WP: All murdered Israeli children are murdered by... Arabs

[Hersch]

Another perspective on Wikipedian double standards, by Sam Lee. Kindly discuss.

[Poetlister]

I really can't understand why we have this editorial. Obviously, articles can only be in a category if those articles exist. If Sam Lee thinks that every single murder case should have its own article, let him start some articles. Basically, the thrust of this editorial is that there is some "Jewish conspiracy" to distort the truth. This can only discredit this forum.

[lilburne]

I really can't understand why we have this editorial. Obviously, articles can only be in a category if those articles exist. If Sam Lee thinks that every single murder case should have its own article, let him start some articles. Basically, the thrust of this editorial is that there is some "Jewish conspiracy" to distort the truth. This can only discredit this forum.

The point is that wikipedia highlights the extraordinary rather than the mundane. This distorts reality in all areas.

[The Adversary]

If Sam Lee thinks that every single murder case should have its own article, let him start some articles.

Yeah, right.
Following the way of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rania Siam (T-H-L) (deleted); Rania Iyad Aram (T-H-L) (deleted); Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jihad Shaar (T-H-L) (deleted); and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ghadeer Jaber Mkheemar (T-H-L) (deleted)?

[eagle]

Thank you for the blog post. It would be interesting to have demographic information about Wikipedia's population of active editors. For example, is the distribution of religion similar to that of the populations as a whole? This has been the key to the "gender gap" debate, but there are many areas where the editor population does not reflect society as a whole.

I do not buy the "gender gap" argument that the fact that more men than women edit Wikipedia leads to bias. Nor would having a disproportionate number of Jewish editors necessarily distort the coverage of the Mideast conflict. However, if editors are being recruited for POV-pushing purposes, then WO is doing a valuable service in reporting and documenting that problem.

The bigger problem is that there is no editorial judgment or allocation of resources in Wikipedia. Wikipedia claims to have outsourced this task to the news media where secondary sources generally decide what is worthy of coverage. This blog correctly notes that although there are secondary sources covering the death of children in Israel, Wikipedia picks up on only the Arab-caused deaths.

Unless you have a topic that specifies a "complete set" (e.g., the number of hurricanes in 2014, the number of state routes in Pennsylvania, the number of professional NFL football games in 2014), Wikipedia will not make an intelligent effort at "complete coverage." So, there is nobody watching to make sure that Wikipedia covers every child's death that has secondary sources. Nor is there anyone at Wikipedia watching for every police-involved death in the United States.

Wikipedia has never reflected reality. It reflects the personal interests of its ever-shrinking pool of nerdy content creators supplemented by whomever is willing to pay its hired PR writers.

[EricBarbour]

I really can't understand why we have this editorial. Obviously, articles can only be in a category if those articles exist. If Sam Lee thinks that every single murder case should have its own article, let him start some articles. Basically, the thrust of this editorial is that there is some "Jewish conspiracy" to distort the truth. This can only discredit this forum.

We knew you'd object. And we have ample additional evidence of this POV abuse. So if any serious objectors show up, we can shut them down. (We don't think you're serious enough, congrats.)

[lilburne]

Wikipedia has never reflected reality. It reflects the personal interests of its ever-shrinking pool of nerdy content creators supplemented by whomever is willing to pay its hired PR writers.

No! No! No! And thrice no more.

Wikipedia highlights the sensational, you will get far more press coverage for "Arab lunatic kills Jewish child" then you will get for "IDF soldiers shells house and kills 6 children playing in street nearby". The first is an isolated event, the second is routine and part of daily existence. The first gets international coverage, the second a passing mention at most.

Lesson for aresholes: Kill kids in batches monthly, rather than individually biannually

[eagle]

Wikipedia has never reflected reality. It reflects the personal interests of its ever-shrinking pool of nerdy content creators supplemented by whomever is willing to pay its hired PR writers.

No! No! No! And thrice no more.

Wikipedia highlights the sensational, you will get far more press coverage for "Arab lunatic kills Jewish child" then you will get for "IDF soldiers shells house and kills 6 children playing in street nearby". The first is an isolated event, the second is routine and part of daily existence. The first gets international coverage, the second a passing mention at most.

Lesson for aresholes: Kill kids in batches monthly, rather than individually biannually

You have a fair point. The problem is that the blog post is directed toward individual biography articles of children who were killed in Israel. Now, the AFDs have a consensus against individual biographies for children who have been killed. So, Wikipedia could then approach objective coverage through aggregate facts and statistics. For example one could write an article or section on the causes of death of children in Israel. Wikipedia has a duty to its readers to objectively and accurately report on the "routine parts of daily existence."

