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Issue #1: Geopolitical, ethnic, and religious conflicts noticeboard--keep active or mark historical?

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Geopolitical, ethnic, and religious conflicts are some of the most contentious areas in the world, and so certainly on Wikipedia. Is the noticeboard set up for addressing those issues effectively serving its purpose? Has it been replaced by Arbitration Enforcement sanctions? Is it well manned by experienced editors? Have you ever used it? Last, if it were to be closed, what would you think about redirecting its traffic to the Dispute resolution noticeboard? Please share your thoughts...

  • Just to note, this is not a discussion to close (or redirect, whatever), but more of a poll to determine how the community feels before submitting the proposal. ~~Ebe123~~ → report 19:45, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • There have been some very good editors volunteering there. Someone should go through the archives and contact the regulars and ex-regulars, to find out if they will volunteer at DRN or perhaps NPOVN. I also think, in favour of that noticeboard, that sometimes it is good for an SPA who is going gung-ho to promote a nationalistic POV to realise that their own neck of the woods is not the only one of interest in Wikipedia. Say if someone is obsessed with Gibraltar, and they see that there are people who are coping with Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia and 101 other places, they know we are serious about NPOV. Anyone who has ever intervened to try and sort out a nationalism/ethnicity/religion dispute has experienced the knee-jerk labelling of the uninvolved ("Ha! You are obviously a Sikh yourself!! We know your sort!", and the like, usually from an editor who has been on the encyclopedia for about two days). The existence of the board was sometimes able to defuse that. I see the argument for reduction of noticeboards, but hope that the particular role of this particular board can be continued elsewhere. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:52, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I feel we should keep it active. The board sees little activity now precisely because few do know it exists. When more will know it exists, it ought to liven up more. So we should be focused on doing more to let editors know it's there, instead of mothballing something that could have utility. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 19:56, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • If I had known it existed I certainly would have used it. Most of the most annoying disputes I'm in are related to those topics.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 20:15, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • This should be closed. At the moment it seems to be a mixture of discussions that would work just fine on DRN, and 'watch this space' notices which would work just as well on AN. If there's another way to deal with these problems, then perhaps that could be looked into, but this noticeboard be closed either way. CMD (talk) 20:39, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Honestly, this could be a WikiProject, if there isn't one for this already. Some place to get uninvolved opinions in the way too numerous nationalistic/ethnic type conflicts that spill over to Wikipedia. (I don't know how well WP:IPCOLL has worked in practice because I don't remember ever posting there myself, but I know it exists.) Obviously, there are more generalist venues, 3O, DRN, RfCs, etc. The sad reality of Wikipedia is that in most disputes of this type the number of highly partisan editors often surpasses the number of those who aren't highly opinionated on the matter and are willing to help improve the topic area. Tijfo098 (talk) 20:45, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't really believe in voting, but this comment is especially meant to be construed as a comment and not a vote. Having a noticeboard for ethnic conflicts seems really organized and sensible. It's a well-defined category of conflicts that should be pulled out from the other conflicts. Even if the success rate on this board is low, it has a way of keeping things organized and creating a centralized location for the usual suspects to keep showing up. Even if a lot of these end up going to arbitration, it's good to have it as a clear precursor to that. Is there something that we'd gain by merging it with the DRN And handling it with our other disputes? Shooterwalker (talk) 21:54, 4 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Close it Well intended but it seems to only increase conflicts. I definitely agree we should close it. Mugginsx (talk) 22:21, 4 September 2012 (UTC) (moved from Ocaasi's talk page)[reply]
  • Having been responsible in part for the current naming, the intent was (my perspective) to build a community of interest around representing history and current events where they are greatly colored by ongoing geopolitical, ethnic, and/or religious conflict. This forms a very specific and generally intractable class of historical and political dispute which deserves special, and separate attention. Unfortunately, at the moment, the noticeboard is just another place to complain which has not received the kind of promotion required in order to build the community of interest I mention and to deliver tangible value to the WP community. One solution might be to close this as a discrete dispute resolution mechanism and, instead, to add geopolitical/ethnic/religious dispute (there are commonalities) as a category, if you will, to pertinent disputes which are reported and for which assistance is requested. In that light, answering whether or not to eliminate the noticeboard doesn't advance answering the need itself. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 03:37, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • How do you think that this "categorisation" could be done? A template at the top of the thread to clearly mark it, perhaps? ~~ Lothar von Richthofen (talk) 12:22, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • Hmm. At present, there are a handful of cases on DRN, but none of them involve geopolitical, ethnic and religious conflicts. At the same time, there are a handful of threads on GEARC, which do discuss these conflicts. So there is really no overlap, and both boards are really getting a fairly high amount of use and views. All it would take is putting a mention on DRN with the instructions, that a page exists (or even call it a subpage) to focus on these specific types of conflict, which can be a preliminary stage of resolution / request for comment, in these cases. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 12:37, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm conflicted on this one: on the one hand, I do think the number of noticeboards should be reduced. On the other hand, the Geopolitical/religious noticeboard was created specifically to handle long-running disputes that span several years. The board provides important continuity, so the regulars can point back several years and say "remember when we decided blah blah ...". If the board were eliminated and the job shifted to DRN, there could be a new set of participants every time any issue arises. My recommendation would be to suspend this discussion, and instead focus on other noticeboards that would more easily merge into DRN, such as ORN, RSN, or POVN. --Noleander (talk) 17:05, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • If disputes are running on for several years noticeboards aren't really the place to deal with them, if the dispute isn't resolved after 3 months or so it is time to try the next level in the dispute resolution list - and certainly after several years cases should be before Arbcom.
