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I've noticed the nice effort on the google searchs but would like to suggest a few changes that must be made to them (if you don't mind the suggestions):
p.s. there's more ways to write down the names of the area and while 'Shomron' bumps up the findings another reasonable 300K, Google doesn't know how to handle "Iudea" and finds 470 million pages using the word 'Idea' instead. Warm regards, Jaakobou Chalk Talk 08:29, 3 March 2009 (UTC) p.s. if I add the Hebrew usage, the tables are clearly turned towards using Samaria/Judea rather than censoring them as MeteorMaker proposes 28.7 Mil vs. 15.9 Mil. Still wondering how adding Arabic would benefit the searches though I found out that West Bank (in Arabic) raises the findings to 18 Million while adding Arabic for the Samaria search gives it a total of 28.7 Million. i.e. it (expectedly) adds a neglectible number of findings in the "occupation of Arab land" narrative. Jaakobou Chalk Talk 08:46, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Can we stop this somewhat futile debate right here? I don't see the point in mashing-up google hits in one way or another if we have rather explicit sources in academic and mainstream literature. If you've got real evidence, post it on the page. Discussing it to death here is only a waste of time and energy.
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Just wondering what constitutes an "historical term." How old does something have to be to be accurately labeled "historical"? Tundrabuggy ( talk) 22:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Tundrabuggy, there are two separate questions here. To identify a term like Samaria as "historical" in the actual text of a Wikipedia article, we need reliable mainstream secondary sources explicitly identifying it as such. Something for example like this from the Los Angeles Times:
Around Sanur and Homesh, a web of back roads, trails and canyons could make it difficult for the army to block the arrival of religious militants from other settlements in the northern West Bank, historically referred to by its biblical name, Samaria. [6]
But for the purposes of talk-page discussions, when we're hashing out formally and informally which terminology we should use in article space, then it's fine to point to mainstream primary sources and observe that in the last 40 years "West Bank" (with or without modifying adjectives, e.g. "northern," "southern," etc.) has become the overwhelming standard consensus terminology, while "Samaria" and "Judea" have fallen into disuse.-- G-Dett ( talk) 16:09, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
CM argues that it's beside the point to determine if "Samaria" and "Judea" are widely accepted terms or not, because they are not administrative districts, but "geographical/topographical entities". His argument clashes with WP:NCGN, which requires us to use the most widely accepted English name for every geographical entity.
"Judea was the name of a country in Palestine in ancient times." (p.J158)
"Samaria was the name of a city and its surrounding region in ancient Palestine." (p.S63)
(Emphasis mine). While at the library, I checked a couple more encyclopedias and none supports the "J&S are modern toponyms" position, not even Encyclopaedia Judaica (which, for the record, does not grant the West Bank an article).
"Judea, Lat. form of Judah, the southern province of Erez Israel during the period of Roman hegemony".
"Samaria (Heb. Shomron, mod. Sebaste), city established as the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel during the reign of Omri c.884 BCE".
Note that "Judean heights" and variations thereof is uncontested use and has no bearing on the terms we are discussing here.
"The [West Bank] territory, excluding East Jerusalem, is also known within Israel by its biblical names, Judaea and Samaria."
Judea, the S division of ancient Palestine under Persian, Greek, & Roman rule succeeding the kingdom of Judah; bounded on N by Samaria, on E by Jordan River & Dead Sea, on SW by Sinai Peninsula, & on W by the Mediterranean. [7]
The mudslinging has begun. I admit I was involved in some unnecessarily hot edit wars in my first four months of active editing, it comes with inexperience and the foolhardiness to set foot in the I/P area. That was my edit-war baptism of fire, and I was young and foolish enough to believe it's enough to have the sources and policy on my side. I am wiser (and more disillusioned) now.
While it's no surprise to see my 3RR block and limited topic ban (that was subsequently lifted when it was found I hadn't in fact done what I was accused of) exposed and milked for everything they're worth by CM, he may not be the most suitable editor to make such accusations. During his first four months of editing, he was warned for disruptive editing four times, AGF once, TE once, BITE once, and personal attacks twice. Was he an innocent noob? No, here he admits to having edited for "a while" without a named account [9]. Even more aggravating, one year into his career as a mature editor, in only the last three months, CM was
I don't drag this up to single out Canadian Monkey, every I/P editor has a history of edit warring, generally concentrated to the first few months of one's career berore the subtleties of WP editing practices and etiquette have been discovered and internalized. What's striking in this dispute (at least to me, a relatively inexperienced editor) is how the bad behavior has been spreading from experienced editors, who should instead have been role models for us all.
I'm also appalled at how casually editors like CM fling around pretty serious accusations that may have grave consequences for fellow editors. His claim "None of these warnings and sanctions seemed to have helped, and the latest ban by Elonka was repeatedly violated by User:MeteorMaker", which he now repeats in the hope that nobody will notice that the bluff has already been called, doesn't even contain the proverbial germ of truth, and it will be interesting to see which of the two options "provide diffs" or "remove it" he will choose. MeteorMaker ( talk) 19:13, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Sandahl, I can assure you the discussion climate was already at its nadir when G-Dett entered the debate in early December. Far from worsening the dispute, her input has helped restoring the focus by keeping the most egregious disruption tendencies at bay and by breaking up the vicious circles with entirely new angles.
Re this, Jayjg was indeed making a demonstrably false accusation that he has still not been able to provide diffs for. It was not inappropriate to point this out, as I've done myself. I'm confident his transgressions of this kind will be looked into more fully by you and other admins before this case is closed.
Here, like in a dozen other articles, user:Canadian Monkey appeared out of the blue within three hours of my edit only to revert it, just like you correctly note G-Dett did in the same article. Anybody with a passing familiarity with this dispute knows that a similarly good case can be made that CM has an unhealthy fixation on me, as has Jayjg and user:NoCal100. Between Dec 4 and Feb 29, we were all focused on essentially the same articles, so as proof of anybody hounding anybody, your last observation is of negligible value.
Of G-Dett's edits since December, there is a clear focus on articles that pertain to the Samaria dispute. I don't see this as evidence as an "unhealthy fixation on Jayjg", it's only incidental that both (and several other editors) got involved in this discussion. For all I know, both may have followed my contribs history, since neither had edited eg Samaria (disambiguation) before I did. MeteorMaker ( talk) 11:39, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
The beginning date of the Second Intifada is disputed, but the major violence started the day after a controversial visit on September 28, 2000 by Ariel Sharon to a site held sacred to both Jews and Muslims; some sources, including the Mitchell Report, assert the violence was planned before the visit.
'The beginning date of the Second Intifada is disputed, but the major violence started during and after a controversial visit on September 28, 2000 by Ariel Sharon to a site held sacred to both Jews and Moslems.'
Just a quick note to say that I'm following this thread. I'm busy preparing the next installment of evidence for the main dispute here, but when that's through if anyone wants me to respond in detail to Sandahl/Jayjg's accusations, I will. For the moment, I'll just say that I am both a reader of Wikipedia and an editor. Although the I/P conflict is not what I write about in real life, I do regularly read articles about it here and elsewhere; mostly regarding high-visibility subjects like the second intifada, Israeli settlements, the siege of Jenin, the Gaza war, and so on. When I come across something truly egregious, like the apparently deliberate misrepresentation of the Mitchell Report noted above, I look at the talk page, the edit history, etc., to see what's happened, and intervene if necessary. If the problem is chronic, and involves a massive coordinated effort of source-distortion, policy-distortion, and a catenaccio approach to talk-page discussion – a strategy, that is, of making only tautological statements that assume the established truth of precisely what is in dispute, and dismissing, without elaboration, all critique and analysis of same as "strawman arguments" – then I find, almost without exception, that User:Jayjg is at the center of it.
A final word regarding what Sandahl calls an "unhealthy obsession." My interactions with Jay are indeed unique, without parallel among my other interactions with "pro-Israel" (note the scare quotes) editors. See my recent exchanges with Ynhockey for a representative counter-example. Meanwhile, virtually all of Jay's relationships with "pro-Palestinian" (scare quotes again) editors not only occasionally feature but are in fact defined by frustration, tautology, nonsensical games of who's-on-first, failed attempts at dispute resolution, total breakdown of WP:AGF; and an odd, almost poignant pleading, on the part of Jay's interlocutors, that he for once step out of his defensive crouch, stand up straight, and engage in substantive discussion.-- G-Dett ( talk) 18:35, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
A few final words on Sandahl's evidence. The bulk of it (i.e. everything from West Bank, Israeli settlement, Judea and Samaria, Samaria (disambiguation), and Talk:Samaria/Discussion_of_sources) regards the present dispute, the quarreling over use of the terms Samaria and Judea in WP's neutral voice for the northern and southern West Bank respectively. The others are simply high-visibility IP articles that had rank POV-pushing in their leads when I cam across them: Second Intifada's lead falsified the conclusions of the Mitchell Report, and Anti-Zionism's lead misrepresented sources in order to suggest a strong and necessary connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Jay was standing behind both falsifications, so I confronted him over both. These confrontations were about a week apart.
Sandahl also lists the BLP and AN/I noticeboards as pages I "followed" Jay to. I regularly read almost all of the public noticeboards, and do not hesitate to intervene where serious POV-pushing and/or misrepresentation is going on.
Now, Jay's war over the disputed terms "Judea" and "Samaria" had been going on for months without my knowledge when I first intervened. I began watching Israeli settlement in late November, for reasons that had nothing to do with the disputed terms, and nothing to do with Jay; I simply happened to read a version whose lead began like this:
Israeli settlements are arbitrarily defined as communities inhabited by Israeli Jews in territory that came under Israel's control as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War. Some Arabs, included most members of Hamas, use the term "settlement" to refer to any Israeli community, even those inside the Green Line, in order to deny Israel moral legitimacy and to represent Israelis as foreigners or outsiders rather than indigenous...
...and finished by saying the settlements constituted "one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for Arabs and Europeans." [10] (emphasis added). This was not Jay's work but that of an anon. [11], and was fixed soon enough by Nickhh, [12] without much ado or significant edit-warring (rolling back rank POV-pushing is generally accomplished without too much fuss if Jay isn't involved). Looking into the talk page, however, I saw the dispute about "Samaria" coming to full boil. [13] I do not understand Sandahl's attribution of the "deterioration of the discussion" to my involvement; at the point that I first entered the discussion, all of the sources were laid out, the positions were entrenched, and Jay was repeatedly calling MeteorMaker a liar and a bigot. My debut posts consisted of two requests for clarification: I asked Jay to explain why he thought when an author (Safire, discussed in my submitted evidence) "refers to 'the Biblical names for the West Bank,' what he really has in mind is 'an Israeli administrative district'?"; and I asked more generally:
Is it the position of Nocal100, Jayjg, Oboler CM et al that Samaria is not a loaded term? Or is that even if it is loaded, Wikipedia should use it as long as some RSs use it?
Jay did not respond to my first question. To my second question, he wrote that "'Samaria' reflects a moderately widely used term that also happens to reflect the terminology used in the official government statements regarding the withdrawal." I asked if we should also factor in moderately widely used terms from official Palestinian statements; Jay responded, "I'm pretty sure the Israeli government is currently the government legally in charge of the territories." I asked if "NPOV terminology on Wikipedia is set by the party 'in charge of' a disputed or occupied territory"; Jay then claimed I was strawmanning him, but wouldn't say how. He never would say how, and I don't think any reasonable person could conclude I had strawmanned him; connoisseurs of the catenaccio can follow the game to its mind-numbing conclusion at the bottom of this section. Meanwhile the larger question I had put to him – why we should privilege official Israeli terminology over official Palestinian terminology, instead of just using the standard consensus terms of reliable sources – remains the heart and soul of this dispute, and needless to say remains unanswered, possibly unanswerable. I realized at that point that this was a propaganda ploy, plain and simple, and decided to take it on.-- G-Dett ( talk) 15:35, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
(outdent) Duke, I don't think anyone's saying it's OK to follow someone from article to article in pursuit of a personal grudge or "unhealthy obsession" or whatever, and I believe I've offered a fairly detailed response to that charge as leveled at me by Sandahl. I think what Scott is saying is what I'm saying, that it's OK to consult and analyze a problem editor's contribution history in order to understand larger patterns of disruption, deception, chronic POV-pushing, etc. I invite you to do the same with my record; then you can present your charge against me, rather than asking a daisy-chain of insinuating rhetorical questions.-- G-Dett ( talk) 21:07, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
As to your previous questions, Duke, they didn't seem to me lazy so much as theatrical. I was picturing you in wingtips and a barrister's wig, sort of hypnotically pacing in front of the jury box, awaiting a response about my whereabouts "during the time period in question" when the answer is two clicks away. Anyway: yes, both of the community-noticeboard issues I took up during that period involved Jay. Jay and I clashed briefly on Anti-Zionism in late October, and Second Intifada in early to mid November. Meanwhile however from late October and throughout November, my edits concentrated pretty heavily on Rashid Khalidi and Cynthia McKinney; Jay wasn't present and wasn't a party to either of those disputes. Then in early December I happened upon Israeli settlement and got into the whole Judea & Samaria business. During December I also got involved in a dispute about the use of sidebars on Israeli apartheid analogy; Jay was not involved directly in that dispute, as I remember, but I did mention his position on the Antisemitism sidebar. At another editor's request I weighed in on a dispute on Hummus, where Jayjg was not active. In January much of my editing was taken up with articles relating to the Gaza conflict, where Jay hadn't edited at all. I was also involved pretty heavily on Pallywood in the last week of January; again, no Jayjg. Meanwhile my involvement in the Judea & Samaria dispute has continued pretty stably in 2009 (yes, lots of firefights with Jay), with occasional edits to this and that ( George Packer, Charles Freeman, etc. Now if I can borrow the wig & wingtips for a second and ask you a question, do you have any idea how many I-P articles Jay edited during this 4-5 month period? Would it be in the hundreds?-- G-Dett ( talk) 21:55, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Talk about flogging a dead horse. Jaakobou now joins Canadian Monkey in perpetuating accusations that have already been thoroughly debunked, in the vain hope that somebody will fall for his deliberate assertions of false information in order to mislead.
The limited topic ban Jaakobou is talking about was found to be based on a misunderstanding and lifted on 1 March. Now, he makes the following demonstrably false claims:
- Making Samaria-related reverts to any article in the Israel/Palestine topic area
- Removing reliable citations from any article in the topic area. [14]
Jaakobou may, like User:NoCal100 here, be a little unclear over the definition of citation. No amount of wikilawyering from Jaakobou and others can change the fact that no citations were removed during my ban, and no Samaria-related reverts were done on any articles.
I request clarification from Jaakobou where in the diff he provided [15] he sees that. Until such clarification has been produced, Jaakobou should strike that accusation. UPDATE: On receiving this request on his talk page, Jaakobou replies he's "thinking that the text doesn't require further clarification at this point in time" [16] and has chosen not to strike the false accusation.
Complete nonsense. I even quoted the facts, so it's quite a stretch to claim that I "misrepresented" them.
Jaakobou also neglects to mention that as a consequence of my "arguing the sanction", Elonka admitted she had made a mistake:
You are correct about the citation thing. I saw the edit summary, and that citations had been removed, but missed the part about you moving the citations to a different part of the article. I am amending my statement accordingly, and apologize for my error. [17]
This is becoming ugly. Jaakobou's and Canadian Monkey's persistent attempts to discredit other editors with made-up serious allegations are, how shall I put it, somewhat less than helpful. MeteorMaker ( talk) 12:01, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
As the case is progressing, evidence of POV-pushing by Jayjg is being presented. I wonder if it would be helpful for the ArbCom if evidence was presented that showed whether or not Jayjg has been a persistent and problematic POV-pusher, apart from this particular dispute, over a long period of time? If this seems like a good idea, I'm extending an open invitation to any interested editors to collaborate in compiling evidence on a page in my userspace. I suggest listing evidence, if any exists, of Jayjg engaging in:
If such evidence exists, it could then be presented in this case, if not, then the evidence in this case stands on its own merits, subject to evaluation by the Committee. Cla68 ( talk) 23:30, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
I concur with statements above to the effect that user conduct issues needn't be limited to Jayjg, and I'm fully prepared to have my own editing scrutinized; I won't (in fact I never) complain of "attacks."
That said, I think it's useful to break down what we mean by POV-pushing. "Bias" per se is not the problem here. I'm biased, Duke's biased, most people (with the exception of a few saints and geniuses) are biased when it comes to the I/P conflict. With its core policies, its mechanisms of consensus and dispute resolution, and its traditions of lively, good-faith debate, Wikipedia is fully prepared to deal with bias. In fact, I'm only half kidding/rhapsodizing when I say it's the best system yet created by man for the absorption of collective intellectual energy and elimination of individual bias in the production of knowledge. (And I say that as a member of and believer in academia.) In the case of Jayjg, I think what we're looking at is not an editor who is "biased," but rather an editor who regards the policies, mechanisms, and traditions of Wikipedia as constituting not a system of restraint, but rather a set of pieces in a chess game to be mastered. This I regard as exceptional. This is why I don't have an "unhealthy obsession" with editors like 6SJ7 (whom I like very much even as he calls for my punishment), or my dear friend IronDuke (who regularly makes me laugh and whom I'll gladly stand a drink one day). I have beloved relatives who share their opinions ("biases"), and I'd be delighted if they too started editing the Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit. I think if anyone is going to bring a bill of particulars against another editor, it cannot focus on how their edits, in whole or in part, show that their balance of sympathy inclines towards one or the other side in the I/P conflict. This is perfectly normal and frankly perfectly acceptable, and Wikipedia is more than capable of making use of their energies. No, what a bill of particulars would have to establish is that the editor in question was deliberately gaming (and therefore showing contempt for) the very policies, mechanisms, and traditions that are there to manage and control the biases we all have.