[Hersch]

I really can't understand why we have this editorial. Obviously, articles can only be in a category if those articles exist. If Sam Lee thinks that every single murder case should have its own article, let him start some articles. Basically, the thrust of this editorial is that there is some "Jewish conspiracy" to distort the truth. This can only discredit this forum.

The point is that wikipedia highlights the extraordinary rather than the mundane.

No, it doesn't. Dying Israeli kids are certainly no more extraordinary than dying Palestinian kids, except by being somewhat more rare. Wikipedia acts as a megaphone for the (Western) news and entertainment media, and is thus just another propaganda organ.

[Poetlister]

Is every child murder in the world given its own separate article? Why pick on one very small corner of the world? Just yesterday, there was a shocking case in England of a grandfather allegedly murdering his grandson.

linkhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ncoln.html[/link]

Will that get its own article? If not, can I write a blog piece about how child murders in Lincolnshire aren't getting articles?

[lilburne]

Is every child murder in the world given its own separate article? Why pick on one very small corner of the world? Just yesterday, there was a shocking case in England of a grandfather allegedly murdering his grandson.

linkhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ncoln.html[/link]

Will that get its own article? If not, can I write a blog piece about how child murders in Lincolnshire aren't getting articles?

Yes or no. Pick one.

In a conflict singling out the non-combatants of one side, and ignoring the non-combatants on the other side is bias.

[EricBarbour]

Don't forget Mark Bernstein's blog post from last May.

[EricBarbour]

Posted on Slashdot, please upvote.

http://slashdot.org/submission/4083385/ ... lestinians

[sparkzilla]

This is a structural issue because Wikipedia is being used for a purpose it was not designed for: Wikipedia is not a newspaper. These articles about dead children are news archives and not encyclopedic. An encyclopedia by definition requires fact checking. News archives do not require checking (or at the least the checking can be done external to the archive).

[Poetlister]

In a conflict singling out the non-combatants of one side, and ignoring the non-combatants on the other side is bias.

I'm sure it has been said before, but it's worth repeating: which articles exist or do not exist is a major and under-appreciated form of POV.

[Johnny Au]

That is major systemic bias that is not mentioned in WP:CSB (T-H-L).

[Poetlister]

That is major systemic bias that is not mentioned in WP:CSB (T-H-L).

Very true. Nor is it easy to combat. People will create articles on things that interest them, and people will seek to delete articles that they would prefer not to exist, and it's all crowdsourced and fairly unsupervised.

[Drowninginlimbo]

This reminds me of the subtly biased editing of Shakehandsman. Is it against Wikipedias rules to focus heavily on a fringe topic? Not as far as I know. If there are numerous articles written that focus on the murders of Israelis by Arabs, but few on Israelis murdered by other Israelis, should we blame the people who are writing all of these articles that focus on the murders of Israelis by Arabs, or that there are not more written that focus us the other?

Having a look through some of them, many of them are figures who were somewhat notable before the murders happened, so the fact that Palestinian children are not featured so heavily in a similar list may be because they are not "religious leaders" or "academics". Then I suppose we get into notability and how that ties into notions of "bare life" and the political status of the Palestinian people in comparison to that of the Israeli people. Are Israelis considered to be more "notable"? Can you apply this idea to a different group of people? Americans are certainly over-represented in Category:Deaths from Ebola (T-H-L). Is this even what Wikipedia is for? If anything this just shows how useless the category system is for this kind of research.

[Captain Occam]

I think it's for the best that we have a blog post about this. In terms of the amount of POV-pushing that there's been over a long period of time, the Israel/Palestine conflict is one of the worst topic areas at Wikipedia, but for some reason it's received less attention than other problem areas like climate change, race and intelligence, or eastern Europe. It seems consistent with the goals of Wikipediocracy to shine more light on some of Wikipedia's especially unsavory corners.

[lilburne]

Should I continue?

What would be the point?

The blog post highlights that on wikipedia pages written about murdered Israeli children are almost exclusively about children that were not killed by Israelis, or more particularly about children killed by Palestinians. Why this is remarkable is because in all societies, outside of war, children are predominately killed by parents, other family members, or close acquantences. This happens in Gaza, New York, London, Paris, and other places across the world. There are many articles about this on wikipedia, but apparently if you look at wikipedia there are no such reported cases in the State of Israel.

On wikipedia two and half times as many articles dedicated to the murders committed by women exist then statistics would expect. This is the work of the noted misogynist, racist, and all round piece of shit Shakehandsman (T-C-L).

