Talk:Euromaidan/Archive 12015/January

New York Times investigation

This article: "Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted" contains significant information about the final hours. It seems that the security forces, rather than submitting to being the fall guys, fled. User:Fred Bauder Talk 11:37, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

"they were alarmed by language in the truce deal that called for an investigation of the killing of protesters. They feared that a desperate Mr. Yanukovych was ready to abandon the very people who had protected him, particularly those in the lower ranks who had borne the brunt of the street battles." User:Fred Bauder Talk 11:38, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

"the sudden departure of security forces on Friday afternoon had taken the president and his entourage entirely by surprise." User:Fred Bauder Talk 11:45, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Too Much Advocacy and Too Little Neutral Point of View

The Euromaidan article is extremely problematic. It fails to conform to the three basic article policies: (1) no original research, (2) neutral point of view, and (3) verifiability.

The article covers a highly politicized issue on which there are several sides of the story, and none of the sides appear to comport well with verifiable facts.

Recently I deleted two paragraphs that contained a narrative that advocates just one of the several non-factual versions of this issue. The text in question was completely unsupported by references.

I also made two minor editorial corrections where I could see that point of view could be easily removed by simple word changes.

For instance, the original text said "Many protesters joined because of the violent dispersal of protesters..." Calling the police action violent is pejorative and reflects one side of the story. Another side would say that the police were responding to a provocation and were seeking to restore law and order.

I thought that a POV-neutral way of describing the incident would be to use the term "forceful dispersal" instead of violent dispersal.

Similarly, a sentence beginning with "Escalating violence from government forces..." seemed to reflect the same point of view that is in contention. For the sake of neutrality, I changed that to "Escalating use of physical control by government forces..." In both cases, my edits maintained the undisputed description of the events, but without the pejorative words used originally.

And, finally, in a later section the narrative discusses an action of the parliament. It said that the body "allegedly impeached the president." That suggests that there has been no authoritative determination made about whether the president was really impeached or not. But this is an instance where there is irrefutable evidence that the president was not impeached. I modified the text accordingly, and provided references to reliable sources.

After having done all that, Volunteer Marek, citing "POV pushing, weasel-ing and removal of relevant text," undid all of my editorial corrections.

In my opinion this article in its present state is an affront to the facts of the matter. It is a narrative of advocacy.

The article needs to be more factual and less partisan.

One of the challenges in achieving that is the unfortunate amount of media bias that has manifested in covering the topic. There are vast differences in media storylines depending upon which country's media is doing the reporting.

This mainstream bias means that simply citing media reports will not establish something as factual. The media reports themselves would have to be fact checked before they could be relied upon.

But if there is some reasonable way to move toward fixing the present article's problems, I'd be glad to help in a modest way. (Although, I must say that I have no appetite for going back and forth with individuals like Volunteer Marek who apparently wish to preserve a distorted description of the issue.)

But are there others who might be motivated to join in to remove POV rhetoric from this article?

If not, perhaps Wikipedia readers would be better served if this article were deleted entirely.

Comments please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tikva2009 (talk • contribs) 18:13, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

At 03:41, 23 January 2015‎ Jbhunley deleted my proposed deletion saying "No, Just no. This is an improper use of PROD," without addressing the policy violations that I asserted. Tikva2009 (talk) 04:25, 23 January 2015 (UTC)tikva2009

My apologies for not immediately posting a note on your talk page as I should have done. I corrected that a few minutes ago. You tried to use a deletion process for articles no one will object to the deletion of. See WP:PROD. The proper process for an actively edited article would be via WP:AFD although considering the quality of the article, and the continued improvement such a proposal would be considered disruptive and would likely lead to sanctions. Before you placed that template you had already been notified that this article was subject to discretionary sanctions because of the controversy surrounding the topic. There was no need for me to address your policy concerns, "mainstream bias" is not a policy concern it is the point-of-view we edit from at Wikipedia.

My assumption, when I saw your PROD was that you are a new editor simply being WP:BOLD. I saw a Welcome template on your talk page, it has links to Wikipedia editing policies. I would encourage you to read and familiarize yourself with the basic policies on sources and verifiability at a minimum before editing in such a highly charged area. If you approach the issues you find here in a collaborative manner and within Wikipedia's policies and guidelines your editing time here will be much more rewarding and the encyclopedia will benefit from your perspective. If you have a specific policy concern you can point to with a diff please feel free to contact me on my talk page.JBH (talk) 05:22, 23 January 2015 (UTC)