This may be as good a moment as any to mention that Jayjg has created, built, and sustained – in the best spirit of Wikipedia – a huge and invaluable series of articles on synagogues in North America.-- G-Dett ( talk) 01:05, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Cla68, I would prefer if you work on and present your evidence primarily as your own. Inviting other editors to compile a specific sort of evidence against another editor is an invitation to problems. In addition, if you wish to submit evidence to this arbitration, please do it on the case's evidence page, not within your user space. An RfC as evidence would also be acceptable.-- Tznkai ( talk) 02:20, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
IMHO the case named "West_Bank_-_Judea_and_Samaria" should deal with the conflict related to the articles. Then it have chances to lead to something useful. The decision of the Arbcom that the community finds useful and fair make a precedent for solving other disputes. Now admins could use the decision as a guidance to solve similar conflicts on their own right or we could bring other acute conflicts to the arbcom to decide, etc. Creating omnibuses cases over years of editing, hundreds of articles, thousands of edits, etc. is IMHO usually unhelpful. I am not sure whether attempt to criticize a long time editor on a talk page and canvassing for some sort of a flashmob against the editor is helpful or in alighnment with our policies Alex Bakharev ( talk) 04:13, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Witch hunts usually reflect more poorly on the organizers and participants than on the witches they eventually burn.— Sandahl ( talk) 17:48, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
I was unexpectedly busy this weekend in Meatspace and will continue to do so- so I apologize for responding to inquiries slowly. I will attempt to respond to inquiries or requests for clerk assistance within 24 hours, you may wish to contact another clerk if the issue is urgent.-- Tznkai ( talk) 01:52, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm thinking of contributing to this great and exciting endeavor. One thing I'm unclear about, however. Is this about content or about contributors? Should I be saying "we should user term xxx because source-xxx says that the term is xxx" or should I be saying "user xxx is an unproductive edit-warrior, see xxx-link and xxx-link" ?-- brew crewer (yada, yada) 03:40, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
"this diff given by MeteorMaker as evidence [18] of so-called "misrepresentation by User:Jayjg""
Hmmm. I can't recall giving that diff as evidence, and none of my diffs have been labelled "misrepresentation by User:Jayjg" (though I have been encouraged to make the diffs user-specific, so I may have to label them that way). No idea why User:Tundrabuggy makes those claims, which seem to be good examples of misrepresentation themselves. (UPDATE: TB has corrected his error, though it's still a puzzling statement).
"the region is still so-named and understood world-wide."
That is an oft-repeated claim, but nobody has been able to find any kind of source, reliable or unreliable, partisan or neutral, mainstream or fringe, that actually states so. While there are numerous sources that explicitly state they are used in Israel and not in the rest of the world. [19]
"Further, User:MeteorMaker and others are simply wrong when they say that "reliable sources began avoiding it...in 1948." In fact, it was the common (and only) usage up until and after the '67 war. "
1) I've never claimed that "RSs began avoiding [J&S] in 1948", and I don't think anybody else has claimed that either.
2) The (unsupported) notion that it was the only usage up until 1967 is contradicted by several sources:
- “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical terms that the Likud government succeeded in substituting for what had previously been called by many the West Bank, the occupied territories, or simply the territories." (Aronoff 1991)
- "Even though the name ‘Judea and Samaria’ had been officially adopted as early as the beginning of 1968 instead of the ‘West Bank’, it has hardly been used until 1977. " (Gazit 2003)
- "Judea and Samaria (a term taken from Mandatory times and officially adopted to replace West Bank or the territories)" (Eisenstadt 1992)
"In fact, UN authorities consistently referred to Judea and Samaria as such."
For some years, the UN simply continued to use the official but defunct British Mandate district names that were imposed in 1920.
"In 1920, the British mandate government established a Commission for Place Names, charged with giving a name to new Jewish localities. Three criteria were established to govern the choice of new toponyms: (1) to restore the names of historical places, in particular the names of historic Jewish sites, whose names had been arabicised over time; (2) to commemorate persons and events important to the Zionist movement, the Jewish population of Palestine or of Jews, generally; and (3) to choose names of symbolic significance, esp. from the Bible (Arikha 1937: 7). These three principles seem to have been followed during the Mandate period and governed many of the earliest changes." [21]
Isolated instances of the terms can indeed be found in UN texts up to two decades after the Mandate was terminated, as Tundrabuggy's refs show. However, from the last 45 years, Tundrabuggy has only one example of UN usage (1970, incidentally from an Israeli source, The Israel League for Human and Civil Rights in Tel Aviv.)
"Samaria, for example, is on recent maps, is a real place with real roads, with a real university, Ariel University Center of Samaria."
Scroll up to the Discussion of evidence presented by Canadian Monkey section for the debunking of the "recent maps" claim. "Trans-Samaria Highway" and "Ariel University of Samaria" may be "real" (whatever that proves) but their names are nevertheless given by Israel.
"The Judean region, hills and lowlands are really real as well a magnet for travel or Jews, Christians, and history/archeology buffs worldwide and known for its wineries."
Absolutely. And the question we are discussing here, if J&S are widely accepted toponyms outside Israel, Tundrabuggy supports with five examples of usage, predictably all taken from Israeli sources — except one, from an Israel-only travel agency, where the single tour leader is presented with these words:
"Without hesitation, Linda takes a stand for Israel, for Jerusalem as its undivided capitol and the unquestioned right of the original Chosen People to be in their land."
I rest my case.
"When editors use legitimate, acceptable, and modern RS to refer to "Judea and Samaria" or each separately, very real and readily understood places, why would that not be perfectly acceptable at Wikipedia?"
Because the terms are not compliant with WP:NCGN, WP:UNDUE and WP:NPOV [22]. Note that none of Tundrabuggy's sources have stated that the terms are widely used (which is required by WP:NCGN), and nearly all from the last 40 years are Israeli.
"There does seem to be two sides here. One that wants to use "West Bank" to the exclusion of the Israeli "Judea and Samaria" throughout WP, and the other one that wants to use "Judea" and/or "Samaria" together with "West Bank."
Or rather, one side that wants to use neutral, internationally accepted standard terms without issues with multiple policies, and the other one that wants partisan minority terminology (but generously together with the unproblematic terms, for extra reader confusion). The complementary third side (that advocates using Palestinian partisan minority terminology) has not been invited to this party, but I can't see how their preferred nomenclature is less legitimate. MeteorMaker ( talk) 13:03, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
"Discussions with MeteorMaker on this topic are typically difficult, and often involve his repeating the same arguments, despite their rejection by other editors."
Well, what can I say. Editors who constantly reject arguments that policies should be adhered to and that evidence must support the conclusions find it "difficult" to discuss with other editors. I have no problem with editors who engage in civil, give-and-take, policy-respecting discourse — see these [23] [24] [25] for example, where articles were improved considerably through collegial discussion rather than stonewalling and disruption.
"
Here he insists that an English language source can only be used on Hebrew Wikipedia, because it is Israeli."
My argument is really in the linked page, the talk page note is just a short teaser. Considering there's exactly one edit by me on that talk page, my alleged "repeating the same arguments" doesn't seem to be such a big problem after all.
"In another discussion, he insisted that the two tables
[26] and
[27] are "
the exact same one", despite the former having data in it from years after the latter had been published."
For all relevant purposes, the tables are exactly the same, with (as I was the first one to point out) two columns added (that are immaterial in the context). I was also the one who tracked down the original table and the sources so they could be discussed. Tundrabuggy also chooses to truncate the full sentence:
Re the table, it's the exact same one [28] [29], only with the header changed from "Population Growth in Judea" to "Population Growth in the Judea Region [Southern West Bank]". Two more year columns have also been added, and populated with data supplied by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.
Were those Tundrabuggy's best examples of the alleged difficulty to discuss with me?
I hope it will not count as "difficulty of discussion" with me if I point out that Tundrabuggy's last two examples are, um, exactly the same (with not even a column added). That leaves two examples, which on closer inspection turn out to be the same one too, only manifesting itself as two different reverts of the same insertion of highly cherry-picked sources by Jayjg. WP:UNDUE doesn't state anything about how it applies to refs, but it sort of goes against the spirit to select eight partisan sources that say "Samaria" over more than half a million that say "West Bank". I suspect the "inappropriate editing" charge is more properly levelled at Jayjg, though we need more discussion to determine if this rather extreme case of selective source selection in order to prove a point is consistent with policy. MeteorMaker ( talk) 13:03, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
The whole paragraph Nick quotes from (last paragraph of WP:NCGN's lead) is very relevant to this dispute:
Within articles, places should generally be referred to by the same name as is used in their article title, or a historic name when discussing a past period. Use of one name for a town in 2000 does not determine what name we should give the same town in 1900 or in 1400, nor the other way around. Many towns, however, should keep the same name; it is a question of fact, of actual English usage, in all cases. For example, when discussing the city now called Istanbul, Wikipedia uses Byzantium in ancient Greece, and Constantinople for the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and also the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, use Stalingrad when discussing the city now called Volgograd in the context of World War II.
Emphasis added. This paragraph should also be borne in mind when Jay argues that a 2006 history book referring to Samaria and Transjordan in 1948 establishes the contemporary currency of such terms: "clearly published in 2006, not historical usage." -- G-Dett ( talk) 16:06, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
TB presents a Google News Archive link [31] to support his conclusion that "Samaria" is "clearly understood internationally, then as now." The "now" part has of course never been substantiated, but let's take a look at how clearly understood the term was in the 48-67 period, according to his evidence.
Of the first 50 hits, 18 are to ships named "Samaria", 3 to a race horse, 1 to one Peter Samarra of Pennsylvania, 7 to other places called Samaria, 3 to a pilgrimage play, and 10 to the ancient/biblical Samaria. Only 8 (of which two duplicates and two probably more properly classified as ancient/biblical) use the term as a contemporary toponym. The ratio of relevant hits decreases dramatically as we move down the Google stack, to around 2 or 3 in 50, the majority of which are from quotes by Israeli PMs or other Israeli sources. We also encounter the special case "Samarian Hills" and variations of it, which is uncontested usage and irrelevant to this discussion.
Now, was the term "clearly understood" in the 48-67 period? If it were, we would expect the term to be used without explanations. Even in this highly fragmentary material, we frequently find such explanations however: "the Samaria region of the Holy Land" [32], "the biblical district of Samaria, now i[n] western Jordan". Interestingly, all 4 instances of unexplained use are from the New York Times, which may indicate a naming policy unique to that publication during the 50's.
"The usage that one side wishes us to adopt as neutral, has only recently come into currency, especially with the current apparent "default" understanding that "West Bank" means "Palestine.""
"To insist on purging "Judea" &/or "Samaria" as currently used and understood terms is not to be neutral, but to take a position in a political language war going on not only in Wikipedia, but throughout the internet. "
MeteorMaker ( talk) 10:09, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
"The campaign"
It is wholly appropriate for editors to remove or amend bad content. Where it occurs across multiple articles, that may lead to those editors going to a large number of articles to put those errors right. Working "systematically" would seem to be a good thing in this context. The fact that there are ten or more WP editors engaged in trying to retain that poor content is a serious cause for concern, not evidence of the rightness of their case.
"Compromise"
To say that neither MM nor Pedrito "allowed any compromise wording" is, well, untrue. See this thread and this comment. Other examples abound. In addition, please note that we cannot - and should not - have compromises that overcome fundamental policy, eg (to use a familiar example) to say "2+2=5" because there is a (real world) minority view that it equals 6.
"Reliable sources dismissed"
Yes, one-off and occasional uses recorded in some sources have been rightly dismissed as a basis for demonstrating that the terms Judea and Samaria are standard, or equivalent alternatives to the the mainstream international terminology. I see you are still throwing them in here. I can throw 100 times as many back that do not use the terms at all, and use West Bank instead (note, not "as well as"). By implication, you and others are "dismissing" those.
What we have been waiting for over the last 6 months is the source that summarises the overall situation and says "while West Bank is a term favoured by Palestinians and Mongolians, the majority of the world refers to the area using the standard terms Judea and Samaria". Either bring that source, or confirm to us all now that it doesn't matter whether it exists or not, and the basis of this dispute will finally be made clear to everyone, in your own words. Or, as I've suggested above, go to every English language media organisation, every publisher, every international body and most governments in the world and work on getting them to change the way they describe the area. Once that's been sorted out I'll cede the point - I don't have any stake in it one way or the other, I just want this place to follow the language and terminology that I see in 99% of the mainstream newspapers, websites, documents, official papers and books I've ever read. That's policy here btw -- Nickhh ( talk) 19:30, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Questions about the "administrative district" shell game, and about "G-Dett's definition of Samaria"
Jay, a large number of secondary sources have been introduced over the months stating that the terms "Judea" and "Samaria" are ideologically loaded. You have dismissed most of these, saying that what they're really talking about "is the administrative district, not the geographic term." I contested these dismissals on a number of occasions, pointing out that in many instances the sources were explicitly talking about "biblical names" cum geographic terms, mentioned nothing about the name of any administrative district, etc. You never responded to any of my questions or challenges about this during the months that the dispute was unfolding. Now, in this Arbcom case, you are introducing as evidence sources that are explicitly talking about the administrative district:
From the time of the Persian Gulf War, President Bush and later President Clinton campaigned for a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty and they insisted that Israel refrain from building any further settlements in the administered areas of Samaria-Judea.
Can you explain this? How does this work? When William Safire talks about the disputed terms as "biblical names evoking Hebrew origins," you say he's talking about an "administrative district," so he doesn't count as a good source. Weird. But when Herbert Druks talks about "the administered areas of Samaria-Judea," he's not talking about the administrative district, he's talking about "geographic terms," hence he's a valid source? Very weird. Do you see how weird this is? I've been introducing anomalies like this as evidence that you are consciously playing a shell-game, categorizing sources as being either about the "administrative district" or the "geographic term" based solely on whether you want to credit or discredit them, all the while refusing to discuss the rationale of these dubious categorizations. I'm now in the process of condensing my evidence; if you respond in a meaningful and illuminating way to this question that I've been asking for months now, I'll revisit and possibly revise the allegation in my evidence section that you've been willfully deceiving the community about this.-- G-Dett ( talk) 20:32, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Preliminary note: Keep in mind that what Jayjg is opposing here is two facts that are almost universally accepted:
1) "Judea" and "Samaria" are historical terms (ie, not used any more) for the area that is today the West Bank.
2) With the sole exception of Israel, where the terms are official.
"User:MeteorMaker first began his campaign to remove/deprecate the terms "Judea" and "Samaria" on April 6, 2008. By July he had done so in 34 articles:"
That is true, though all except one of Jayjg's edit examples were made on a single day, April 18/19. As a month-old newcomer, I noticed a number of articles that used archaic terminology and updated them ("J&S" -> "West Bank"). Nothing particularly problematic.
"MeteorMaker took a break from Wikipedia from July 8 to October 22, and the conflict disappeared."
It's somewhat disingenuous to describe something as a "conflict" that doesn't involve edit warring or at least a few reverts. The nearest thing I can find is a short revert exchange with User:Canadian Monkey on 19 April @ Lakhish River, and again with the same user on 8 May@ Judea.
"MeteorMaker was well aware of the controversial nature of these removals. He had been advised by three different administrators that it was a bad idea for him to be doing this".
Not quite true. Of the three different administrators on Jayjg's list, only one (Ynhockey) says anything at all about "these removals", contrary to Jayjg's claim, and that was (obviously) after the fact. Ynhockey initially calls it "vandalism" but after reading the talk page at Judea engages in discussion, which ends with no particular objection from him or statement to the effect that it's "a bad idea" or "controversial". [43] As a gesture of good will, I put a lid on updating the toponyms anyway. The second editor on Jayjg's list, Coren, talks exclusively about Jayjg's and mine out-of-hand dispute at the Samaria article [44], and the third, Elonka, talks exclusively about Israeli settlement [45]. Jayjg's recollection of the events is not consistent with reality (easily verified by checking my talk page).
"in February 2009, Elonka banned him for 90 days from making Samaria-related reverts, and admonished him for that behavior."
What Jayjg neglects to mention is that the ban was found to be based on a misunderstanding and lifted on March 1. [46]
Let's take a look at what was behind that 90-day topic ban Elonka imposed on me, because that has bearings on what's happening now. Background:
"Hi Elonka. I discovered that Meteormaker has again removed the term from the Israeli settlement article, despite the previous agreement." [49]
Jayjg does not mention the crucial qualifier "in the lead".
"MeteorMaker, you have been cautioned before about removing citations to reliable sources. Since you have started up again, I am going to make this formal: You are banned from
- Making Samaria-related reverts to any article in the Israel/Palestine topic area
- Removing reliable citations from any article in the topic area.
This ban is in place for 90 days. " [50]
Curiously, Elonka ignores Jayjg original (unfounded) claim and comes up with a different rationale for banning me. Upon finding I hadn't in fact removed any citations, she apologized, and the ban was subsequently lifted. [51]
In essence, I could have got a 90-day topic ban because Jayjg provided Elonka with incorrect information. I am not insinuating malicious intent, but as an experienced admin, he should have checked his information better, particularly as the consequences for an innocent editor could have become dire. User:brewcrewer [52], User:NoCal100 [53], User:Canadian Monkey [54], and User:Jaakobou soon begun lobbying for extensions of the ban, the latter two alleging breaches of it on my part. They both provided incorrect information to support their claims [55]. Both have been notified and given an opportunity to review their allegations [56] [57]; in this Arbcom case, they have both chosen to maintain their allegations.
"Unlike those who disagreed with them, neither MeteorMaker nor Pedrito allowed any compromise wording that used both terminologies."
Since the pro-J&S side's position was that both terminologies, partisan and neutral, should be used, it's not correct to describe that as a "compromise wording".
"Meteormaker's most typical edit summaries were "Terminology modernized" or "Terminology updated," and the edits often marked as "minor" even after months of disagreements about these changes. "
I see nothing wrong at all with "terminology modernized". That Jayjg disagrees with me about the modernity of the terms, as well as with several other editors, and with all the sources that say anything at all about the subject [58], is hardly evidence of disruptive behavior on my part. A word on "minor": it was default for my editor, so I didn't always bother to switch for small edits. Apparently Jayjg didn't either always [59].
"This was in line with persistent attempts to deprecate the term wherever it could not be excised completely - to insist that it was not a term used today. Thus Meteormaker's and G-Dett's definition of Samaria as a "Biblical name"/"Biblical term"/"Biblical" or "ancient region" despite MeteorMaker stating weeks earlier, several times, that it was the name of the "British Mandatory administration district." - the British Mandate was neither "biblical" nor "ancient."
"Biblical" was in fact a compromise, the original distinction between modern/historical was expressed simply by using the past tense like in all other articles on historic regions. Since Jayjg refused to budge on this and allow the articles on Judea and Samaria to reflect complete source consensus, we settled on describing the areas as "biblical", much because hundreds of reliable sources use that exact word.