When one sees statistics like those for murderers in the UK you know that there is manipulation going on. I see the same thing happening here with the articles about murdered Israeli children, and I would call it the same if the only articles were about children killed by Jewish mothers.

[The Adversary]

This reminds me of the subtly biased editing of Shakehandsman. Is it against Wikipedias rules to focus heavily on a fringe topic? Not as far as I know. If there are numerous articles written that focus on the murders of Israelis by Arabs, but few on Israelis murdered by other Israelis, should we blame the people who are writing all of these articles that focus on the murders of Israelis by Arabs, or that there are not more written that focus us the other?

The Gender, Bending Wikipedia -blog shows very much the same process, in another area (British murderers, by gender). Each and every fact by themselves might be correct, but by putting emphasis on one area (=female murderers) and not another (=male murderers) you can create a totally false impression. When 10% of murders in Britain are committed by females, while 25% of articles on Wikipedia about British murderers are about females....then you know something is not right.

We should be able to discuss:
A: Does the articles on Wikipedia reflects the "facts on the ground"?
B: if not, then why?
...without coming into a shouting-match.

Or perhaps not?:

[EricBarbour]

It's been up for almost 2 days and we still haven't been swamped by furious pro-Israel campaigners, which is bizarre. Maybe they're choosing to ignore us to death. Some of the fine gentlemen who have pushed Israel POV on Wikipedia in the past can only be described as "deeply and violently insane". If this blog post had run on WR back in 2007 there would have been headlines in Israeli newspapers.

[neved]

Should I continue?

What would be the point?

The blog post highlights that on wikipedia pages written about murdered Israeli children are almost exclusively about children that were not killed by Israelis, or more particularly about children killed by Palestinians. Why this is remarkable is because in all societies, outside of war, children are predominately killed by parents, other family members, or close acquantences. This happens in Gaza, New York, London, Paris, and other places across the world. There are many articles about this on wikipedia, but apparently if you look at wikipedia there are no such reported cases in the State of Israel.

I know there are a few articles about Palestinian children killed by Israelis.
Do you know, if there's an article or two about Palestinian children killed by their parents?
Could you please name some?

[lilburne]

I know there are a few articles about Palestinian children killed by Israelis.
Do you know, if there's an article or two about Palestinian children killed by their parents?
Could you please name some?

This is not the point.

[SB_Johnny]

I don't see anything surprising about there being more articles from the "Israeli POV", because there's just a lot more people with broadband (and, uh, computers) in Israel than there are in the occupied territories, and the Palestinians don't happen to have been "promised that piece of land by God".

The RfDs mentioned in the post are actually more disheartening, IMO.

[lilburne]

I don't see anything surprising about there being more articles from the "Israeli POV", because there's just a lot more people with broadband (and, uh, computers) in Israel than there are in the occupied territories, and the Palestinians don't happen to have been "promised that piece of land by God".

The RfDs mentioned in the post are actually more disheartening, IMO.

I recall that their are many living outside of Gaza and the West Bank, indeed some live in Israel itself, that have access to computers and know how to type.

[neved]

I know there are a few articles about Palestinian children killed by Israelis.
Do you know, if there's an article or two about Palestinian children killed by their parents?
Could you please name some?

This is not the point.

Aga, now I understand:

There's a point if one writes a blog named "Wikipedia: All murdered Israeli children are murdered by… Arabs"

but there's no point, if one writes a blog named: "Wikipedia: All murdered Palestinian children are murdered by… Israelis".

I have no more questions. Proceed.

[Hersch]

I don't see anything surprising about there being more articles from the "Israeli POV", because there's just a lot more people with broadband (and, uh, computers) in Israel than there are in the occupied territories, and the Palestinians don't happen to have been "promised that piece of land by God".

The RfDs mentioned in the post are actually more disheartening, IMO.

I recall that their are many living outside of Gaza and the West Bank, indeed some live in Israel itself, that have access to computers and know how to type.

I see no reason to assume that the Wikipedia POV-pushers who seek to demonize Palestinians and gloss over the rather egregious crimes of the Netanyahu/Likudnik faction, are Israelis. I pay attention to Israeli politics, and there have been spirited mass protests there against the behavior of the Netanyahu regime, something I have yet to see in the US or UK.

[Drowninginlimbo]

The Gender, Bending Wikipedia -blog shows very much the same process, in another area (British murderers, by gender). Each and every fact by themselves might be correct, but by putting emphasis on one area (=female murderers) and not another (=male murderers) you can create a totally false impression. When 10% of murders in Britain are committed by females, while 25% of articles on Wikipedia about British murderers are about females....then you know something is not right.

