] Notes

  1. ^ the only difference being that religion and nationalism are recognized by society as super-individual causes, while the crank experiences the same feelings with regard to his chosen topic, but is perceived as an eccentric loner by society.
  2. ^ These connections show that religion and ethnic pride are probably identical at a fundamental level (human group behaviour, development of religion).

[edit] See also

Indian sandbox

/Hindutva and pseudoscience

the art of sockpuppeteering appears to be particularly popular among Indian patriots.