    • And actually if a dispute is bubbling along under the surface some new input is probably helpful. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:20, 5 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • I think you are missing the crux of long-running, it's not about editors A versus editors B in conflict, eventually escalating to Arbcom for "resolution"; there is no "resolution", for example:
        • As long as Russian insists the Soviet Union did not occupy the Baltic states, you have a government-sanctioned version of history which is in conflict with western historical accounts
        • As long as Israel occupies the West Bank (I'm not here to debate the merits, only acknowledge the state of affairs), there will be an Israeli-Palestinian conflict over everything from current events to whose ancient name for a region takes precedence
        • As long as genocides conducted against peoples X by peoples Y are characterized as resettlement, that deaths on forced marches of civilians were health issues, et al., all those conflicts will surface here, e.g., the Russian genocide against the Circassians
        • As long as people believe that creationism is equal to science or supercedes science on the basis of "faith", those conflicts will surface here
          • As a corrolary, put in every other conflict originated out of religious beliefs where a single ethnic people slaughtered each other based on faith (Balkans, Northern Ireland)--really, should the Protestant Irish still be celebrating their victory of the Catholic Irish with parades more than 300 years later?
          • As a corrolary, put in every conflict over territory which involves conflicting claims by more than one identified ethnic or culturally homogenous group
        • It's precisely these long standing conflicts which the noticeboard was intended to serve, rather than every individual content conflict related to the above going through its own dispute resolution, mediation, etc. It's not about resolution or mediation, it is about how to deal with history serving politics, religion, and ethnic identity. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 14:28, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
          • While there are a number of real world disputes we can minimise conflicts on wikipedia by making sure articles follow our policies. It is perfectly possible to write an FA standard article in an area where the sources are contradictory depending on who has written them, an obvious example would be Tibet during the Ming dynasty.
          • I also think you massively underestimate our ability to solve disputes, China now has a sensible name, and that is no longer disputed to give a prominent example. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 10:07, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • oppose I can see three possible reasons to close it:
  • It's not needed.
  • It's not functioning.
  • It's handled better elsewhere.
Now the first of these is obviously not the case. Nationalist edit warring certainly hasn't vanished! If we have such as an ongoing problem (and we do), then it's likely that a specialist board would be better solution.
Is it functioning? This is the only one with any real evidence to support it. It's certainly very quiet there. But why is that? I would contend that a lack of traffic for an ongoing problem is a need to fix something, not to abandon it. Is the board well known? (I've encountered nationalist issues, yet I've never used it) Is traffic ending up in the "obvious" locations of DRN or ANI instead?
Are its issues simply being handled elsewhere? I suspect that they are, but not well. Personally I avoid nationalist issues. I don't understand them, I don't want to understand them. I can't possibly begin to judge an editor's behaviour based on the truth of a statement grounded in a 300 year old massacre. However there are plenty of ANI's drama-lovers who would see no barrier here and would happily jump right in. Resolution of these complex issues cannot be achieved by broad policy and GF alone, sometimes it needs past experience and knowledge of the Elbonian vowel-shift crisis and the Enforced Holiday Excursion of the Lesser Elbonians (aka The Weeping So Tearful It Rendered Our Motherland To Mud ) to know what is a reasonable claim and what's hyperbole. I salute anyone doing good work in this field, because I recognise that it's hard and I certainly couldn't do it.
Nationalist issues need to be handled by experienced, level-headed editors and admins with a good grounding of WP and also some experience of how we handle such divisive issues and how we look on some of the more biased ones in particular. Just what is Danzig called locally? How long have we really been at war with Eastasia? We need editors who are already familiar with such things, not the usual fruitless ANI pile-on.
We shouldn't close this board, we should encourage it. Maybe by greater prominence, by pro-active identification of relevant conflicts on articles, talk pages and user pages, and bby re-directing such conflict towards it. Certainly by pushing content from generalist dispute boards to this specialist one. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:52, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You say that the ANI drama lovers would jump right in and yet you say you don't want those people. That isn't exactly consistent.
With regards to the ideals of the noticeboard I think the fundamental problem is that you are trying to stuff mediation into a noticeboard. What you actually want is for the "mediator" or "mediators" to sit down and do some research into the issue - mediation has the time to do that without becoming bogged down with ongoing discussions, noticeboards for them to function need to process stuff quickly. Additionally you don't want anyone to waste time doing research when an editor is simply behaving inappropriately. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:20, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
@Andy, you have hit the nail (well, at least one of them) on the head. It's difficult to find editors deeply knowledgeable in a conflict who don't have a personal stake. Personally, I qualify on Lithuanian-Polish conflicts because I have the historical knowledge and, from my perspective, the 20th century was a tragic shambles, not that either the Lithuanians or Poles are more "right" about events. To your pile-on, it's editors who know nothing who conflate ignorance with impartiality that then pour gasoline on the flames. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 14:38, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Except when outside people come in and try and understand the dispute, they are then much more likely not to hold a POV over it. But to do that you have to do background research which makes it a level 3 technical support issue, and therefore not one that is suitable for noticeboard based solutions. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 10:07, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think it could be redirected to DRN. My very best wishes (talk) 16:39, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that it should be closed or redirected to DRN. It's largely inactive, and is redundant noticeboard creep that only serves as another place to forum shop.--SGCM (talk) 07:30, 8 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with SGCM on this one. What Wikipedia needs above all right now is simplification of certain processes, this included. This is a good way of working toward that. Kansan (talk) 15:40, 10 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep active; I think it's helpful to have a board which focusses on a one of our most common types of content dispute, without getting hung up on DR procedures &c. I only came across this proposal belatedly, by chance, because the proposal is not actually visible in day-to-day use of the board; I imagine that other users of the board might have wanted to cast their !vote too had they known about it. bobrayner (talk) 11:47, 9 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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