We should be able to discuss:
A: Does the articles on Wikipedia reflects the "facts on the ground"?
B: if not, then why?
...without coming into a shouting-match.

I agree, it is difficult, although not impossible, to write direct propaganda articles with Wikipedias sourcing policy. However, by writing numerous, lengthy articles on topics of fringe interest, it naturally makes them appear more prevalent than they are.

I would say that the only thing that said shouting matches solve is polarising the userbase and making deletion agreements impossible. I didn't realise this when I was editing, but the best solution is to just write numerous articles that show the opposite.

Although it would take a lot of time, I would say that is the prime solution.

I pay attention to Israeli politics, and there have been spirited mass protests there against the behavior of the Netanyahu regime, something I have yet to see in the US or UK.

What about the protests in London and Manchester this year? Or the academic boycott?

[Poetlister]

I don't see anything surprising about there being more articles from the "Israeli POV", because there's just a lot more people with broadband (and, uh, computers) in Israel than there are in the occupied territories, and the Palestinians don't happen to have been "promised that piece of land by God".

The RfDs mentioned in the post are actually more disheartening, IMO.

There is a curious assumption here that only people living in that very small part of the world would write articles on this. The overwhelming majority of edits in this area come from all over the place, especially America.

[Poetlister]

I pay attention to Israeli politics, and there have been spirited mass protests there against the behavior of the Netanyahu regime, something I have yet to see in the US or UK.

It depends on what you call "protests against the behavior of the Netanyahu regime". There have been protests in the UK, for example about an Israeli firm called SodaStream, though really they aren't just about Netanyahu. Notoriously, these led to the closure of the SodaStream plant that employed hundreds of Arabs at good wages. I'm not clear why these "pro-Palestinian" protesters wanted to put Arabs out of work.

linkhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -says.html[/link] And, for those who never believe what the Daily Mail says, linkhttp://www.businessinsider.com/afp-soda ... 14-10?IR=T[/link]

[Cla68]

The big picture here is that, although WP has a policy on neutral editing, WP's administration, since its inception, has been thoroughly incompetent at enforcing it. Many, many editors on all sides of the Israel/Palestine Wikipedia conflict make it clear that they are at WP to support one particular POV Does WP's admins ever invoke the "NPOV" policy when banning any of them? Not that I know of. They usually wait for them to screw up in some other way, such as revert warring or sockpuppeting. That's why so many of them get away with it for so long.

[Hersch]

Mod note: I have moved the off-topic political debates to a new thread.

[lilburne]

I'll give a graphic illustration as to how biased this issue is Faris Odeh (T-H-L) was 14 years old when he was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip while throwing stones. Wikipedia has a photo of him a few days earlier:



The article about his death has this:

Ten days later, on 8 November, Odeh was again throwing stones at Karni when he was shot in the neck by Israeli troops. The boy and the image subsequently assumed iconic status within the Palestinian territories as a symbol of opposition to the area's occupation by Israel.
...
To French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, the Palestinian response to Odeh's death forms part of a popular political religion revolving around the figure of the shahid, or martyr. He views this as a consequence of the "Islamization" of the Palestinian cause, manifested in Palestinian support for a "culture of death."[12] Odeh's mother told reporters that he used to watch Felesteen-Al-Yawm, the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine television channel, where the idea of becoming a martyr is highly regarded. "He wanted to join them," she said, "and used to wear their headband."

Who is Pierre-André Taguieff (T-H-L)?

Taguieff is the author of a number of books and papers on racism and antisemitism, including The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles (2001) and Rising from the Muck: The New Antisemitism in Europe (2004). He is known in particular for his studies on the French National Front and populism.

It is quite clear as top what we are supposed to think about Faris Odeah's death and what its cause was.

Contrast with this image:



and the Tank Man (T-H-L) article.

In April 1998, Time included the "Unknown Rebel" in a feature titled Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.
...
There are several conflicting stories about what happened to him after the demonstration. In a speech to the President's Club in 1999, Bruce Herschensohn, former deputy special assistant to President Richard Nixon, reported that he was executed 14 days later; other sources say he was executed by firing squad a few months after the Tiananmen Square protests.
...
Internationally, the image of the lone man in front of the tank has come to symbolize the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989[10][15] and is widely considered one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
...
The scene was also recorded by crews from the BBC and CNN and transmitted across the world. One witness reported seeing Chinese tanks crushing vehicles and people early on June 4, the day before the "tank man" incident.

Consider that one image is of a 14 year old boy, the other of a 19/20 year old student. Both confronting tanks, but the treatment of each is completely different. Is it because that in one there is a stone and in the other two shopping bags, or is it the politics?