User:Geo Swan/working/xyzzy

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• • Zoe, a year ago you stated articles about Guantanamo were:
    • ...but an article about each one of these non-notable people is only America-bashing.
    • ...all are nonnotable.
    • ...POV anti-Americanism
  • I got the impression, from your comments, that you were asserting that ANY article about ANY Guantanamo detainee was necessarily POV, necessarily "America-bashing". I replied that I didn't believe that any topic was, in and of itself, POV. I stated the opinion that articles could be written from a NPOV, on any topic, with sufficient effort. I asked you to clarify for me whether you were really arguing that the topic was, in and of itself POV. You didn't reply to my question then. Perhaps I could repeat my request for you to reply now?
  • I've done considerable work on the topic of Guantanamo. I have done my best to write from a NPOV. I don't think anyone succeeds at this 100% of the time. But I think I have done a pretty good job. I have had a few comments that one or another of my contributions on this general topic lapsed from NPOV. When those comments do seem to hilight lapses I am happy to rewrite those sections, because NPOV is my goal. Generally though, I have found those who express a concern about a biased POV don't manage to be specific about what they find biased.
  • Those half dozen Guantanamo articles that you and others nominated for deletion a year ago were my first experience with the {afd} procedure. Frankly, it was a very unpleasant introduction. As administrators I would have expected you and Jossi to be more compliant with WP:BITE. You wouldn't reply to my civil questions. Jossi wouldn't explain what "nn" was.
  • Now that I am more familiar with the {afd} procedure I would urge you and Jossi to show greater collegiality and respect for the efforts of those unfamiliar with the {afd} procedure.
  • Now that I am more familiar with the {afd} procedure I question this reliance on notability. WP:BIO is not a policy. It references three policies WP:VER, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV, but it is not a policy itself. Am I wrong to think that there is nothing wrong with my contributions, so long as they comply with the wikipedia's real policies? I find notability to be a far too subjective criteria to be meaningful. I strongly suspect if American citizens were being held, by a foreign power, without charge, under the conditions the Guantanamo detainees are being held, there wouldn't be anyone suggesting articles about them were "nn". It is recognized that a disproportionate fraction of the wikipedia's contributors are Americans, and that this exerts an unconscious systematic bias on the wikipedia. Wikipedia contributors are encouraged to take this unconscious systematic bias into consideration.
  • There was this one guy, who consistently, for several months, reverted, or tagged, or nominated for {afd} something I had worked on almost every day. It was extremely unpleasant. He was extremely inconsistent. He complained that the articles I started on detainees didn't state the charges against them. And then when I started to add the allegations against them, from their Combatant Status Review Tribunals, he complained about my inclusion of those allegations.

1. I have spent much of my second year of contributing to the wikipedia contributing to articles related to the US war on terror. It is a controversial set of topics. At first I got a lot of challenges from other contributors who felt my contributions were written from a biased point of view. Occasionally, they were correct, and I had lapsed from my intention to fully comply with WP:NPOV, but, most of the time I found that there was something I had written that had triggered that feeling,