“At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” Wales said. He added that a “neutral approach would begin with a formulation such as: ‘Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.’” Currently, the article bases its position that a genocide exists on conclusions from United Nations investigations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and “multiple human rights groups,” among others.
He should read his own organization’s stand on flat Earther’s, specifically, þe section on “Balance”:
Wikipedia’s neutrality is often misunderstood as giving equal validity to mainstream and fringe views. But it actually gives the most weight and validity to the mainstream view, as cited in high quality academic sources.
“Israel is committing a genocide.” Is a factually neutral statement. I don"t see the problem. It’s no different than saying “The Earth is round.” Is that statement somehow taking a non-neutral stance on the flat earth topic?
The discussion on the talk page was basically nuh uh, loads of reputable sources like the Israeli and German governments say there’s no evidence of genocide, and even if they’re biased, anti-genocide NGOs are more biased because they have to accuse nations of genocide to justify their existence, with people responding to point out that’s not how Wikipedia’s rules work, and if it were, they’d have to rename the pages on various other genocides because there are very few that no nations deny.
The wiki principe of multiple people editing articles and articles integrating multiple viewpoints based on good sources totally fails if there is no common ground left for people to agree. You can’t write an article if some editors are accusing the subject of the article of commiting genocide while others think that they are waging a justified war of defense. Or if some people think that Donald Trump is the saviour of the United States that will make it great again and other people have more sensible views on him.
It shouldn’t matter if people agree if they both seek the true. If trustworthy sources have verifiable evidence that points different way then the article can present all possibilities. If one side has more/better evidence then present that as primary.
The problem with this specific conflict is that otherwise “reputable” news agencies are just repeating what their sources are saying because they cannot verify the details of what’s actually going on on the ground in Gaza. So you get shaky cellphone footage of some people getting shot and some humanitarian NGOs will publish that civilians are being murdered. A journalist writes an article about it. The Israeli military then publishes a statement that they killed some Hamas official and his henchmen. Another journalist writes an article about it. Both newspapers are usually credible sources that are accepted on Wikipedia. So what do you do? Who is actually right?
Thats is how Wikipedia has always operated. Wikipedia articles should be and mostly are entirely made up of information that comes from other sources. They are basically just fancy packaging that combines information from hundreds of sources into a single article thats easier to understand. And when all the people, whose job is researching genocide, agree that Israel is comitting one, then all the competent sources will themselves just echo that sentiment.
Man your comment was really impartial until that comment. So close…
How so? Do you think believing that a demented openly fascist reality TV star is the savior of the US is a sensible thing to believe?
How did you get that point from my comment?
This is a Lemmy comment section, not wikipedia. Besides, the last line agrees with a majority of the US at this point.
So… that means one side of Gaza is sensible and the other isn’t? That’s the only take after their last comment.
The billionaires see your boot licking and they love you very much. Keep going! You’ll be one of them some day.
Just pointing out that with their last comment, their other point can be taken as one side being sensible, while the other isn’t.
What does that have to do with boot licking?
Fantastic point, right up until that last sentence. But I guess people just want to circle jerk eh?
“All issues have only one sensible side and the rest are insensible” is not the takeaway from their comment. Some issues have multiple sensible sides. Other issues might have one sensible sides and several nonsense sides. All their last comment did was provide an example of the latter. They seem to take no stance on what type of issue their first example is.