"In addition, it's true that more recently one "side" in the conflict has tended to prefer the traditional, longstanding designations, rather than the newer "West Bank.""
Question to Jayjg: just why should WP kowtow to that side and its idiosyncratic terminology? Aren't we here to write English wikipedia, for English readers, using established English terminology? MeteorMaker ( talk) 02:20, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Preliminary note: Jayjg's claim that reliable sources were dismissed is a total red herring. No sources were ever presented, by Jayjg or anybody else, that remotely support the "J&S are modern toponyms" position without a huge amount of WP:SYNTH. What was rejected was examples of usage, because they failed to be examples of anything else than historic usage or Israeli usage (both uncontested).
"On the Talk: page discussions it was shown that, contrary to Meteormaker's assertions, there were many examples of modern English language sources using the terms"
"MeteorMaker and his supporters disqualified almost all sources that contradicted their claims. They rejected out of hand any Israeli sources; the fact that the official Israeli government designation for the region was "Judea and Samaria" was apparently meaningless,"
"and any English language sources published in Israel that used the terms were not, MeteorMaker claimed, valid indicators of their use in English."
"However, the rejections quickly widened beyond this scope: if an American or British publication used the terms, but the author was born in/connected with Israel, then it was again not an example of English-language use. "
"For example, David Weisburd's Jewish Settler Violence, published by Penn State Press was dismissed because "...Weisburd is also an Israeli, which makes [him] unusable as evidence of outside-Israel use of the toponym." [62] This despite the fact that Weisburd was, at the time of publication, a professor at the Graduate School of Criminal Justice of Rutgers University, with degrees only from American universities. "
"Similarly, Miriam Shaviv, born and raised in Canada and a citizen of the U.K. was dismissed as writing for "foreign publications" when she wrote for Britain's The Jewish Chronicle. [63]"
"Sources were also dismissed if the author was, in MeteorMaker's estimation, an "ardent anti-Muslim"
"or an official in the Zionist Organization of America [66] [67] and therefore using "Zionist-approved terminology", or, in the case of Abraham D. Sofaer, because he had committed the "faux pas" of belonging to a Zionist organization in his youth. [68] "
"If all that didn't work, then sources could be dismissed because, according to MeteorMaker, the source "[could]n't be evaluated due to restricted content" [69] "
"or was a dead link (to partisan source) [70], despite the actual quotations being provided."
"It became apparent that there was little point in providing sources that contradicted MeteorMaker's theories, because there was always some rationale by which they could be dismissed."
"Despite all this, and even when applying all of MeteorMaker's conditions, there are still sources that use the terms."
"And a final bit of irony: a number of editors have been trying to portray the "Samaria"/"Judea" terminology as Israeli-only, or Israeli/Zionist/Jewish. Yet in several of the articles in question, the terminology was first added by a Muslim Palestinian (and native English speaker)"
MeteorMaker ( talk) 02:20, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
What's missing in
User:Jayjg's evidence is the
smoking gun or
silver bullet: A source that explicitly says that
Judea and
Samaria are the common names for the southern and northern
West Bank, respectively. Until then, all accusations of anybody being on a campaign of disruption are bogus. No source, no argument.
Cheers,
pedrito -
talk - 11.03.2009 13:05
It has taken me 2 days to check thoroughly his evidence. The notes are so extensive, that I would violate even generous word-limits. I'll use just one snippet paradigmatically (as is known, I don't think diffs are reliable to judge what is going on. Each a frozen snapshot of a long and intricately sequential film of evidence)
It is a masterful mustering of evidence, in the German sense of 'Muster'. The problem is, how to read the pattern? I clicked through the dazzling necklace, spangled with cerulean diffs, feeling somewhat like Catherine the Great drifting on her imperial barge down the Dnieper, and admiring the impressive facades of Potemkin's villages. It is useful, however, at the end of the voyage, to walk the backleg and see the same facades from behind. The technical term is 'unpacking'.
There is almost nothing there, unless one accepts Jayjg's prefatory premise that MeteorMaker is engaged in a 'campaign' of denigration ('deprecation'), with a bigoted spirit on I/P wikipedia. Let me unpack the first piece of evidence.
Item 173.
'a geographic term used for the mountainous region between the Galilee to the north and Judea to the south. It is the name of natural, historical and political regions. It is the central region of the Biblical Land of Israel. Most of the region is in the northern West Bank of the Jordan River.'
with
'is a term used for the mountainous northern part of the West Bank, used by people who want to emphasize Israel's and the Jewish people's relationship with the area.'
Conclusion. In itself, there is nothing here, evidence-wise. No edit-warring, or deprecation, or campaigning, at least on that page. To the contrary, MM, over a period of 8 months, makes 4 edits, one of which Jayjg contests after 6 months, while accepting MM's original reduction of the lead, which defines Samaria as 'in the West Bank'. Since then, a problem has arisen, and now what Jayjg accepted of MM's edit is now adduced as evidence for MM's campaign of hostile POV pushing. If one wants, I can do this for a good many of the other pearls in the spangle. It is the method which is defective. Nishidani ( talk) 15:18, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi Joshua, I just read your piece of evidence, about the irritable exchange between MetoerMaker and Jay regarding the dead link to the op-ed by the Israeli ambassador to Australia, which Jay had presented as a non-Israeli source.
I agree with you that MeteorMaker ought simply to have found the cache online or visited a library, rather than insinuating that Jay's summary might have been incomplete or misleading. For context, however, it's relevant that at the time that MeteorMaker expressed those doubts, Jay had already accused him sixteen times of being a liar, and a comparable number of times of being a bigot. In almost all of these cases, it's clear that Jay's accusations were made in bad faith. It's also relevant that Jay has in fact lied extensively and repeatedly about many of the sources involved in this dispute. Just for perspective, I'll say that I would never take on faith any claim that Jay makes about source materials. I wouldn't insinuate doubts about something that could be easily checked, and in that respect MeteorMaker misstepped, but the above is the above.-- G-Dett ( talk) 03:50, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Comment removed by clerk: unacceptable personal insult to criticism ratio. -- Tznkai ( talk) 03:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
It seems to me that Joshuaz misuses the term "bad faith" for what he means, that MeteorMaker did not assume Jayjg's good faith. This use seems to be appearing more frequently; I tend to hope for that to reverse, since it seems to turn the whole accusation into a simultaneous self-incrimination. Mackan79 ( talk) 05:21, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
"On December 19, 2008 MeteorMaker argued that an Australian newspaper using the term "Samaria" could not be verified since the link was dead. This is exactly counter to what is stated in WP:V which is explicit that sources do not need to be online."
True, I'm still learning. I honestly didn't know that at the time. (Parenthetically, it has had some odd consequences, for instance here, where an unverifiable but 404-reffed claim was made where we, counterintuitively, had to simply take the posting editor's word for it, because policy says so.)
Let me also mention that in academia, everything needs to be verifiable, and verification is seen as a natural part of the scientific process rather than as an expression of bad faith or a personal attack [72]. Blindly accepting the word of an authority runs counter to everything science (and, I innocently believed for a while, Wikipedia) stands for.
"User:Jayjg responded to Meteor that he had provided the quote and confirmed the source, and suggested, in the face of apparent bad faith or inability to understand basic policy, that MeteorMaker drop by a library to validate the source himself."
- "I quoted the source, therefore it said it. The claim has been confirmed by me. Period. " [79]
"After a two week period, Meteor removed the link as well as the content , with the edit summary "Rm dead link (to partisan source)". This act was both against basic policy and apparently in bad faith."
- "Four settlements will be evacuated in the northern Samaria region of the West Bank."
"A Spanish translation of the original newspaper article was then found hosted on the web and was used as a substitute for the Australian citation. It included, however, a footnote text that was not part of the original article. MeteorMaker inserted his translation of the hosted version's footnote."
"Jayjg pointed Meteor to a google cache to further confirm the content of the original and reminded him of the library option."
MeteorMaker ( talk) 15:36, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Clerk note: Mackan79's original post here was evidence, and has been moved to the evidence page in his section.
Perhaps now might be a good time to start focusing on solutions and ways forward? Or at least get some concrete proposals going over at the Workshop ... — Roger Davies talk 15:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
In my final section of evidence, just now submitted, I refer to Jay's use of WP:NOR as a parliamentary bludgeon to suppress critical discussion of source-material on talk pages, instead of as a community policy governing article content. I say he does this "in every single instance where he is opposed." This is not rhetoric; I am fully prepared to prove that this is his standard operating procedure when it comes to disputes about sources. This illegitimate tactic is absolutely central to the dispute now before Arbcom; in other words, if Jay didn't do this, we wouldn't be where we are today.-- G-Dett ( talk) 21:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
(moved back here to avoid dumping repetitive discussions there)
The point of the Trinidad and Tobago example is this quite simple one, based around a combination of geography and logic - if a place is in "Trinidad and Tobago", it is by definition surely also sited in one or other of "Trinidad" or "Tobago" (or possibly, one of the smaller islands). Equally, if we note that Port of Spain is in Trinidad, it is also surely in "Trinidad and Tobago". By the same logic, if we say something is in "Samaria", it is surely by definition to be found within the larger entity "Judea and Samaria". Whether we wish to describe these areas as "geographic" or "political" or "administrative" regions is kind of neither here nor there, although as it happens the designations are not mutually exclusive anyway. We are simply talking about where things are located.
The "confusion" which seems to be coming from pointing to occasional sources that suggest places in Israel are also in Samaria only arises because in some cases "Samaria" is used in what would appear to be more of a historical or even biblical sense, to refer to a wider region that extends into modern day Israel. This appears to have been the case in British Mandate times, when of course Jordan was also called Transjordan. Contemporary usage, according to sources I have seen, does not generally follow this. Those contemporary sources are quite explicit that "Samaria", on the occasions when it is used at all in a modern context, is, unsurprisingly, usually simply a reference to one part of "Judea and Samaria", or rather "the West Bank". Please, once and for all can we get beyond the "here's one example of X being used in a certain way, therefore X is the standard normal term and can be used everywhere" logic? Anyway here's a sample of what really does seem to be the standard use -
Similar examples are available in respect of Judea/southern West Bank. The argument that suggests that Samaria and/or Judea can therefore be added in to articles (especially in respect of things in the West Bank, but probably in respect of places in Israel as well) fails on several levels, all of which have been discussed and demonstrated at length long before we got to ArbCom -
At the end of day I'm personally agnostic as to whether the term can or should be used in respect of towns in the parts of what could be referred to as historical Samaria/Judea that lie within Israel, but they should certainly not be used in respect of places in the West Bank as if they were neutral standard terms. Saying "but we're using them as geographical terms rather than in a Judea & Samaria sense" won't wash for the reasons above. When they are used, they have a standard - and rather obvious one would have thought - meaning. If I abuse someone in the street and they object to my language, I can't get away with saying - "oh you and everyone else might see c##t as a rude word, but I'm using it as a term of affection, so there's nothing wrong with it. Look, here's a film script where someone uses it as a term of endearment, QED". -- Nickhh ( talk) 17:52, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Brewcrewer's methodology has several flaws that have been discussed already [85]. A brief recap:
Result: Samaria: 1,540,000 /12 = 128K hits.
Also note that "Northern West Bank" has several alternatives, like "Northern part of the West Bank" (
32K hits), "Northern portion of the West Bank" (
4.8K hits), "North West Bank" (
90K hits, with the word "banking" excluded to filter out most false positives. (Though ORing the varieties together, counterintuively, lowers the Google total, which is probably indicative of a deficiency in the Google search algorithm. I have chosen to disregard the varieties in this calculation.)
Result: 118K hits, with "banking" excluded but none of the results of the varieties added to the total.
Conclusion: Far from being "far more commonly used English terms", the terms seem to be in the same ballpark. Outside Israel, "Northern West Bank" is around 20 times more common than "Samaria". This is in addition to the result of another (informal) analysis, that indicated that "West Bank" is 70 times more common than Samaria, and 1400 times more common outside Israel. [86]
BC's accusation that his "comments and offers to compromise were met with WP:IDONTHEARTHAT, WP:WIKILAWYERING, strawman arguments, stonewalling, and incivility" has not been substantiated with anything. The discussion is here.
"I pointed out that other "Samarias" don't necessarily take away from the notability of the term because the fact that other things are named after the original Samaria enhances the notability of the current Samaria."
"MM responds with: WP:IDONTHEARTHAT , WP:WIKILAWYERING, and general stonewalling."
"Initially [MM] states that editors "don't have to be worried about the expungment of J&S from WP because there is Category:Judea and Samaria. Yet weeks later argues for its removal."
Not a "misrepresentation", a change of mind, after careful consideration over many weeks. The J&S category is problematic for many reasons:
MeteorMaker ( talk) 15:43, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
Keep in mind that BC's diffs have been taken out of context and that he had kept insisting ad nauseam:
BC also misrepresents her:
BC, despite his stated dislike for neologisms, doesn't hesitate to waste hours of other editors' time in an attempt to force one on this article. I admire the other editors' restraint deeply. MeteorMaker ( talk) 14:24, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
BC gives four diffs as evidence of his stated willingness to compromise. Of these, three [88] [89] [90] are just unsupported statements to the effect of "I have compromised". Let's take a look at his sole remaining example of an offer to compromise:
In other words, BC's "compromise" is to make J&S the standard terms on WP, and put what everybody else regards as the standard, neutral terms in parentheses. As an attempt to adopt controversial terminology, it goes much further than what even the most notorious POV-pushers have dared to suggest. Needless to say, BC's suggestion got no support and was immediately struck down. It takes some gall to parade that episode as evidence of other editors' "refusal to compromise", particularly as BC's "compromise" was offered in opposition of another, more functional compromise.
Regarding CM's attempt to disguise Jayjg's 6 partisan sources as "the International Herald Tribune, the Journal of Church and State, Sussex Academic Press, Lexington Books, Hoover Press and others" [91], it's so obviously a breach of good citation practice that it needs no further discussion. It was rightly removed and nobody has argued for putting it back again. Was that BC's best example of a "refusal to compromise"? MeteorMaker ( talk) 10:45, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
"MM [and G-Dett] wikilawyer to get around IHT article".
Let's now take a look at the relevant part of the IHT article:
"Biblical significance of West Bank settlements — IT'S IN THE BIBLE: The four West Bank settlements that Israel is evacuating are all located in the biblical Land of Israel — territory that observant Jews believe was promised to the Jewish people in the Old Testament. The area of the West Bank, known as northern Samaria, was inhabited by the tribe of Menashe, one of the 10 tribes of Israel that were forced into exile. "
"When it was inhabited by the tribe of Menashe, it wasn't known as Samaria, it was Samaria."
Note that the IHT article is, again, just an alleged example of outside-Israel use of "Samaria" and not a source that actually says anything about the usage — unlike these. MeteorMaker ( talk) 12:24, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
- "Without hesitation, Linda takes a stand for Israel, for Jerusalem as its undivided capitol and the unquestioned right of the original Chosen People to be in their land." [102]
Over the months, Brewcrewer has contributed a number of spirited if eccentric propositions to this debate. He has argued for example that standard contemporary usage should be determined in part by pop-cultural references to the ancient past; that putting an ordinary adjective like "northern" in front of a proper noun like "West Bank" results in a "chic neologism," which we should avoid even if it's standard usage among mainstream RSs; that a story in the IHT about the biblical resonance of "Samaria" for settlers living in today's West Bank (subtitled "IT'S IN THE BIBLE") establishes the widespread, neutral, contemporary currency of the disputed term; that to resolve a months-long dispute about whether to use controversial nationalist terms in WP's neutral voice alongside the accepted terms, a good "compromise" would be to use the controversial nationalist terms in WP's neutral voice, with the accepted terms in parentheses; and so on.
If I'm not mistaken, all or most of his eccentric propositions are rooted in a single act of research, wherein he typed "Samaria" into a search bar and got knocked back out of his deskchair by the flood of Google hits streaming from his monitor. Fellow editors in hip-high rubber galoshes came to his aid here, quickly discovering that the first ten of these three million consisted of four references to the ancient past, one reference to "historical parts of the Land of Israel," two Wikipedia articles, a reference to a 2004 film called "Samaritan Girl" (about a South Korean prostitute), and three references to a national park in Greece and its nearby accommodations. From his sprawled position on the floor, Brewcrewer did not dispute the point, but rather suggested, sopping wet and still blinking, that we had more to learn from the brand name of bottled water in Greece than we do from the neologistic phraseologies used by chic, fly-by-night organizations such as the New York Times, Haaretz, and CNN, when talking about today's Middle East.
A surprising amount of time has been devoted to Brewcrewer's impish observations and non sequiturs; to my knowledge, there has been no IDIDNTHEARTHAT. There has been a bit of ICANTBELIEVEHEJUSTSAIDTHAT and even some GOODLORDBREWCREWERPULLYOURHEADOUT. To the latter in particular I plead guilty.-- G-Dett ( talk) 17:43, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
[outdent] @ Nishidani , one could argue that to teach one approach to the exclusion of all other approaches blind sides the student/teacher to the necessary pluralism required in the imperfect world of knowledge. Two simple examples will suffice.
Obviously the two are not compatible. To adhere to one requires sacrificing the rich world of pluralism for the singularity of homogeneity, an act of faith. Tundrabuggy ( talk) 03:41, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
[outdent]Not at all. In fact it was you who said on the workshop page "where there are alternative terms or terminologies, especially when these are used to express a point of view about ownership or to highlight a political or national affiliation, these should be acknowledged and noted, but only in the appropriate place and only relative to the extent that they are used in mainstream and authoritative sources." It is you who is suggesting "ratios" or percentages. I say let the sources used determine the name. If there is a legitimate conflict of names in the RS, it can actually be noted in the article, both can be used with the appropriate reference, either through the use of a quote, or a note concerning which sources say what. It shouldn't have to be black and white. It isn't rocket science. Tundrabuggy ( talk) 03:06, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Khoikhoi's argument is a good example of the logical fallacy converse accident: Since Jayjg has written 4 FA's, all his edits must be without fault. The evidence that has come to light in this discussion strongly contradicts that conclusion.
