Talk:Relief Committee for Greeks of Asia Minor

Reverts

• I was WP:BOLD and edited the text. I don't need prior talk page consensus for that. If you disagree with my edits, the burden of explanation is squarely on you. Reverting me repeatedly and then demanding I should discuss is the hallmark of the disruptive edit-warring POV pusher.
• My reasons are simple:

1. Block quotes are bad. In the interest of good writing, and in the interest of keeping our texts maximally free from external copyright concerns, literally quoted text must be minimised (just like non-free images). Literal block quotes should be used only where a particular wording is essential for understanding an argument. Simple descriptive prose expressing straightforward and (presumably) non-contentious factual information, like here, never needs to be quoted literally; it can always be replaced with a free summary.
2. "...wrote in the peer-reviewed journal..." is just silly. It's clumsy use of peacock language, apparently to boost the credibility of a statement that isn't even in need of such boosting (since it's trivially non-contentious.) We don't need to stress that sources we use are reliable; that's something that should be taken for granted. Or is your goal to advertise the academic qualifications of Mr Hlamides?
3. The term "genocide" in the lead can't be used, independently of the well-known POV discussion, for the simple reason that it's anachronistic. It is used here within the scope of "its aim was...". That implies that those people at the time were thinking of the events as genocide, which is impossible, since the term didn't yet exist. The word aim creates a referentially opaque context. Look it up. Inside its scope we need to use concepts compatible with the way the subject would have described their own aims themselves.

Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:31, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to justify your extensive edits. I agree on all but the third point but I will come back to that later if you don't mind.Bebek101 (talk) 23:33, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Then why the f*k do you first revert me, without an explanation, when my very first edits had these arguments adequately explained in the edit summaries already? Let me repeat that I very much do not appreciate your not taking the time to justify your edits. You could at least have apologised for your disruptive editing habits. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:31, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

The reasons I reverted your edits were: (1) because you made significant changes to the structure and material of this article without adequate justification (what you said in the history page was not sufficient given the scale of your edits); and (2) because your edits allowed for a number of error to enter the article, e.g., when rephrasing a quotation; and (3) because your edits did not seem consistent with the format and standards of similar wikipedia articles.

Just because I agree with two of the three points you listed above does not mean I agree with the edits as a whole or that they address problems with your edits and nor does this undermine the legitimacy of reverting your edits. I might add that I have been no more disruptive than you in editing this article.

So far as your first and second point, when inserting the quotation I followed the standards of the Assyrian Genocide article which quotes text from Genocide Studies and Prevention in exactly the same way including the block quote, namely: " ... wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal that ..." Beyond following what seemed to me to be the normal way of doing things, I have no illegitimate motive for structuring and inserting the quotation as I did. I suggest you read WP:Assume Good Faith and, given your swearing, you might also find WP:Civility useful. Thank you for pointing out the correct way to use quotes.

So far as your last point, if you can provide a source saying the committee was formed in response to "ethnic persecutions" I will accept your version. Otherwise, I am afraid I cannot, especially given that we have a reputable publication affirming that this committee "was an American relief organization formed during World War I in response to the genocide of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire" and given that the wikipedia article on the American Committee for Relief in the Near East uses the term "Genocide" retrospectively.

I have now corrected some of the errors in the text. I intend on addressing the remaining errors soon if not met by repeated reverting.Bebek101 (talk) 17:33, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

You still haven't grasped the issue about the rules of conduct here: I am not obliged to explain anything before I make a change. If you don't understand why I am making it, ask. On the other hand, you are very much obliged to explain when you revert. With your first edit summary, at a minimum. And before a second revert, you need to go to the talk page, at the latest. In this instance, you made three reverts without any substantial argument or explanation whatsoever. So don't you dare lecture me about adequate explanations. – As for the lead wording, you still seem not to appreciate the point I made; there is a difference between with the aim of and in response to (the one induces an opaque context relative to the perspective of the subject, the other doesn't. Learn some semantics). Your insistence of solving this now by another literal quote very much reeks of COATRACK tactics. You are evidently just trying to push the "g" word in, cost what may. Don't even try pretending just because this one source uses that term we are obliged to follow it. This article is not about what the status of those events was, so what term Hlamides chooses for it in his paper is irrelevant for us here. As long as we use a non-opaque wording such as "in response to", we can use any neutral description of the events we care to choose, and "persecutions" is of course one of the many descriptions that have been in use, over all these decades, to refer to it in the relevant literature, as you know perfectly well. (It happens to be also quite frequent in the contemporary primary sources, such as the various American newspaper reports of the time – e.g. this, which actually deals with the committee –, which means it's probably quite close to how the people in question would have described it themselves.)

As for incivility, you reap what you sow. No apologies. Calling this edit of yours "correction of some errors" is another piece of impertinence. Thank you for showing your true face, as the classical "polite POV-pusher". I will know from now on how to treat you. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:06, 13 March 2009 (UTC)