For the past few months, I have been visiting with interest the various political battlegrounds of Wikipedia, even dipping in to a firefight for a little dustup of my own now and then. I have had a lot of thoughts, nothing very organized yet, but I felt the time had come to write some stuff down, before senility expunges it from my addling brain. There will be a lot of rambling here, so if anyone ever reads it, be forewarned.
I think the most revealing of the political battles is the article on Muhammad al-Durrah. The process of editing that article is held as a model, for better or for worse, of managing political disputes on Wikipedia. Poor Elonka took the bull by the horns, and got pretty badly mauled in the process. Whether she will emerge in the end as the savior of Wikipedia or its Ossama bin Laden has yet to be decided. But the question I ask is, is the article better or more neutral, for it?
I think that Muhammad al-Durrah is a fine article: it is clearly written, well-organized, comprehensive, copiously documented. It does not suffer from long apologetics and polemics, as do some other controversial articles. Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is so convoluted with arguments and counterarguments that it is almost impossible to read - you need a Rashi commentary to understand it. Muhammad al-Durrah does not suffer that way - he has gotten an article that puts forth the facts as clearly and as straightforwardly as can be.
Is the article neutral? Well, when I finished the article I came away with the clear opinion that the al-Durrah story was largely a fabrication; that in all probability, if he was shot, it was by the Palestinians, not by the Israelis; and that there is some likelihood that he was not shot at all, but that the whole episode was staged.
But I also felt that the whole article could have been rewritten, using exactly the same facts and exactly the same references, leaving the exact opposite impression: that allegations that the episode was staged were an insidious propaganda effort by the pro-Israelis.