Another way to see it: While this dispute has been going on, neither Jayjg or anybody else involved has had time to devote to writing FA-quality articles. Jayjg's refusal to let WP reflect total source consensus has cost the project countless productive hours, and potentially several FAs. MeteorMaker ( talk) 15:17, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
Three of Jay's four Featured Articles and all five of his Good Articles are about synagogues and Jewish community centers. The fourth FA is on Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz and helped spread detailed information about the Holocaust to the Allies. As I wrote above, on this very page, "Jayjg has created, built, and sustained – in the best spirit of Wikipedia – a huge and invaluable series of articles on synagogues in North America."
Meanwhile, the problem under discussion in this Arbcom case is his serious conflict of interest in editing articles on or related to Israel/Palestine, a conflict of interest that has him exploiting and misrepresenting core Wikipedia policies and principles instead of implementing and respecting them, making his presence in this area of the encyclopedia indeed a "pernicious" one.-- G-Dett ( talk) 16:27, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
This section is a great example of how this arbitration has become an attack-fest by one "side". I hope the ArbCom can see this concerted, coordinated smear campaign for what it is. 6SJ7 ( talk) 22:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
"MeteorMaker claimed, in response to User:Khoikhoi's evidence, that "While this dispute has been going on, neither Jayjg or anybody else involved has had time to devote to writing FA-quality articles. Jayjg's refusal to let WP reflect total source consensus has cost the project countless productive hours, and potentially several FAs". As regards the first sentence, as noted in other evidence, the conflict began on April 6, 2008. In addition to the article Jayjg currently has up for FA status, he also had FAs promoted on August 6, 2008, October 13, 2008, and November 15, 2008. His GAs were promoted on August 8, 2008, September 12, 2008, December 19, 2008, December 20, 2008, and January 4, 2009. All of his DYKs were written during this period."
"Perhaps Jayjg is being singled out because he was the one that provided the most sources opposing that campaign":
MeteorMaker ( talk) 16:46, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
G-Dett, thank you for trying to understand my position. I am sorry you find my way of explaining myself unclear - I will try harder. I think NPOV was created because the founders of Wikipedia assumed that it was very plausible that all the editors working on a given article might be highly partisan, with irreconcilable points of view. For me the key point of NPOV is that there is no truth, just points of view. I am disturbed by any argument that one term is "more neutral," which to me is the same kind of argument as "more true" - the problem is, anyone may believe that the term they favor is "more neutral." NPOV exists precisely because every editor can believe that their way is best whether they use the words "more true" or "more good" or "more correct" or "more neutral." NPOV says, "Uh, we do not care what you think. We provide all significant views from notable sources that are relevant." Beyond that, my own approach is to defer to the people in question. If it is someone's view that the ground they live on is called Samaria, when we are talking about them, use Samaria. If it is someone's view that the ground they live on is called Palestine, when talking about them, call it Palestine. Nishidani seems to think that this is an endoresement. It is not. It is complying with our NPOV policy, which is to express all significant points of view - everyone I seem to have pissed off here seems to get back to an argument that their word is somehow "better" when they whole point of NPOV is to make a huge sidestep around those kinds of arguments which get us nowhere. No, G-Dett, you have a right to disagree with me, but I posit that you would be disagreeing with my interpretation of NPOV. Doyou see how I reach my conclusion? This ends up as a dispute over how to apply NPOV. It is a content dispute. I sorely wished we had good mechanisms for resolving content disputes, this has been a problem at Wikipedia for many years. But I do not think it is wise for people to solve the problem of a lack of mechanisms for resolving content disputes, to out of desparation (and frustration, and a desire to improve the encyclopedia - i am not questioning anyone's good faith, only their good judgment), say "it is not a content dispute, it is a personal behavior dispute" because once they make that little switch, they can go to ArbCom. I understand the motivation, the sense of need. But it is still a bad idea to call a content dispute a personal behavior dispute. Slrubenstein | Talk 21:03, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
MeteorMaker, you are simply calling for the termination of our NPOV policy. So some sources say that "West Bank" is neutral. So what? Big deal! That itself is a point of view. Do you get it? My position is simple: The neutral point of view is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject: it neither endorses nor discourages viewpoints. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. The elimination of article content cannot be justified under this policy on the grounds that it is "POV". All views are "points of view," even those views that people claim are neutral. It just doesn't matter. Wikipedia must represent all significant views and it is utterly irrelevant that people believe one of those views to be "neutral." Slrubenstein | Talk 22:54, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
Are you asking me if I believe in Wikipedia policy? Yes. Are you asking me to judge someon's behavior? I won't do that. I am an outsider but obviously felt it important to ente e3vience on behalf of Jayjg. haven't you offered evidence too? So now what? Are you asking me to be judge? jury? Wikipedia has no good mechanism for resolving conflicts over content. editors need to work it out with patience. I continue to view this as a conflict dispute. Are you asking me if I believe in NPOV, V and NOR for strict guidance? My answer is yes. Are you asking me to apply elements o policy to this case, i.e. resolve the dispute for you? Sorry, I won't. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:42, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
On this talk page alone, there are over 40 thousand words spanning 66 single spaced pages. The evidence page currently hosts about 24 thousand words. As a reference point the first Harry Potter novel was 76,944 words.-- Tznkai ( talk) 18:19, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Okay. I'll review all threads and suggest a solution in 300 words.
(A) There is one bounded geophysical and political region. It is called in international law 'The Occupied Palestinian Territories. Its inhabitants are 83% Palestinian, with 17 percent Israeli settlers, there illegally (in international law). The area is known internationally by a term, the ' West Bank', which is disliked by that part of Israeli society which favours annexation, partial or complete. Palestinians in the area call it ' Palestine' (Filastin). We thus have (i) international neutral terminology (ii) sectarian (sub-national) Israeli usage (iii) Palestinian usage.
(B)A cultural-ethnic block in wiki wants a 'singularity', i.e. the use of toponyms for this non-Israeli territory as favoured by annexationists. They want these terms to be treated on a par with international terminology. They never mention the countervailing Palestinian terms as having equal legitimacy. They press for 'the northern West Bank' to be called 'Samaria', and 'the southern West Bank' to be called Judah. No one on the other side (editors from many different ethnic backgrounds) has countered by suggesting we call the two areas 'northern Palestine' nor 'southern Palestine', the prospective name of the future state, just as 'Judah and Samaria' would be the prospective territorial designation if Israel were eventually to incorporate the West Bank into its territorial confines.
(C) When international usage coincides with Israeli usage, we use the term Israelis use. Hebron, not Al-Khalil, the name used by 99.8% of its inhabitants, and a billion Muslims. When international usage coincides with Palestinian usage, we use the term Palestinians use. Nablus, not Shechem, as many Israelis prefer. When Israeli and Palestinian terms are in conflict, we use the default, neutral international term in English. 'West Bank' (not ' Judea and Samaria or Filastin/' Palestine'). In all cases, we should not use any term which prioritizes one (sub)national or partisan-political name, while suppressing the countervailing nation (people)'s naming system. That is an obvious violation of WP:NPOV. Nishidani ( talk) 16:57, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
"MeteorMaker used the phrase "used outside Israel" to mean "written by non-Israelis". [123] [124] Jayjg understood it to mean something different as he explains here [125] and as is evident here [126]. Therefore the rejection of examples based on whether the authors were Israelis appeared arbitrary to Jayjg, who was offended; and when he expressed this, MeteorMaker was in turn offended."
(Emphasis in original). Note, it was when 14 of these examples were found to be by people born in Israel that Jayjg's allegations of "distasteful ethnic discrimination" begun. MeteorMaker ( talk) 08:43, 1 May 2009 (UTC)(Jayjg, 14 November 2008 [127]:) "[MeteorMaker] has been presented with multiple English language sources that use the term and thus refute his theory, but has rejected them on various grounds, claiming that they are referring to the biblical Samaria, or that the sources are Israeli. Now, to begin with, there is nothing wrong with a source simply because the person happens to have been born in Israel. I repeat, there is nothing wrong with a source simply because the person happens to have been born in Israel. [...] However, even if you exclude people born in Israel (not that there is any reason to), your claims still fail, as the multiple sources below show."
Red herring, because nobody has claimed that, and no arguments on the WB side depend on it. MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:41, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
That only demonstrates that smaller geographical entities are more rarely mentioned than the larger entities they are parts of, which nobody has doubted. Another red herring. MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:41, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
"Successes in clearing up misunderstandings!
G-Dett originally stated [...] MeteorMaker clarified [...] MeteorMaker has clarified |...] possibly clearing up a misunderstanding."
Considering that the only person who have misunderstood those things so far seems to be Coppertwig himself, the success is perhaps not much to write home about. MeteorMaker ( talk) 21:46, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Update. MeteorMaker ( talk) 02:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
""demonstrably false accusation" (Here is the diff requested: [129]"
""deliberately assertion of false information in order to mislead" [147] (quote without diff; no evidence for "deliberately")"
"""This is one of Jayjg's more unorthodox positions: that the nationality of a writer changes with the nationality of the publisher." [528] (no evidence Jayjg said that)"
Correct observation; fixed. The diffs I added may be difficult to understand without the context:
Jayjg: "Utter nonsense. The sources are all non-Israelis who use the term to mean the Samaria, no more no less." [148]
Jayjg is talking about these usage examples, of which 10 of 35 have been shown to be Israeli. [149]
Jayjg: "You're right, they are 35 examples, not sources. The fact that they're non-Israeli and "from Jewish sources" is actually what is "irrelevant", as Wikipedia does not disqualify sources based on country of birth or ethnicity of the author." [150]
Jayjg is talking about the same examples. Later, after having added 8 examples, 3 of which were found to be Israeli, he also said "I will, however, grant you the "most humorous argument" award for claiming to have proved that "its use is confined to Israel" in the face of over forty reliable sources from outside Israel using the term." [151]
Some additional Jayjg quotes to illustrate the concept:
- "However, the sources used are not "Israeli" or "Jewish"; rather, they are typically American or British publications, written for general English-speaking audiences." [152]
- "sources published outside of Israel are not Israeli" [153]
- "Things published in America are American. [154]"
- "As for things published in Australian papers, they're Australian." [155]
MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:04, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
I think the problem here may be that you're perhaps somehow using the term "outside Israel" to exclude a person who is an Israeli who is outside Israel at the time. I don't think there's any evidence that Jayjg has made the ridiculous claim you're attributing to him. Please state more clearly what you mean when you say "outside Israel": I think that will clear up the misunderstanding. ☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 16:37, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
"3 diffs, where Jayjg did not demand a specific verbal formulation"
"what Jay claimed they demonstrated, to wit, that the disputed terms were in wide use outside of Israel, and were widely accepted as neutral." (No evidence that he said that.) "lies" (discriminate can mean make distinctions between) [529] "accused him sixteen times of being a liar, and a comparable number of times of being a bigot" "bad faith" "has in fact lied" [530] "extensive lying" [531]
"Re West Bank/Samaria, MeteorMaker seemed to insist on keeping the phrase "what is today", arguing it is not a pleonasm [185], but re Palestine deleted "what is currently called" [186], and "the area today referred to as" [187] (edit summary "Tautology removed") [188]"
"Given a choice [190] between assuming Jayjg considers "Israeli" an ethnicity and assuming good faith, MeteorMaker chooses the former. [191]"
"Again, Jayjg: an Israeli source is poor proof that non-Israelis use the term. The nationality of the publisher is immaterial and your "discrimination" objection is distasteful and willfully misleading."
"Your attempts to discriminate against sources based on their alleged ethnic or national origin is distasteful and inappropriate. The United Kingdom is "outside-Israel", and the alleged ethnicity or national origin of the other is irrelevant and willfully misleading."
"Given a choice between assuming that Jayjg understood that "West Bank" was being used as a short form for "Northern West Bank" and assuming good faith, MeteorMaker chooses the former. [211]"
"Given a choice between assuming that Jayjg understood that "outside Israel" didn't mean place of publication and assuming good faith, MeteorMaker chooses the former. [212]"
"Even given the benefit of doubt regarding why Israeli examples must be dismissed as irrelevant as examples of non-Israeli usage, Jayjg's persistent repeating of the claim that what he perceived as "discrimination" was "ethnic" (I assume he does not regard "Israeli" as an ethnicity) was clearly not based in ignorance. Despite numerous admonishments to either show diffs or strike the accusations, he chose to perpetuate the lie, to the point that other editors started joining in."
(Outdent ) I'm sure I'm not alone in considering your strange insistence that "in/outside Israel" must mean a physical location near-disruptive. "Term X is used in country Y" is a very simple concept to understand. Quibbling about edge cases like if a citizen of country Y travels abroad, or if something was written by a citizen of country Y but published in country Z is not helpful in the least. Are Americans required to lay off typically American idioms when they go abroad? Are foreign publishing houses under an obligation to substitute non-Americanisms in texts written by Americans? This diversionary shifting of the focus to inconsequential grey zone cases while ignoring the larger picture is, as Nishidani observes, essentially identical to Jayjg's technique (which it apparently is not an AGF breach to call "distasteful", and by extension I assume, "not sincere").
Some observations:
"Another example: MeteorMaker said "All explicitly, unequivocally and undisputedly support one side" but did not specify (until I asked) what assertion or proposed action the editor was saying had been supported."
"In spite of much discussion [237] [238] about placing that very phrase in quotation marks, MeteorMaker again used quotation marks to mention a phrase which Jayjg didn't actually use. [239]"
Coppertwig, you've proposed on the workshop page that "People need to state clearly and often what it is they're arguing about." I'm not sure how often is often enough for you; apparently very often, so I'll take this opportunity to point out for the 500th or so time that no one has ever proposed "to cleanse Wikipedia of 'Samaria'." They've proposed to use it in appropriate contexts, and not in Wikipedia's neutral voice as an uncontroversial contemporary toponym. Its use in a contemporary context is controversial, ideologically loaded, and very rare among mainstream reliable sources. If you think it's analogous to "New England" or "Western Canada," then you haven't acquainted yourself with the dispute you're wading into.
Regarding the diffs of mine you cited as misleading in your "evidence" post, they contained exactly what I said they contained, and my use of them was unanswerably straightforward. As you appear at best simply to have clicked the wrong diffs, or not read or understood what you were commenting on, I urge you now to do the honorable thing and refactor.-- G-Dett ( talk) 03:38, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
‘It would appear from a note on my page by User:Nableezy that I am guilty of not (I admit it) having the foggiest notion of how images generate these window pop-ups. If the Susya pop-up is as Nableezy suggests, I retract my remark on it, and apologize to User:Ynhockey.Nishidani (talk) 10:16, 30 March 2009 (UTC)’
A day has passed, and those who are capable, like yourself, of fixing these things, don’t fix them. My original point therefore stands. One should not upload defective templates that give the false impression West Bank villages are in Israel, esp. when this whole Arcom issue has been trying to fix the problem of an occupational power (Israel) having its POV, that parts of the West Bank, are 'Judea and Samaria' (i.e. Israeli, not only administratively, but historically, politically and symbolically), represented here. That template asserts as a fact something which happens to be an ideological dream and a geopolitical aspiration, as yet devoid of any legality.
If being very precise is a problem, then we both have it. In an area as conflicted as the I/P one, I, as a mere peon, expect stringent standards of neutrality in anyone honoured by an administrative capacity, for administrators here must set an example. What you cite for the idea I am responsible for 'conflict creation' is a tiff that disguises, yes, a conflict in our respective POVs. Those are resolved by loyalty to method and strict requirements for evidence, and objectivity. We both subscribe to these: at times, the POV shows a leg. Nishidani ( talk) 11:39, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Since Jayjg hasn't been active on-wiki recently, I sent him an email to ask about some things that have been discussed here recently. He gave me permission to post his reply, which is:
☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 22:04, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Coppertwig now presents a new e-mail from Jayjg as evidence for his hypothesis that misunderstandings are at the root of this dispute.
(1) Observations:
MeteorMaker ( talk) 00:30, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
(2) Jayjg says "Written by non-Israelis"? If so, why didn't he say that, rather than "outside Israel"?" Let's check the sources and see when the word "non-Israelis" entered the discussion:
Now, the crucial question: did Jayjg understand that valid examples of outside-Israel use need to be "written by non-Israelis", not just "physically located in a place other than Israel"?
Conclusion: Contrary to his claim in the email to Coppertwig above, Jayjg understood that "[Samaria is] used only by Israelis" was my position. Nevertheless, only one post later, he switches foot and dismisses a source that confirms that position 100%, by improvising a strawman, where "outside Israel" (which he silently misconstrues further to mean "physically located outside Israel") becomes the criterion, then characteristically leaves the discussion. MeteorMaker ( talk) 00:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Coppertwig too apparently understood the concept at the time:
MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:56, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
i followed his edit, but I'm trying to npov an article called Jerusalem light rail and user meteormaker has been really disruptive there. If this is about his conduct here on wikipeida something shall be done to stop it I believe. 216.165.95.70 ( talk) 22:37, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
I've read through here a little, and it seems amazing. Meteormaker is trying to erase the terms judea and samaria out of wikipedia?? this is what's going on here? These are distinct georgraphic areas... how does he explain the fact that these areas are also part of Israel proper like he called it.... if you can read hebrew you can see here [274], for example Beit Shemesh is in Israel proper and in judea. was this ever explained? sorry if it's in the wrong place. 216.165.95.70 ( talk) 10:13, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
JayJG's FAs have been touted as showing his general contribution to the project. However they have been extremely questionable content (individual congregations). When there are so many big topics, even within only Jewish areas), that are not at FA, seeing JayJG work up these minutia into FAs, does not impress me. Makes me wonder if he is just trying to get FAs like notches on a belt, rather than helping the encyclopedia. I almost even wonder if he is advertising.
Why not get Dead Sea Scrolls, Masada, David, Passover up to FA? Surely that helps the project more than random synagogues? Hand to heart, I picked 4 major interest Jew themes and not a single one was FA. Those were the first 4 I picked! I've picked some before and not come up with an FA. I'm sure there are some wide interest Jewish topics that are FA/GA, but they are HARD TO FIND!
At a minimum, JayJG's accomplishments are less than what is touted (given the subjects' lack of importance to readers). At a maximum, JayJG is deliberately gaming the system to promote himself or the congregations.
P.s. The Meteor guy sounds even worse. But at least no one is making this to do about what a contributor he is...
69.255.3.246 ( talk) 22:17, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
I've noticed the nice effort on the google searchs but would like to suggest a few changes that must be made to them (if you don't mind the suggestions):
p.s. there's more ways to write down the names of the area and while 'Shomron' bumps up the findings another reasonable 300K, Google doesn't know how to handle "Iudea" and finds 470 million pages using the word 'Idea' instead. Warm regards, Jaakobou Chalk Talk 08:29, 3 March 2009 (UTC) p.s. if I add the Hebrew usage, the tables are clearly turned towards using Samaria/Judea rather than censoring them as MeteorMaker proposes 28.7 Mil vs. 15.9 Mil. Still wondering how adding Arabic would benefit the searches though I found out that West Bank (in Arabic) raises the findings to 18 Million while adding Arabic for the Samaria search gives it a total of 28.7 Million. i.e. it (expectedly) adds a neglectible number of findings in the "occupation of Arab land" narrative. Jaakobou Chalk Talk 08:46, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Can we stop this somewhat futile debate right here? I don't see the point in mashing-up google hits in one way or another if we have rather explicit sources in academic and mainstream literature. If you've got real evidence, post it on the page. Discussing it to death here is only a waste of time and energy.
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Just wondering what constitutes an "historical term." How old does something have to be to be accurately labeled "historical"? Tundrabuggy ( talk) 22:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Tundrabuggy, there are two separate questions here. To identify a term like Samaria as "historical" in the actual text of a Wikipedia article, we need reliable mainstream secondary sources explicitly identifying it as such. Something for example like this from the Los Angeles Times:
Around Sanur and Homesh, a web of back roads, trails and canyons could make it difficult for the army to block the arrival of religious militants from other settlements in the northern West Bank, historically referred to by its biblical name, Samaria. [6]
But for the purposes of talk-page discussions, when we're hashing out formally and informally which terminology we should use in article space, then it's fine to point to mainstream primary sources and observe that in the last 40 years "West Bank" (with or without modifying adjectives, e.g. "northern," "southern," etc.) has become the overwhelming standard consensus terminology, while "Samaria" and "Judea" have fallen into disuse.-- G-Dett ( talk) 16:09, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
CM argues that it's beside the point to determine if "Samaria" and "Judea" are widely accepted terms or not, because they are not administrative districts, but "geographical/topographical entities". His argument clashes with WP:NCGN, which requires us to use the most widely accepted English name for every geographical entity.
"Judea was the name of a country in Palestine in ancient times." (p.J158)
"Samaria was the name of a city and its surrounding region in ancient Palestine." (p.S63)
(Emphasis mine). While at the library, I checked a couple more encyclopedias and none supports the "J&S are modern toponyms" position, not even Encyclopaedia Judaica (which, for the record, does not grant the West Bank an article).
"Judea, Lat. form of Judah, the southern province of Erez Israel during the period of Roman hegemony".
"Samaria (Heb. Shomron, mod. Sebaste), city established as the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel during the reign of Omri c.884 BCE".
Note that "Judean heights" and variations thereof is uncontested use and has no bearing on the terms we are discussing here.
"The [West Bank] territory, excluding East Jerusalem, is also known within Israel by its biblical names, Judaea and Samaria."
Judea, the S division of ancient Palestine under Persian, Greek, & Roman rule succeeding the kingdom of Judah; bounded on N by Samaria, on E by Jordan River & Dead Sea, on SW by Sinai Peninsula, & on W by the Mediterranean. [7]
The mudslinging has begun. I admit I was involved in some unnecessarily hot edit wars in my first four months of active editing, it comes with inexperience and the foolhardiness to set foot in the I/P area. That was my edit-war baptism of fire, and I was young and foolish enough to believe it's enough to have the sources and policy on my side. I am wiser (and more disillusioned) now.
While it's no surprise to see my 3RR block and limited topic ban (that was subsequently lifted when it was found I hadn't in fact done what I was accused of) exposed and milked for everything they're worth by CM, he may not be the most suitable editor to make such accusations. During his first four months of editing, he was warned for disruptive editing four times, AGF once, TE once, BITE once, and personal attacks twice. Was he an innocent noob? No, here he admits to having edited for "a while" without a named account [9]. Even more aggravating, one year into his career as a mature editor, in only the last three months, CM was
I don't drag this up to single out Canadian Monkey, every I/P editor has a history of edit warring, generally concentrated to the first few months of one's career berore the subtleties of WP editing practices and etiquette have been discovered and internalized. What's striking in this dispute (at least to me, a relatively inexperienced editor) is how the bad behavior has been spreading from experienced editors, who should instead have been role models for us all.
I'm also appalled at how casually editors like CM fling around pretty serious accusations that may have grave consequences for fellow editors. His claim "None of these warnings and sanctions seemed to have helped, and the latest ban by Elonka was repeatedly violated by User:MeteorMaker", which he now repeats in the hope that nobody will notice that the bluff has already been called, doesn't even contain the proverbial germ of truth, and it will be interesting to see which of the two options "provide diffs" or "remove it" he will choose. MeteorMaker ( talk) 19:13, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Sandahl, I can assure you the discussion climate was already at its nadir when G-Dett entered the debate in early December. Far from worsening the dispute, her input has helped restoring the focus by keeping the most egregious disruption tendencies at bay and by breaking up the vicious circles with entirely new angles.
Re this, Jayjg was indeed making a demonstrably false accusation that he has still not been able to provide diffs for. It was not inappropriate to point this out, as I've done myself. I'm confident his transgressions of this kind will be looked into more fully by you and other admins before this case is closed.
Here, like in a dozen other articles, user:Canadian Monkey appeared out of the blue within three hours of my edit only to revert it, just like you correctly note G-Dett did in the same article. Anybody with a passing familiarity with this dispute knows that a similarly good case can be made that CM has an unhealthy fixation on me, as has Jayjg and user:NoCal100. Between Dec 4 and Feb 29, we were all focused on essentially the same articles, so as proof of anybody hounding anybody, your last observation is of negligible value.
Of G-Dett's edits since December, there is a clear focus on articles that pertain to the Samaria dispute. I don't see this as evidence as an "unhealthy fixation on Jayjg", it's only incidental that both (and several other editors) got involved in this discussion. For all I know, both may have followed my contribs history, since neither had edited eg Samaria (disambiguation) before I did. MeteorMaker ( talk) 11:39, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
The beginning date of the Second Intifada is disputed, but the major violence started the day after a controversial visit on September 28, 2000 by Ariel Sharon to a site held sacred to both Jews and Muslims; some sources, including the Mitchell Report, assert the violence was planned before the visit.
'The beginning date of the Second Intifada is disputed, but the major violence started during and after a controversial visit on September 28, 2000 by Ariel Sharon to a site held sacred to both Jews and Moslems.'
Just a quick note to say that I'm following this thread. I'm busy preparing the next installment of evidence for the main dispute here, but when that's through if anyone wants me to respond in detail to Sandahl/Jayjg's accusations, I will. For the moment, I'll just say that I am both a reader of Wikipedia and an editor. Although the I/P conflict is not what I write about in real life, I do regularly read articles about it here and elsewhere; mostly regarding high-visibility subjects like the second intifada, Israeli settlements, the siege of Jenin, the Gaza war, and so on. When I come across something truly egregious, like the apparently deliberate misrepresentation of the Mitchell Report noted above, I look at the talk page, the edit history, etc., to see what's happened, and intervene if necessary. If the problem is chronic, and involves a massive coordinated effort of source-distortion, policy-distortion, and a catenaccio approach to talk-page discussion – a strategy, that is, of making only tautological statements that assume the established truth of precisely what is in dispute, and dismissing, without elaboration, all critique and analysis of same as "strawman arguments" – then I find, almost without exception, that User:Jayjg is at the center of it.
A final word regarding what Sandahl calls an "unhealthy obsession." My interactions with Jay are indeed unique, without parallel among my other interactions with "pro-Israel" (note the scare quotes) editors. See my recent exchanges with Ynhockey for a representative counter-example. Meanwhile, virtually all of Jay's relationships with "pro-Palestinian" (scare quotes again) editors not only occasionally feature but are in fact defined by frustration, tautology, nonsensical games of who's-on-first, failed attempts at dispute resolution, total breakdown of WP:AGF; and an odd, almost poignant pleading, on the part of Jay's interlocutors, that he for once step out of his defensive crouch, stand up straight, and engage in substantive discussion.-- G-Dett ( talk) 18:35, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
A few final words on Sandahl's evidence. The bulk of it (i.e. everything from West Bank, Israeli settlement, Judea and Samaria, Samaria (disambiguation), and Talk:Samaria/Discussion_of_sources) regards the present dispute, the quarreling over use of the terms Samaria and Judea in WP's neutral voice for the northern and southern West Bank respectively. The others are simply high-visibility IP articles that had rank POV-pushing in their leads when I cam across them: Second Intifada's lead falsified the conclusions of the Mitchell Report, and Anti-Zionism's lead misrepresented sources in order to suggest a strong and necessary connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Jay was standing behind both falsifications, so I confronted him over both. These confrontations were about a week apart.
Sandahl also lists the BLP and AN/I noticeboards as pages I "followed" Jay to. I regularly read almost all of the public noticeboards, and do not hesitate to intervene where serious POV-pushing and/or misrepresentation is going on.
Now, Jay's war over the disputed terms "Judea" and "Samaria" had been going on for months without my knowledge when I first intervened. I began watching Israeli settlement in late November, for reasons that had nothing to do with the disputed terms, and nothing to do with Jay; I simply happened to read a version whose lead began like this:
Israeli settlements are arbitrarily defined as communities inhabited by Israeli Jews in territory that came under Israel's control as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War. Some Arabs, included most members of Hamas, use the term "settlement" to refer to any Israeli community, even those inside the Green Line, in order to deny Israel moral legitimacy and to represent Israelis as foreigners or outsiders rather than indigenous...
...and finished by saying the settlements constituted "one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for Arabs and Europeans." [10] (emphasis added). This was not Jay's work but that of an anon. [11], and was fixed soon enough by Nickhh, [12] without much ado or significant edit-warring (rolling back rank POV-pushing is generally accomplished without too much fuss if Jay isn't involved). Looking into the talk page, however, I saw the dispute about "Samaria" coming to full boil. [13] I do not understand Sandahl's attribution of the "deterioration of the discussion" to my involvement; at the point that I first entered the discussion, all of the sources were laid out, the positions were entrenched, and Jay was repeatedly calling MeteorMaker a liar and a bigot. My debut posts consisted of two requests for clarification: I asked Jay to explain why he thought when an author (Safire, discussed in my submitted evidence) "refers to 'the Biblical names for the West Bank,' what he really has in mind is 'an Israeli administrative district'?"; and I asked more generally:
Is it the position of Nocal100, Jayjg, Oboler CM et al that Samaria is not a loaded term? Or is that even if it is loaded, Wikipedia should use it as long as some RSs use it?
Jay did not respond to my first question. To my second question, he wrote that "'Samaria' reflects a moderately widely used term that also happens to reflect the terminology used in the official government statements regarding the withdrawal." I asked if we should also factor in moderately widely used terms from official Palestinian statements; Jay responded, "I'm pretty sure the Israeli government is currently the government legally in charge of the territories." I asked if "NPOV terminology on Wikipedia is set by the party 'in charge of' a disputed or occupied territory"; Jay then claimed I was strawmanning him, but wouldn't say how. He never would say how, and I don't think any reasonable person could conclude I had strawmanned him; connoisseurs of the catenaccio can follow the game to its mind-numbing conclusion at the bottom of this section. Meanwhile the larger question I had put to him – why we should privilege official Israeli terminology over official Palestinian terminology, instead of just using the standard consensus terms of reliable sources – remains the heart and soul of this dispute, and needless to say remains unanswered, possibly unanswerable. I realized at that point that this was a propaganda ploy, plain and simple, and decided to take it on.-- G-Dett ( talk) 15:35, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
(outdent) Duke, I don't think anyone's saying it's OK to follow someone from article to article in pursuit of a personal grudge or "unhealthy obsession" or whatever, and I believe I've offered a fairly detailed response to that charge as leveled at me by Sandahl. I think what Scott is saying is what I'm saying, that it's OK to consult and analyze a problem editor's contribution history in order to understand larger patterns of disruption, deception, chronic POV-pushing, etc. I invite you to do the same with my record; then you can present your charge against me, rather than asking a daisy-chain of insinuating rhetorical questions.-- G-Dett ( talk) 21:07, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
As to your previous questions, Duke, they didn't seem to me lazy so much as theatrical. I was picturing you in wingtips and a barrister's wig, sort of hypnotically pacing in front of the jury box, awaiting a response about my whereabouts "during the time period in question" when the answer is two clicks away. Anyway: yes, both of the community-noticeboard issues I took up during that period involved Jay. Jay and I clashed briefly on Anti-Zionism in late October, and Second Intifada in early to mid November. Meanwhile however from late October and throughout November, my edits concentrated pretty heavily on Rashid Khalidi and Cynthia McKinney; Jay wasn't present and wasn't a party to either of those disputes. Then in early December I happened upon Israeli settlement and got into the whole Judea & Samaria business. During December I also got involved in a dispute about the use of sidebars on Israeli apartheid analogy; Jay was not involved directly in that dispute, as I remember, but I did mention his position on the Antisemitism sidebar. At another editor's request I weighed in on a dispute on Hummus, where Jayjg was not active. In January much of my editing was taken up with articles relating to the Gaza conflict, where Jay hadn't edited at all. I was also involved pretty heavily on Pallywood in the last week of January; again, no Jayjg. Meanwhile my involvement in the Judea & Samaria dispute has continued pretty stably in 2009 (yes, lots of firefights with Jay), with occasional edits to this and that ( George Packer, Charles Freeman, etc. Now if I can borrow the wig & wingtips for a second and ask you a question, do you have any idea how many I-P articles Jay edited during this 4-5 month period? Would it be in the hundreds?-- G-Dett ( talk) 21:55, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Talk about flogging a dead horse. Jaakobou now joins Canadian Monkey in perpetuating accusations that have already been thoroughly debunked, in the vain hope that somebody will fall for his deliberate assertions of false information in order to mislead.
The limited topic ban Jaakobou is talking about was found to be based on a misunderstanding and lifted on 1 March. Now, he makes the following demonstrably false claims:
- Making Samaria-related reverts to any article in the Israel/Palestine topic area
- Removing reliable citations from any article in the topic area. [14]
Jaakobou may, like User:NoCal100 here, be a little unclear over the definition of citation. No amount of wikilawyering from Jaakobou and others can change the fact that no citations were removed during my ban, and no Samaria-related reverts were done on any articles.
I request clarification from Jaakobou where in the diff he provided [15] he sees that. Until such clarification has been produced, Jaakobou should strike that accusation. UPDATE: On receiving this request on his talk page, Jaakobou replies he's "thinking that the text doesn't require further clarification at this point in time" [16] and has chosen not to strike the false accusation.
Complete nonsense. I even quoted the facts, so it's quite a stretch to claim that I "misrepresented" them.
Jaakobou also neglects to mention that as a consequence of my "arguing the sanction", Elonka admitted she had made a mistake:
You are correct about the citation thing. I saw the edit summary, and that citations had been removed, but missed the part about you moving the citations to a different part of the article. I am amending my statement accordingly, and apologize for my error. [17]
This is becoming ugly. Jaakobou's and Canadian Monkey's persistent attempts to discredit other editors with made-up serious allegations are, how shall I put it, somewhat less than helpful. MeteorMaker ( talk) 12:01, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
As the case is progressing, evidence of POV-pushing by Jayjg is being presented. I wonder if it would be helpful for the ArbCom if evidence was presented that showed whether or not Jayjg has been a persistent and problematic POV-pusher, apart from this particular dispute, over a long period of time? If this seems like a good idea, I'm extending an open invitation to any interested editors to collaborate in compiling evidence on a page in my userspace. I suggest listing evidence, if any exists, of Jayjg engaging in:
If such evidence exists, it could then be presented in this case, if not, then the evidence in this case stands on its own merits, subject to evaluation by the Committee. Cla68 ( talk) 23:30, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
I concur with statements above to the effect that user conduct issues needn't be limited to Jayjg, and I'm fully prepared to have my own editing scrutinized; I won't (in fact I never) complain of "attacks."
That said, I think it's useful to break down what we mean by POV-pushing. "Bias" per se is not the problem here. I'm biased, Duke's biased, most people (with the exception of a few saints and geniuses) are biased when it comes to the I/P conflict. With its core policies, its mechanisms of consensus and dispute resolution, and its traditions of lively, good-faith debate, Wikipedia is fully prepared to deal with bias. In fact, I'm only half kidding/rhapsodizing when I say it's the best system yet created by man for the absorption of collective intellectual energy and elimination of individual bias in the production of knowledge. (And I say that as a member of and believer in academia.) In the case of Jayjg, I think what we're looking at is not an editor who is "biased," but rather an editor who regards the policies, mechanisms, and traditions of Wikipedia as constituting not a system of restraint, but rather a set of pieces in a chess game to be mastered. This I regard as exceptional. This is why I don't have an "unhealthy obsession" with editors like 6SJ7 (whom I like very much even as he calls for my punishment), or my dear friend IronDuke (who regularly makes me laugh and whom I'll gladly stand a drink one day). I have beloved relatives who share their opinions ("biases"), and I'd be delighted if they too started editing the Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit. I think if anyone is going to bring a bill of particulars against another editor, it cannot focus on how their edits, in whole or in part, show that their balance of sympathy inclines towards one or the other side in the I/P conflict. This is perfectly normal and frankly perfectly acceptable, and Wikipedia is more than capable of making use of their energies. No, what a bill of particulars would have to establish is that the editor in question was deliberately gaming (and therefore showing contempt for) the very policies, mechanisms, and traditions that are there to manage and control the biases we all have.
This may be as good a moment as any to mention that Jayjg has created, built, and sustained – in the best spirit of Wikipedia – a huge and invaluable series of articles on synagogues in North America.-- G-Dett ( talk) 01:05, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Cla68, I would prefer if you work on and present your evidence primarily as your own. Inviting other editors to compile a specific sort of evidence against another editor is an invitation to problems. In addition, if you wish to submit evidence to this arbitration, please do it on the case's evidence page, not within your user space. An RfC as evidence would also be acceptable.-- Tznkai ( talk) 02:20, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
IMHO the case named "West_Bank_-_Judea_and_Samaria" should deal with the conflict related to the articles. Then it have chances to lead to something useful. The decision of the Arbcom that the community finds useful and fair make a precedent for solving other disputes. Now admins could use the decision as a guidance to solve similar conflicts on their own right or we could bring other acute conflicts to the arbcom to decide, etc. Creating omnibuses cases over years of editing, hundreds of articles, thousands of edits, etc. is IMHO usually unhelpful. I am not sure whether attempt to criticize a long time editor on a talk page and canvassing for some sort of a flashmob against the editor is helpful or in alighnment with our policies Alex Bakharev ( talk) 04:13, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Witch hunts usually reflect more poorly on the organizers and participants than on the witches they eventually burn.— Sandahl ( talk) 17:48, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
I was unexpectedly busy this weekend in Meatspace and will continue to do so- so I apologize for responding to inquiries slowly. I will attempt to respond to inquiries or requests for clerk assistance within 24 hours, you may wish to contact another clerk if the issue is urgent.-- Tznkai ( talk) 01:52, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm thinking of contributing to this great and exciting endeavor. One thing I'm unclear about, however. Is this about content or about contributors? Should I be saying "we should user term xxx because source-xxx says that the term is xxx" or should I be saying "user xxx is an unproductive edit-warrior, see xxx-link and xxx-link" ?-- brew crewer (yada, yada) 03:40, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
"this diff given by MeteorMaker as evidence [18] of so-called "misrepresentation by User:Jayjg""
Hmmm. I can't recall giving that diff as evidence, and none of my diffs have been labelled "misrepresentation by User:Jayjg" (though I have been encouraged to make the diffs user-specific, so I may have to label them that way). No idea why User:Tundrabuggy makes those claims, which seem to be good examples of misrepresentation themselves. (UPDATE: TB has corrected his error, though it's still a puzzling statement).
"the region is still so-named and understood world-wide."
That is an oft-repeated claim, but nobody has been able to find any kind of source, reliable or unreliable, partisan or neutral, mainstream or fringe, that actually states so. While there are numerous sources that explicitly state they are used in Israel and not in the rest of the world. [19]
"Further, User:MeteorMaker and others are simply wrong when they say that "reliable sources began avoiding it...in 1948." In fact, it was the common (and only) usage up until and after the '67 war. "
1) I've never claimed that "RSs began avoiding [J&S] in 1948", and I don't think anybody else has claimed that either.
2) The (unsupported) notion that it was the only usage up until 1967 is contradicted by several sources:
- “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical terms that the Likud government succeeded in substituting for what had previously been called by many the West Bank, the occupied territories, or simply the territories." (Aronoff 1991)
- "Even though the name ‘Judea and Samaria’ had been officially adopted as early as the beginning of 1968 instead of the ‘West Bank’, it has hardly been used until 1977. " (Gazit 2003)
- "Judea and Samaria (a term taken from Mandatory times and officially adopted to replace West Bank or the territories)" (Eisenstadt 1992)
"In fact, UN authorities consistently referred to Judea and Samaria as such."
For some years, the UN simply continued to use the official but defunct British Mandate district names that were imposed in 1920.
"In 1920, the British mandate government established a Commission for Place Names, charged with giving a name to new Jewish localities. Three criteria were established to govern the choice of new toponyms: (1) to restore the names of historical places, in particular the names of historic Jewish sites, whose names had been arabicised over time; (2) to commemorate persons and events important to the Zionist movement, the Jewish population of Palestine or of Jews, generally; and (3) to choose names of symbolic significance, esp. from the Bible (Arikha 1937: 7). These three principles seem to have been followed during the Mandate period and governed many of the earliest changes." [21]
Isolated instances of the terms can indeed be found in UN texts up to two decades after the Mandate was terminated, as Tundrabuggy's refs show. However, from the last 45 years, Tundrabuggy has only one example of UN usage (1970, incidentally from an Israeli source, The Israel League for Human and Civil Rights in Tel Aviv.)
"Samaria, for example, is on recent maps, is a real place with real roads, with a real university, Ariel University Center of Samaria."
Scroll up to the Discussion of evidence presented by Canadian Monkey section for the debunking of the "recent maps" claim. "Trans-Samaria Highway" and "Ariel University of Samaria" may be "real" (whatever that proves) but their names are nevertheless given by Israel.
"The Judean region, hills and lowlands are really real as well a magnet for travel or Jews, Christians, and history/archeology buffs worldwide and known for its wineries."
Absolutely. And the question we are discussing here, if J&S are widely accepted toponyms outside Israel, Tundrabuggy supports with five examples of usage, predictably all taken from Israeli sources — except one, from an Israel-only travel agency, where the single tour leader is presented with these words:
"Without hesitation, Linda takes a stand for Israel, for Jerusalem as its undivided capitol and the unquestioned right of the original Chosen People to be in their land."
I rest my case.
"When editors use legitimate, acceptable, and modern RS to refer to "Judea and Samaria" or each separately, very real and readily understood places, why would that not be perfectly acceptable at Wikipedia?"
Because the terms are not compliant with WP:NCGN, WP:UNDUE and WP:NPOV [22]. Note that none of Tundrabuggy's sources have stated that the terms are widely used (which is required by WP:NCGN), and nearly all from the last 40 years are Israeli.
"There does seem to be two sides here. One that wants to use "West Bank" to the exclusion of the Israeli "Judea and Samaria" throughout WP, and the other one that wants to use "Judea" and/or "Samaria" together with "West Bank."
Or rather, one side that wants to use neutral, internationally accepted standard terms without issues with multiple policies, and the other one that wants partisan minority terminology (but generously together with the unproblematic terms, for extra reader confusion). The complementary third side (that advocates using Palestinian partisan minority terminology) has not been invited to this party, but I can't see how their preferred nomenclature is less legitimate. MeteorMaker ( talk) 13:03, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
"Discussions with MeteorMaker on this topic are typically difficult, and often involve his repeating the same arguments, despite their rejection by other editors."
Well, what can I say. Editors who constantly reject arguments that policies should be adhered to and that evidence must support the conclusions find it "difficult" to discuss with other editors. I have no problem with editors who engage in civil, give-and-take, policy-respecting discourse — see these [23] [24] [25] for example, where articles were improved considerably through collegial discussion rather than stonewalling and disruption.
"
Here he insists that an English language source can only be used on Hebrew Wikipedia, because it is Israeli."
My argument is really in the linked page, the talk page note is just a short teaser. Considering there's exactly one edit by me on that talk page, my alleged "repeating the same arguments" doesn't seem to be such a big problem after all.
"In another discussion, he insisted that the two tables
[26] and
[27] are "
the exact same one", despite the former having data in it from years after the latter had been published."
For all relevant purposes, the tables are exactly the same, with (as I was the first one to point out) two columns added (that are immaterial in the context). I was also the one who tracked down the original table and the sources so they could be discussed. Tundrabuggy also chooses to truncate the full sentence:
Re the table, it's the exact same one [28] [29], only with the header changed from "Population Growth in Judea" to "Population Growth in the Judea Region [Southern West Bank]". Two more year columns have also been added, and populated with data supplied by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.
Were those Tundrabuggy's best examples of the alleged difficulty to discuss with me?
I hope it will not count as "difficulty of discussion" with me if I point out that Tundrabuggy's last two examples are, um, exactly the same (with not even a column added). That leaves two examples, which on closer inspection turn out to be the same one too, only manifesting itself as two different reverts of the same insertion of highly cherry-picked sources by Jayjg. WP:UNDUE doesn't state anything about how it applies to refs, but it sort of goes against the spirit to select eight partisan sources that say "Samaria" over more than half a million that say "West Bank". I suspect the "inappropriate editing" charge is more properly levelled at Jayjg, though we need more discussion to determine if this rather extreme case of selective source selection in order to prove a point is consistent with policy. MeteorMaker ( talk) 13:03, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
The whole paragraph Nick quotes from (last paragraph of WP:NCGN's lead) is very relevant to this dispute:
Within articles, places should generally be referred to by the same name as is used in their article title, or a historic name when discussing a past period. Use of one name for a town in 2000 does not determine what name we should give the same town in 1900 or in 1400, nor the other way around. Many towns, however, should keep the same name; it is a question of fact, of actual English usage, in all cases. For example, when discussing the city now called Istanbul, Wikipedia uses Byzantium in ancient Greece, and Constantinople for the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and also the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, use Stalingrad when discussing the city now called Volgograd in the context of World War II.
Emphasis added. This paragraph should also be borne in mind when Jay argues that a 2006 history book referring to Samaria and Transjordan in 1948 establishes the contemporary currency of such terms: "clearly published in 2006, not historical usage." -- G-Dett ( talk) 16:06, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
TB presents a Google News Archive link [31] to support his conclusion that "Samaria" is "clearly understood internationally, then as now." The "now" part has of course never been substantiated, but let's take a look at how clearly understood the term was in the 48-67 period, according to his evidence.
Of the first 50 hits, 18 are to ships named "Samaria", 3 to a race horse, 1 to one Peter Samarra of Pennsylvania, 7 to other places called Samaria, 3 to a pilgrimage play, and 10 to the ancient/biblical Samaria. Only 8 (of which two duplicates and two probably more properly classified as ancient/biblical) use the term as a contemporary toponym. The ratio of relevant hits decreases dramatically as we move down the Google stack, to around 2 or 3 in 50, the majority of which are from quotes by Israeli PMs or other Israeli sources. We also encounter the special case "Samarian Hills" and variations of it, which is uncontested usage and irrelevant to this discussion.
Now, was the term "clearly understood" in the 48-67 period? If it were, we would expect the term to be used without explanations. Even in this highly fragmentary material, we frequently find such explanations however: "the Samaria region of the Holy Land" [32], "the biblical district of Samaria, now i[n] western Jordan". Interestingly, all 4 instances of unexplained use are from the New York Times, which may indicate a naming policy unique to that publication during the 50's.
"The usage that one side wishes us to adopt as neutral, has only recently come into currency, especially with the current apparent "default" understanding that "West Bank" means "Palestine.""
"To insist on purging "Judea" &/or "Samaria" as currently used and understood terms is not to be neutral, but to take a position in a political language war going on not only in Wikipedia, but throughout the internet. "
MeteorMaker ( talk) 10:09, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
"The campaign"
It is wholly appropriate for editors to remove or amend bad content. Where it occurs across multiple articles, that may lead to those editors going to a large number of articles to put those errors right. Working "systematically" would seem to be a good thing in this context. The fact that there are ten or more WP editors engaged in trying to retain that poor content is a serious cause for concern, not evidence of the rightness of their case.
"Compromise"
To say that neither MM nor Pedrito "allowed any compromise wording" is, well, untrue. See this thread and this comment. Other examples abound. In addition, please note that we cannot - and should not - have compromises that overcome fundamental policy, eg (to use a familiar example) to say "2+2=5" because there is a (real world) minority view that it equals 6.
"Reliable sources dismissed"
Yes, one-off and occasional uses recorded in some sources have been rightly dismissed as a basis for demonstrating that the terms Judea and Samaria are standard, or equivalent alternatives to the the mainstream international terminology. I see you are still throwing them in here. I can throw 100 times as many back that do not use the terms at all, and use West Bank instead (note, not "as well as"). By implication, you and others are "dismissing" those.
What we have been waiting for over the last 6 months is the source that summarises the overall situation and says "while West Bank is a term favoured by Palestinians and Mongolians, the majority of the world refers to the area using the standard terms Judea and Samaria". Either bring that source, or confirm to us all now that it doesn't matter whether it exists or not, and the basis of this dispute will finally be made clear to everyone, in your own words. Or, as I've suggested above, go to every English language media organisation, every publisher, every international body and most governments in the world and work on getting them to change the way they describe the area. Once that's been sorted out I'll cede the point - I don't have any stake in it one way or the other, I just want this place to follow the language and terminology that I see in 99% of the mainstream newspapers, websites, documents, official papers and books I've ever read. That's policy here btw -- Nickhh ( talk) 19:30, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Questions about the "administrative district" shell game, and about "G-Dett's definition of Samaria"
Jay, a large number of secondary sources have been introduced over the months stating that the terms "Judea" and "Samaria" are ideologically loaded. You have dismissed most of these, saying that what they're really talking about "is the administrative district, not the geographic term." I contested these dismissals on a number of occasions, pointing out that in many instances the sources were explicitly talking about "biblical names" cum geographic terms, mentioned nothing about the name of any administrative district, etc. You never responded to any of my questions or challenges about this during the months that the dispute was unfolding. Now, in this Arbcom case, you are introducing as evidence sources that are explicitly talking about the administrative district:
From the time of the Persian Gulf War, President Bush and later President Clinton campaigned for a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty and they insisted that Israel refrain from building any further settlements in the administered areas of Samaria-Judea.
Can you explain this? How does this work? When William Safire talks about the disputed terms as "biblical names evoking Hebrew origins," you say he's talking about an "administrative district," so he doesn't count as a good source. Weird. But when Herbert Druks talks about "the administered areas of Samaria-Judea," he's not talking about the administrative district, he's talking about "geographic terms," hence he's a valid source? Very weird. Do you see how weird this is? I've been introducing anomalies like this as evidence that you are consciously playing a shell-game, categorizing sources as being either about the "administrative district" or the "geographic term" based solely on whether you want to credit or discredit them, all the while refusing to discuss the rationale of these dubious categorizations. I'm now in the process of condensing my evidence; if you respond in a meaningful and illuminating way to this question that I've been asking for months now, I'll revisit and possibly revise the allegation in my evidence section that you've been willfully deceiving the community about this.-- G-Dett ( talk) 20:32, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Preliminary note: Keep in mind that what Jayjg is opposing here is two facts that are almost universally accepted:
1) "Judea" and "Samaria" are historical terms (ie, not used any more) for the area that is today the West Bank.
2) With the sole exception of Israel, where the terms are official.
"User:MeteorMaker first began his campaign to remove/deprecate the terms "Judea" and "Samaria" on April 6, 2008. By July he had done so in 34 articles:"
That is true, though all except one of Jayjg's edit examples were made on a single day, April 18/19. As a month-old newcomer, I noticed a number of articles that used archaic terminology and updated them ("J&S" -> "West Bank"). Nothing particularly problematic.
"MeteorMaker took a break from Wikipedia from July 8 to October 22, and the conflict disappeared."
It's somewhat disingenuous to describe something as a "conflict" that doesn't involve edit warring or at least a few reverts. The nearest thing I can find is a short revert exchange with User:Canadian Monkey on 19 April @ Lakhish River, and again with the same user on 8 May@ Judea.
"MeteorMaker was well aware of the controversial nature of these removals. He had been advised by three different administrators that it was a bad idea for him to be doing this".
Not quite true. Of the three different administrators on Jayjg's list, only one (Ynhockey) says anything at all about "these removals", contrary to Jayjg's claim, and that was (obviously) after the fact. Ynhockey initially calls it "vandalism" but after reading the talk page at Judea engages in discussion, which ends with no particular objection from him or statement to the effect that it's "a bad idea" or "controversial". [43] As a gesture of good will, I put a lid on updating the toponyms anyway. The second editor on Jayjg's list, Coren, talks exclusively about Jayjg's and mine out-of-hand dispute at the Samaria article [44], and the third, Elonka, talks exclusively about Israeli settlement [45]. Jayjg's recollection of the events is not consistent with reality (easily verified by checking my talk page).
"in February 2009, Elonka banned him for 90 days from making Samaria-related reverts, and admonished him for that behavior."
What Jayjg neglects to mention is that the ban was found to be based on a misunderstanding and lifted on March 1. [46]
Let's take a look at what was behind that 90-day topic ban Elonka imposed on me, because that has bearings on what's happening now. Background:
"Hi Elonka. I discovered that Meteormaker has again removed the term from the Israeli settlement article, despite the previous agreement." [49]
Jayjg does not mention the crucial qualifier "in the lead".
"MeteorMaker, you have been cautioned before about removing citations to reliable sources. Since you have started up again, I am going to make this formal: You are banned from
- Making Samaria-related reverts to any article in the Israel/Palestine topic area
- Removing reliable citations from any article in the topic area.
This ban is in place for 90 days. " [50]
Curiously, Elonka ignores Jayjg original (unfounded) claim and comes up with a different rationale for banning me. Upon finding I hadn't in fact removed any citations, she apologized, and the ban was subsequently lifted. [51]
In essence, I could have got a 90-day topic ban because Jayjg provided Elonka with incorrect information. I am not insinuating malicious intent, but as an experienced admin, he should have checked his information better, particularly as the consequences for an innocent editor could have become dire. User:brewcrewer [52], User:NoCal100 [53], User:Canadian Monkey [54], and User:Jaakobou soon begun lobbying for extensions of the ban, the latter two alleging breaches of it on my part. They both provided incorrect information to support their claims [55]. Both have been notified and given an opportunity to review their allegations [56] [57]; in this Arbcom case, they have both chosen to maintain their allegations.
"Unlike those who disagreed with them, neither MeteorMaker nor Pedrito allowed any compromise wording that used both terminologies."
Since the pro-J&S side's position was that both terminologies, partisan and neutral, should be used, it's not correct to describe that as a "compromise wording".
"Meteormaker's most typical edit summaries were "Terminology modernized" or "Terminology updated," and the edits often marked as "minor" even after months of disagreements about these changes. "
I see nothing wrong at all with "terminology modernized". That Jayjg disagrees with me about the modernity of the terms, as well as with several other editors, and with all the sources that say anything at all about the subject [58], is hardly evidence of disruptive behavior on my part. A word on "minor": it was default for my editor, so I didn't always bother to switch for small edits. Apparently Jayjg didn't either always [59].
"This was in line with persistent attempts to deprecate the term wherever it could not be excised completely - to insist that it was not a term used today. Thus Meteormaker's and G-Dett's definition of Samaria as a "Biblical name"/"Biblical term"/"Biblical" or "ancient region" despite MeteorMaker stating weeks earlier, several times, that it was the name of the "British Mandatory administration district." - the British Mandate was neither "biblical" nor "ancient."
"Biblical" was in fact a compromise, the original distinction between modern/historical was expressed simply by using the past tense like in all other articles on historic regions. Since Jayjg refused to budge on this and allow the articles on Judea and Samaria to reflect complete source consensus, we settled on describing the areas as "biblical", much because hundreds of reliable sources use that exact word.
"In addition, it's true that more recently one "side" in the conflict has tended to prefer the traditional, longstanding designations, rather than the newer "West Bank.""
Question to Jayjg: just why should WP kowtow to that side and its idiosyncratic terminology? Aren't we here to write English wikipedia, for English readers, using established English terminology? MeteorMaker ( talk) 02:20, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Preliminary note: Jayjg's claim that reliable sources were dismissed is a total red herring. No sources were ever presented, by Jayjg or anybody else, that remotely support the "J&S are modern toponyms" position without a huge amount of WP:SYNTH. What was rejected was examples of usage, because they failed to be examples of anything else than historic usage or Israeli usage (both uncontested).
"On the Talk: page discussions it was shown that, contrary to Meteormaker's assertions, there were many examples of modern English language sources using the terms"
"MeteorMaker and his supporters disqualified almost all sources that contradicted their claims. They rejected out of hand any Israeli sources; the fact that the official Israeli government designation for the region was "Judea and Samaria" was apparently meaningless,"
"and any English language sources published in Israel that used the terms were not, MeteorMaker claimed, valid indicators of their use in English."
"However, the rejections quickly widened beyond this scope: if an American or British publication used the terms, but the author was born in/connected with Israel, then it was again not an example of English-language use. "
"For example, David Weisburd's Jewish Settler Violence, published by Penn State Press was dismissed because "...Weisburd is also an Israeli, which makes [him] unusable as evidence of outside-Israel use of the toponym." [62] This despite the fact that Weisburd was, at the time of publication, a professor at the Graduate School of Criminal Justice of Rutgers University, with degrees only from American universities. "
"Similarly, Miriam Shaviv, born and raised in Canada and a citizen of the U.K. was dismissed as writing for "foreign publications" when she wrote for Britain's The Jewish Chronicle. [63]"
"Sources were also dismissed if the author was, in MeteorMaker's estimation, an "ardent anti-Muslim"
"or an official in the Zionist Organization of America [66] [67] and therefore using "Zionist-approved terminology", or, in the case of Abraham D. Sofaer, because he had committed the "faux pas" of belonging to a Zionist organization in his youth. [68] "
"If all that didn't work, then sources could be dismissed because, according to MeteorMaker, the source "[could]n't be evaluated due to restricted content" [69] "
"or was a dead link (to partisan source) [70], despite the actual quotations being provided."
"It became apparent that there was little point in providing sources that contradicted MeteorMaker's theories, because there was always some rationale by which they could be dismissed."
"Despite all this, and even when applying all of MeteorMaker's conditions, there are still sources that use the terms."
"And a final bit of irony: a number of editors have been trying to portray the "Samaria"/"Judea" terminology as Israeli-only, or Israeli/Zionist/Jewish. Yet in several of the articles in question, the terminology was first added by a Muslim Palestinian (and native English speaker)"
MeteorMaker ( talk) 02:20, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
What's missing in
User:Jayjg's evidence is the
smoking gun or
silver bullet: A source that explicitly says that
Judea and
Samaria are the common names for the southern and northern
West Bank, respectively. Until then, all accusations of anybody being on a campaign of disruption are bogus. No source, no argument.
Cheers,
pedrito -
talk - 11.03.2009 13:05
It has taken me 2 days to check thoroughly his evidence. The notes are so extensive, that I would violate even generous word-limits. I'll use just one snippet paradigmatically (as is known, I don't think diffs are reliable to judge what is going on. Each a frozen snapshot of a long and intricately sequential film of evidence)
It is a masterful mustering of evidence, in the German sense of 'Muster'. The problem is, how to read the pattern? I clicked through the dazzling necklace, spangled with cerulean diffs, feeling somewhat like Catherine the Great drifting on her imperial barge down the Dnieper, and admiring the impressive facades of Potemkin's villages. It is useful, however, at the end of the voyage, to walk the backleg and see the same facades from behind. The technical term is 'unpacking'.
There is almost nothing there, unless one accepts Jayjg's prefatory premise that MeteorMaker is engaged in a 'campaign' of denigration ('deprecation'), with a bigoted spirit on I/P wikipedia. Let me unpack the first piece of evidence.
Item 173.
'a geographic term used for the mountainous region between the Galilee to the north and Judea to the south. It is the name of natural, historical and political regions. It is the central region of the Biblical Land of Israel. Most of the region is in the northern West Bank of the Jordan River.'
with
'is a term used for the mountainous northern part of the West Bank, used by people who want to emphasize Israel's and the Jewish people's relationship with the area.'
Conclusion. In itself, there is nothing here, evidence-wise. No edit-warring, or deprecation, or campaigning, at least on that page. To the contrary, MM, over a period of 8 months, makes 4 edits, one of which Jayjg contests after 6 months, while accepting MM's original reduction of the lead, which defines Samaria as 'in the West Bank'. Since then, a problem has arisen, and now what Jayjg accepted of MM's edit is now adduced as evidence for MM's campaign of hostile POV pushing. If one wants, I can do this for a good many of the other pearls in the spangle. It is the method which is defective. Nishidani ( talk) 15:18, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi Joshua, I just read your piece of evidence, about the irritable exchange between MetoerMaker and Jay regarding the dead link to the op-ed by the Israeli ambassador to Australia, which Jay had presented as a non-Israeli source.
I agree with you that MeteorMaker ought simply to have found the cache online or visited a library, rather than insinuating that Jay's summary might have been incomplete or misleading. For context, however, it's relevant that at the time that MeteorMaker expressed those doubts, Jay had already accused him sixteen times of being a liar, and a comparable number of times of being a bigot. In almost all of these cases, it's clear that Jay's accusations were made in bad faith. It's also relevant that Jay has in fact lied extensively and repeatedly about many of the sources involved in this dispute. Just for perspective, I'll say that I would never take on faith any claim that Jay makes about source materials. I wouldn't insinuate doubts about something that could be easily checked, and in that respect MeteorMaker misstepped, but the above is the above.-- G-Dett ( talk) 03:50, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Comment removed by clerk: unacceptable personal insult to criticism ratio. -- Tznkai ( talk) 03:04, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
It seems to me that Joshuaz misuses the term "bad faith" for what he means, that MeteorMaker did not assume Jayjg's good faith. This use seems to be appearing more frequently; I tend to hope for that to reverse, since it seems to turn the whole accusation into a simultaneous self-incrimination. Mackan79 ( talk) 05:21, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
"On December 19, 2008 MeteorMaker argued that an Australian newspaper using the term "Samaria" could not be verified since the link was dead. This is exactly counter to what is stated in WP:V which is explicit that sources do not need to be online."
True, I'm still learning. I honestly didn't know that at the time. (Parenthetically, it has had some odd consequences, for instance here, where an unverifiable but 404-reffed claim was made where we, counterintuitively, had to simply take the posting editor's word for it, because policy says so.)
Let me also mention that in academia, everything needs to be verifiable, and verification is seen as a natural part of the scientific process rather than as an expression of bad faith or a personal attack [72]. Blindly accepting the word of an authority runs counter to everything science (and, I innocently believed for a while, Wikipedia) stands for.
"User:Jayjg responded to Meteor that he had provided the quote and confirmed the source, and suggested, in the face of apparent bad faith or inability to understand basic policy, that MeteorMaker drop by a library to validate the source himself."
- "I quoted the source, therefore it said it. The claim has been confirmed by me. Period. " [79]
"After a two week period, Meteor removed the link as well as the content , with the edit summary "Rm dead link (to partisan source)". This act was both against basic policy and apparently in bad faith."
- "Four settlements will be evacuated in the northern Samaria region of the West Bank."
"A Spanish translation of the original newspaper article was then found hosted on the web and was used as a substitute for the Australian citation. It included, however, a footnote text that was not part of the original article. MeteorMaker inserted his translation of the hosted version's footnote."
"Jayjg pointed Meteor to a google cache to further confirm the content of the original and reminded him of the library option."
MeteorMaker ( talk) 15:36, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Clerk note: Mackan79's original post here was evidence, and has been moved to the evidence page in his section.
Perhaps now might be a good time to start focusing on solutions and ways forward? Or at least get some concrete proposals going over at the Workshop ... — Roger Davies talk 15:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
In my final section of evidence, just now submitted, I refer to Jay's use of WP:NOR as a parliamentary bludgeon to suppress critical discussion of source-material on talk pages, instead of as a community policy governing article content. I say he does this "in every single instance where he is opposed." This is not rhetoric; I am fully prepared to prove that this is his standard operating procedure when it comes to disputes about sources. This illegitimate tactic is absolutely central to the dispute now before Arbcom; in other words, if Jay didn't do this, we wouldn't be where we are today.-- G-Dett ( talk) 21:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
(moved back here to avoid dumping repetitive discussions there)
The point of the Trinidad and Tobago example is this quite simple one, based around a combination of geography and logic - if a place is in "Trinidad and Tobago", it is by definition surely also sited in one or other of "Trinidad" or "Tobago" (or possibly, one of the smaller islands). Equally, if we note that Port of Spain is in Trinidad, it is also surely in "Trinidad and Tobago". By the same logic, if we say something is in "Samaria", it is surely by definition to be found within the larger entity "Judea and Samaria". Whether we wish to describe these areas as "geographic" or "political" or "administrative" regions is kind of neither here nor there, although as it happens the designations are not mutually exclusive anyway. We are simply talking about where things are located.
The "confusion" which seems to be coming from pointing to occasional sources that suggest places in Israel are also in Samaria only arises because in some cases "Samaria" is used in what would appear to be more of a historical or even biblical sense, to refer to a wider region that extends into modern day Israel. This appears to have been the case in British Mandate times, when of course Jordan was also called Transjordan. Contemporary usage, according to sources I have seen, does not generally follow this. Those contemporary sources are quite explicit that "Samaria", on the occasions when it is used at all in a modern context, is, unsurprisingly, usually simply a reference to one part of "Judea and Samaria", or rather "the West Bank". Please, once and for all can we get beyond the "here's one example of X being used in a certain way, therefore X is the standard normal term and can be used everywhere" logic? Anyway here's a sample of what really does seem to be the standard use -
Similar examples are available in respect of Judea/southern West Bank. The argument that suggests that Samaria and/or Judea can therefore be added in to articles (especially in respect of things in the West Bank, but probably in respect of places in Israel as well) fails on several levels, all of which have been discussed and demonstrated at length long before we got to ArbCom -
At the end of day I'm personally agnostic as to whether the term can or should be used in respect of towns in the parts of what could be referred to as historical Samaria/Judea that lie within Israel, but they should certainly not be used in respect of places in the West Bank as if they were neutral standard terms. Saying "but we're using them as geographical terms rather than in a Judea & Samaria sense" won't wash for the reasons above. When they are used, they have a standard - and rather obvious one would have thought - meaning. If I abuse someone in the street and they object to my language, I can't get away with saying - "oh you and everyone else might see c##t as a rude word, but I'm using it as a term of affection, so there's nothing wrong with it. Look, here's a film script where someone uses it as a term of endearment, QED". -- Nickhh ( talk) 17:52, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Brewcrewer's methodology has several flaws that have been discussed already [85]. A brief recap:
Result: Samaria: 1,540,000 /12 = 128K hits.
Also note that "Northern West Bank" has several alternatives, like "Northern part of the West Bank" (
32K hits), "Northern portion of the West Bank" (
4.8K hits), "North West Bank" (
90K hits, with the word "banking" excluded to filter out most false positives. (Though ORing the varieties together, counterintuively, lowers the Google total, which is probably indicative of a deficiency in the Google search algorithm. I have chosen to disregard the varieties in this calculation.)
Result: 118K hits, with "banking" excluded but none of the results of the varieties added to the total.
Conclusion: Far from being "far more commonly used English terms", the terms seem to be in the same ballpark. Outside Israel, "Northern West Bank" is around 20 times more common than "Samaria". This is in addition to the result of another (informal) analysis, that indicated that "West Bank" is 70 times more common than Samaria, and 1400 times more common outside Israel. [86]
BC's accusation that his "comments and offers to compromise were met with WP:IDONTHEARTHAT, WP:WIKILAWYERING, strawman arguments, stonewalling, and incivility" has not been substantiated with anything. The discussion is here.
"I pointed out that other "Samarias" don't necessarily take away from the notability of the term because the fact that other things are named after the original Samaria enhances the notability of the current Samaria."
"MM responds with: WP:IDONTHEARTHAT , WP:WIKILAWYERING, and general stonewalling."
"Initially [MM] states that editors "don't have to be worried about the expungment of J&S from WP because there is Category:Judea and Samaria. Yet weeks later argues for its removal."
Not a "misrepresentation", a change of mind, after careful consideration over many weeks. The J&S category is problematic for many reasons:
MeteorMaker ( talk) 15:43, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
Keep in mind that BC's diffs have been taken out of context and that he had kept insisting ad nauseam:
BC also misrepresents her:
BC, despite his stated dislike for neologisms, doesn't hesitate to waste hours of other editors' time in an attempt to force one on this article. I admire the other editors' restraint deeply. MeteorMaker ( talk) 14:24, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
BC gives four diffs as evidence of his stated willingness to compromise. Of these, three [88] [89] [90] are just unsupported statements to the effect of "I have compromised". Let's take a look at his sole remaining example of an offer to compromise:
In other words, BC's "compromise" is to make J&S the standard terms on WP, and put what everybody else regards as the standard, neutral terms in parentheses. As an attempt to adopt controversial terminology, it goes much further than what even the most notorious POV-pushers have dared to suggest. Needless to say, BC's suggestion got no support and was immediately struck down. It takes some gall to parade that episode as evidence of other editors' "refusal to compromise", particularly as BC's "compromise" was offered in opposition of another, more functional compromise.
Regarding CM's attempt to disguise Jayjg's 6 partisan sources as "the International Herald Tribune, the Journal of Church and State, Sussex Academic Press, Lexington Books, Hoover Press and others" [91], it's so obviously a breach of good citation practice that it needs no further discussion. It was rightly removed and nobody has argued for putting it back again. Was that BC's best example of a "refusal to compromise"? MeteorMaker ( talk) 10:45, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
"MM [and G-Dett] wikilawyer to get around IHT article".
Let's now take a look at the relevant part of the IHT article:
"Biblical significance of West Bank settlements — IT'S IN THE BIBLE: The four West Bank settlements that Israel is evacuating are all located in the biblical Land of Israel — territory that observant Jews believe was promised to the Jewish people in the Old Testament. The area of the West Bank, known as northern Samaria, was inhabited by the tribe of Menashe, one of the 10 tribes of Israel that were forced into exile. "
"When it was inhabited by the tribe of Menashe, it wasn't known as Samaria, it was Samaria."
Note that the IHT article is, again, just an alleged example of outside-Israel use of "Samaria" and not a source that actually says anything about the usage — unlike these. MeteorMaker ( talk) 12:24, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
- "Without hesitation, Linda takes a stand for Israel, for Jerusalem as its undivided capitol and the unquestioned right of the original Chosen People to be in their land." [102]
Over the months, Brewcrewer has contributed a number of spirited if eccentric propositions to this debate. He has argued for example that standard contemporary usage should be determined in part by pop-cultural references to the ancient past; that putting an ordinary adjective like "northern" in front of a proper noun like "West Bank" results in a "chic neologism," which we should avoid even if it's standard usage among mainstream RSs; that a story in the IHT about the biblical resonance of "Samaria" for settlers living in today's West Bank (subtitled "IT'S IN THE BIBLE") establishes the widespread, neutral, contemporary currency of the disputed term; that to resolve a months-long dispute about whether to use controversial nationalist terms in WP's neutral voice alongside the accepted terms, a good "compromise" would be to use the controversial nationalist terms in WP's neutral voice, with the accepted terms in parentheses; and so on.
If I'm not mistaken, all or most of his eccentric propositions are rooted in a single act of research, wherein he typed "Samaria" into a search bar and got knocked back out of his deskchair by the flood of Google hits streaming from his monitor. Fellow editors in hip-high rubber galoshes came to his aid here, quickly discovering that the first ten of these three million consisted of four references to the ancient past, one reference to "historical parts of the Land of Israel," two Wikipedia articles, a reference to a 2004 film called "Samaritan Girl" (about a South Korean prostitute), and three references to a national park in Greece and its nearby accommodations. From his sprawled position on the floor, Brewcrewer did not dispute the point, but rather suggested, sopping wet and still blinking, that we had more to learn from the brand name of bottled water in Greece than we do from the neologistic phraseologies used by chic, fly-by-night organizations such as the New York Times, Haaretz, and CNN, when talking about today's Middle East.
A surprising amount of time has been devoted to Brewcrewer's impish observations and non sequiturs; to my knowledge, there has been no IDIDNTHEARTHAT. There has been a bit of ICANTBELIEVEHEJUSTSAIDTHAT and even some GOODLORDBREWCREWERPULLYOURHEADOUT. To the latter in particular I plead guilty.-- G-Dett ( talk) 17:43, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
[outdent] @ Nishidani , one could argue that to teach one approach to the exclusion of all other approaches blind sides the student/teacher to the necessary pluralism required in the imperfect world of knowledge. Two simple examples will suffice.
Obviously the two are not compatible. To adhere to one requires sacrificing the rich world of pluralism for the singularity of homogeneity, an act of faith. Tundrabuggy ( talk) 03:41, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
[outdent]Not at all. In fact it was you who said on the workshop page "where there are alternative terms or terminologies, especially when these are used to express a point of view about ownership or to highlight a political or national affiliation, these should be acknowledged and noted, but only in the appropriate place and only relative to the extent that they are used in mainstream and authoritative sources." It is you who is suggesting "ratios" or percentages. I say let the sources used determine the name. If there is a legitimate conflict of names in the RS, it can actually be noted in the article, both can be used with the appropriate reference, either through the use of a quote, or a note concerning which sources say what. It shouldn't have to be black and white. It isn't rocket science. Tundrabuggy ( talk) 03:06, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Khoikhoi's argument is a good example of the logical fallacy converse accident: Since Jayjg has written 4 FA's, all his edits must be without fault. The evidence that has come to light in this discussion strongly contradicts that conclusion.
Another way to see it: While this dispute has been going on, neither Jayjg or anybody else involved has had time to devote to writing FA-quality articles. Jayjg's refusal to let WP reflect total source consensus has cost the project countless productive hours, and potentially several FAs. MeteorMaker ( talk) 15:17, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
Three of Jay's four Featured Articles and all five of his Good Articles are about synagogues and Jewish community centers. The fourth FA is on Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz and helped spread detailed information about the Holocaust to the Allies. As I wrote above, on this very page, "Jayjg has created, built, and sustained – in the best spirit of Wikipedia – a huge and invaluable series of articles on synagogues in North America."
Meanwhile, the problem under discussion in this Arbcom case is his serious conflict of interest in editing articles on or related to Israel/Palestine, a conflict of interest that has him exploiting and misrepresenting core Wikipedia policies and principles instead of implementing and respecting them, making his presence in this area of the encyclopedia indeed a "pernicious" one.-- G-Dett ( talk) 16:27, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
This section is a great example of how this arbitration has become an attack-fest by one "side". I hope the ArbCom can see this concerted, coordinated smear campaign for what it is. 6SJ7 ( talk) 22:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
"MeteorMaker claimed, in response to User:Khoikhoi's evidence, that "While this dispute has been going on, neither Jayjg or anybody else involved has had time to devote to writing FA-quality articles. Jayjg's refusal to let WP reflect total source consensus has cost the project countless productive hours, and potentially several FAs". As regards the first sentence, as noted in other evidence, the conflict began on April 6, 2008. In addition to the article Jayjg currently has up for FA status, he also had FAs promoted on August 6, 2008, October 13, 2008, and November 15, 2008. His GAs were promoted on August 8, 2008, September 12, 2008, December 19, 2008, December 20, 2008, and January 4, 2009. All of his DYKs were written during this period."
"Perhaps Jayjg is being singled out because he was the one that provided the most sources opposing that campaign":
MeteorMaker ( talk) 16:46, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
G-Dett, thank you for trying to understand my position. I am sorry you find my way of explaining myself unclear - I will try harder. I think NPOV was created because the founders of Wikipedia assumed that it was very plausible that all the editors working on a given article might be highly partisan, with irreconcilable points of view. For me the key point of NPOV is that there is no truth, just points of view. I am disturbed by any argument that one term is "more neutral," which to me is the same kind of argument as "more true" - the problem is, anyone may believe that the term they favor is "more neutral." NPOV exists precisely because every editor can believe that their way is best whether they use the words "more true" or "more good" or "more correct" or "more neutral." NPOV says, "Uh, we do not care what you think. We provide all significant views from notable sources that are relevant." Beyond that, my own approach is to defer to the people in question. If it is someone's view that the ground they live on is called Samaria, when we are talking about them, use Samaria. If it is someone's view that the ground they live on is called Palestine, when talking about them, call it Palestine. Nishidani seems to think that this is an endoresement. It is not. It is complying with our NPOV policy, which is to express all significant points of view - everyone I seem to have pissed off here seems to get back to an argument that their word is somehow "better" when they whole point of NPOV is to make a huge sidestep around those kinds of arguments which get us nowhere. No, G-Dett, you have a right to disagree with me, but I posit that you would be disagreeing with my interpretation of NPOV. Doyou see how I reach my conclusion? This ends up as a dispute over how to apply NPOV. It is a content dispute. I sorely wished we had good mechanisms for resolving content disputes, this has been a problem at Wikipedia for many years. But I do not think it is wise for people to solve the problem of a lack of mechanisms for resolving content disputes, to out of desparation (and frustration, and a desire to improve the encyclopedia - i am not questioning anyone's good faith, only their good judgment), say "it is not a content dispute, it is a personal behavior dispute" because once they make that little switch, they can go to ArbCom. I understand the motivation, the sense of need. But it is still a bad idea to call a content dispute a personal behavior dispute. Slrubenstein | Talk 21:03, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
MeteorMaker, you are simply calling for the termination of our NPOV policy. So some sources say that "West Bank" is neutral. So what? Big deal! That itself is a point of view. Do you get it? My position is simple: The neutral point of view is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject: it neither endorses nor discourages viewpoints. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. The elimination of article content cannot be justified under this policy on the grounds that it is "POV". All views are "points of view," even those views that people claim are neutral. It just doesn't matter. Wikipedia must represent all significant views and it is utterly irrelevant that people believe one of those views to be "neutral." Slrubenstein | Talk 22:54, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
Are you asking me if I believe in Wikipedia policy? Yes. Are you asking me to judge someon's behavior? I won't do that. I am an outsider but obviously felt it important to ente e3vience on behalf of Jayjg. haven't you offered evidence too? So now what? Are you asking me to be judge? jury? Wikipedia has no good mechanism for resolving conflicts over content. editors need to work it out with patience. I continue to view this as a conflict dispute. Are you asking me if I believe in NPOV, V and NOR for strict guidance? My answer is yes. Are you asking me to apply elements o policy to this case, i.e. resolve the dispute for you? Sorry, I won't. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:42, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
On this talk page alone, there are over 40 thousand words spanning 66 single spaced pages. The evidence page currently hosts about 24 thousand words. As a reference point the first Harry Potter novel was 76,944 words.-- Tznkai ( talk) 18:19, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Okay. I'll review all threads and suggest a solution in 300 words.
(A) There is one bounded geophysical and political region. It is called in international law 'The Occupied Palestinian Territories. Its inhabitants are 83% Palestinian, with 17 percent Israeli settlers, there illegally (in international law). The area is known internationally by a term, the ' West Bank', which is disliked by that part of Israeli society which favours annexation, partial or complete. Palestinians in the area call it ' Palestine' (Filastin). We thus have (i) international neutral terminology (ii) sectarian (sub-national) Israeli usage (iii) Palestinian usage.
(B)A cultural-ethnic block in wiki wants a 'singularity', i.e. the use of toponyms for this non-Israeli territory as favoured by annexationists. They want these terms to be treated on a par with international terminology. They never mention the countervailing Palestinian terms as having equal legitimacy. They press for 'the northern West Bank' to be called 'Samaria', and 'the southern West Bank' to be called Judah. No one on the other side (editors from many different ethnic backgrounds) has countered by suggesting we call the two areas 'northern Palestine' nor 'southern Palestine', the prospective name of the future state, just as 'Judah and Samaria' would be the prospective territorial designation if Israel were eventually to incorporate the West Bank into its territorial confines.
(C) When international usage coincides with Israeli usage, we use the term Israelis use. Hebron, not Al-Khalil, the name used by 99.8% of its inhabitants, and a billion Muslims. When international usage coincides with Palestinian usage, we use the term Palestinians use. Nablus, not Shechem, as many Israelis prefer. When Israeli and Palestinian terms are in conflict, we use the default, neutral international term in English. 'West Bank' (not ' Judea and Samaria or Filastin/' Palestine'). In all cases, we should not use any term which prioritizes one (sub)national or partisan-political name, while suppressing the countervailing nation (people)'s naming system. That is an obvious violation of WP:NPOV. Nishidani ( talk) 16:57, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
"MeteorMaker used the phrase "used outside Israel" to mean "written by non-Israelis". [123] [124] Jayjg understood it to mean something different as he explains here [125] and as is evident here [126]. Therefore the rejection of examples based on whether the authors were Israelis appeared arbitrary to Jayjg, who was offended; and when he expressed this, MeteorMaker was in turn offended."
(Emphasis in original). Note, it was when 14 of these examples were found to be by people born in Israel that Jayjg's allegations of "distasteful ethnic discrimination" begun. MeteorMaker ( talk) 08:43, 1 May 2009 (UTC)(Jayjg, 14 November 2008 [127]:) "[MeteorMaker] has been presented with multiple English language sources that use the term and thus refute his theory, but has rejected them on various grounds, claiming that they are referring to the biblical Samaria, or that the sources are Israeli. Now, to begin with, there is nothing wrong with a source simply because the person happens to have been born in Israel. I repeat, there is nothing wrong with a source simply because the person happens to have been born in Israel. [...] However, even if you exclude people born in Israel (not that there is any reason to), your claims still fail, as the multiple sources below show."
Red herring, because nobody has claimed that, and no arguments on the WB side depend on it. MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:41, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
That only demonstrates that smaller geographical entities are more rarely mentioned than the larger entities they are parts of, which nobody has doubted. Another red herring. MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:41, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
"Successes in clearing up misunderstandings!
G-Dett originally stated [...] MeteorMaker clarified [...] MeteorMaker has clarified |...] possibly clearing up a misunderstanding."
Considering that the only person who have misunderstood those things so far seems to be Coppertwig himself, the success is perhaps not much to write home about. MeteorMaker ( talk) 21:46, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Update. MeteorMaker ( talk) 02:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
""demonstrably false accusation" (Here is the diff requested: [129]"
""deliberately assertion of false information in order to mislead" [147] (quote without diff; no evidence for "deliberately")"
"""This is one of Jayjg's more unorthodox positions: that the nationality of a writer changes with the nationality of the publisher." [528] (no evidence Jayjg said that)"
Correct observation; fixed. The diffs I added may be difficult to understand without the context:
Jayjg: "Utter nonsense. The sources are all non-Israelis who use the term to mean the Samaria, no more no less." [148]
Jayjg is talking about these usage examples, of which 10 of 35 have been shown to be Israeli. [149]
Jayjg: "You're right, they are 35 examples, not sources. The fact that they're non-Israeli and "from Jewish sources" is actually what is "irrelevant", as Wikipedia does not disqualify sources based on country of birth or ethnicity of the author." [150]
Jayjg is talking about the same examples. Later, after having added 8 examples, 3 of which were found to be Israeli, he also said "I will, however, grant you the "most humorous argument" award for claiming to have proved that "its use is confined to Israel" in the face of over forty reliable sources from outside Israel using the term." [151]
Some additional Jayjg quotes to illustrate the concept:
- "However, the sources used are not "Israeli" or "Jewish"; rather, they are typically American or British publications, written for general English-speaking audiences." [152]
- "sources published outside of Israel are not Israeli" [153]
- "Things published in America are American. [154]"
- "As for things published in Australian papers, they're Australian." [155]
MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:04, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
I think the problem here may be that you're perhaps somehow using the term "outside Israel" to exclude a person who is an Israeli who is outside Israel at the time. I don't think there's any evidence that Jayjg has made the ridiculous claim you're attributing to him. Please state more clearly what you mean when you say "outside Israel": I think that will clear up the misunderstanding. ☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 16:37, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
"3 diffs, where Jayjg did not demand a specific verbal formulation"
"what Jay claimed they demonstrated, to wit, that the disputed terms were in wide use outside of Israel, and were widely accepted as neutral." (No evidence that he said that.) "lies" (discriminate can mean make distinctions between) [529] "accused him sixteen times of being a liar, and a comparable number of times of being a bigot" "bad faith" "has in fact lied" [530] "extensive lying" [531]
"Re West Bank/Samaria, MeteorMaker seemed to insist on keeping the phrase "what is today", arguing it is not a pleonasm [185], but re Palestine deleted "what is currently called" [186], and "the area today referred to as" [187] (edit summary "Tautology removed") [188]"
"Given a choice [190] between assuming Jayjg considers "Israeli" an ethnicity and assuming good faith, MeteorMaker chooses the former. [191]"
"Again, Jayjg: an Israeli source is poor proof that non-Israelis use the term. The nationality of the publisher is immaterial and your "discrimination" objection is distasteful and willfully misleading."
"Your attempts to discriminate against sources based on their alleged ethnic or national origin is distasteful and inappropriate. The United Kingdom is "outside-Israel", and the alleged ethnicity or national origin of the other is irrelevant and willfully misleading."
"Given a choice between assuming that Jayjg understood that "West Bank" was being used as a short form for "Northern West Bank" and assuming good faith, MeteorMaker chooses the former. [211]"
"Given a choice between assuming that Jayjg understood that "outside Israel" didn't mean place of publication and assuming good faith, MeteorMaker chooses the former. [212]"
"Even given the benefit of doubt regarding why Israeli examples must be dismissed as irrelevant as examples of non-Israeli usage, Jayjg's persistent repeating of the claim that what he perceived as "discrimination" was "ethnic" (I assume he does not regard "Israeli" as an ethnicity) was clearly not based in ignorance. Despite numerous admonishments to either show diffs or strike the accusations, he chose to perpetuate the lie, to the point that other editors started joining in."
(Outdent ) I'm sure I'm not alone in considering your strange insistence that "in/outside Israel" must mean a physical location near-disruptive. "Term X is used in country Y" is a very simple concept to understand. Quibbling about edge cases like if a citizen of country Y travels abroad, or if something was written by a citizen of country Y but published in country Z is not helpful in the least. Are Americans required to lay off typically American idioms when they go abroad? Are foreign publishing houses under an obligation to substitute non-Americanisms in texts written by Americans? This diversionary shifting of the focus to inconsequential grey zone cases while ignoring the larger picture is, as Nishidani observes, essentially identical to Jayjg's technique (which it apparently is not an AGF breach to call "distasteful", and by extension I assume, "not sincere").
Some observations:
"Another example: MeteorMaker said "All explicitly, unequivocally and undisputedly support one side" but did not specify (until I asked) what assertion or proposed action the editor was saying had been supported."
"In spite of much discussion [237] [238] about placing that very phrase in quotation marks, MeteorMaker again used quotation marks to mention a phrase which Jayjg didn't actually use. [239]"
Coppertwig, you've proposed on the workshop page that "People need to state clearly and often what it is they're arguing about." I'm not sure how often is often enough for you; apparently very often, so I'll take this opportunity to point out for the 500th or so time that no one has ever proposed "to cleanse Wikipedia of 'Samaria'." They've proposed to use it in appropriate contexts, and not in Wikipedia's neutral voice as an uncontroversial contemporary toponym. Its use in a contemporary context is controversial, ideologically loaded, and very rare among mainstream reliable sources. If you think it's analogous to "New England" or "Western Canada," then you haven't acquainted yourself with the dispute you're wading into.
Regarding the diffs of mine you cited as misleading in your "evidence" post, they contained exactly what I said they contained, and my use of them was unanswerably straightforward. As you appear at best simply to have clicked the wrong diffs, or not read or understood what you were commenting on, I urge you now to do the honorable thing and refactor.-- G-Dett ( talk) 03:38, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
‘It would appear from a note on my page by User:Nableezy that I am guilty of not (I admit it) having the foggiest notion of how images generate these window pop-ups. If the Susya pop-up is as Nableezy suggests, I retract my remark on it, and apologize to User:Ynhockey.Nishidani (talk) 10:16, 30 March 2009 (UTC)’
A day has passed, and those who are capable, like yourself, of fixing these things, don’t fix them. My original point therefore stands. One should not upload defective templates that give the false impression West Bank villages are in Israel, esp. when this whole Arcom issue has been trying to fix the problem of an occupational power (Israel) having its POV, that parts of the West Bank, are 'Judea and Samaria' (i.e. Israeli, not only administratively, but historically, politically and symbolically), represented here. That template asserts as a fact something which happens to be an ideological dream and a geopolitical aspiration, as yet devoid of any legality.
If being very precise is a problem, then we both have it. In an area as conflicted as the I/P one, I, as a mere peon, expect stringent standards of neutrality in anyone honoured by an administrative capacity, for administrators here must set an example. What you cite for the idea I am responsible for 'conflict creation' is a tiff that disguises, yes, a conflict in our respective POVs. Those are resolved by loyalty to method and strict requirements for evidence, and objectivity. We both subscribe to these: at times, the POV shows a leg. Nishidani ( talk) 11:39, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Since Jayjg hasn't been active on-wiki recently, I sent him an email to ask about some things that have been discussed here recently. He gave me permission to post his reply, which is:
☺ Coppertwig ( talk) 22:04, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Coppertwig now presents a new e-mail from Jayjg as evidence for his hypothesis that misunderstandings are at the root of this dispute.
(1) Observations:
MeteorMaker ( talk) 00:30, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
(2) Jayjg says "Written by non-Israelis"? If so, why didn't he say that, rather than "outside Israel"?" Let's check the sources and see when the word "non-Israelis" entered the discussion:
Now, the crucial question: did Jayjg understand that valid examples of outside-Israel use need to be "written by non-Israelis", not just "physically located in a place other than Israel"?
Conclusion: Contrary to his claim in the email to Coppertwig above, Jayjg understood that "[Samaria is] used only by Israelis" was my position. Nevertheless, only one post later, he switches foot and dismisses a source that confirms that position 100%, by improvising a strawman, where "outside Israel" (which he silently misconstrues further to mean "physically located outside Israel") becomes the criterion, then characteristically leaves the discussion. MeteorMaker ( talk) 00:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Coppertwig too apparently understood the concept at the time:
MeteorMaker ( talk) 01:56, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
i followed his edit, but I'm trying to npov an article called Jerusalem light rail and user meteormaker has been really disruptive there. If this is about his conduct here on wikipeida something shall be done to stop it I believe. 216.165.95.70 ( talk) 22:37, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
I've read through here a little, and it seems amazing. Meteormaker is trying to erase the terms judea and samaria out of wikipedia?? this is what's going on here? These are distinct georgraphic areas... how does he explain the fact that these areas are also part of Israel proper like he called it.... if you can read hebrew you can see here [274], for example Beit Shemesh is in Israel proper and in judea. was this ever explained? sorry if it's in the wrong place. 216.165.95.70 ( talk) 10:13, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
JayJG's FAs have been touted as showing his general contribution to the project. However they have been extremely questionable content (individual congregations). When there are so many big topics, even within only Jewish areas), that are not at FA, seeing JayJG work up these minutia into FAs, does not impress me. Makes me wonder if he is just trying to get FAs like notches on a belt, rather than helping the encyclopedia. I almost even wonder if he is advertising.
Why not get Dead Sea Scrolls, Masada, David, Passover up to FA? Surely that helps the project more than random synagogues? Hand to heart, I picked 4 major interest Jew themes and not a single one was FA. Those were the first 4 I picked! I've picked some before and not come up with an FA. I'm sure there are some wide interest Jewish topics that are FA/GA, but they are HARD TO FIND!
At a minimum, JayJG's accomplishments are less than what is touted (given the subjects' lack of importance to readers). At a maximum, JayJG is deliberately gaming the system to promote himself or the congregations.
P.s. The Meteor guy sounds even worse. But at least no one is making this to do about what a contributor he is...
69.255.3.246 ( talk) 22:17, 25 April 2009 (UTC)