Eperotao

THe article is long because it is controversial. WIkipedia allows anyone to edit an article, and when an article covers a controversial topic, what happens is someone decides to insert some point of view, and opposing editors may attempt to remove it. If that fails, then the alternative is for opposing editors to add the opposing point of view to counter whatever was added by the first editor.

wikipedia really has no concrete or objective way to say an article is good or bad, better or worse, by adding any piece of text, so you get huge debates on talk pages, and edit wars on the articles. the only hard and fast rule about editing content is the 3RR rule which means you can only revert something in an article 3 times in any 24 hour period. If you violate that, you'll get blocked for a period of time (24 hours).

Other than that, it's hard to find objective wikipedia policies that can be applied to make content decisions. people pretty much put in whatever they think is appropriate or important or propaganda, and other editors agree or dispute. On non-controversial topics, it isn't a problem. On controversial articles, the lack of content-related policies can be glaring. The main thing you'll have to learn is NPOV policy. Read the policy page on it. wait a day, and read it again. then try some edits. If you find something that violates NPOV policy fix it. If someone reverts it, point out the specific part of NPOV policy you think it violates.

If the editor continues to revert, you've got to convince them to agree with you, or at least convince enough other editors to agree with you that you can maintain your version of the article. If the editor repeatedly inserts edits that violate NPOV, you may need to start dispute resolution to fix it. request an uninvolved admin to lock the page if a revert war occurs. file an "Article RFC" to try to draw attantion to teh article from outside editors to get some new opinoins on the problem. continued and rampant policy violations from one editor may require you to file a "user RFC" to correct. You'll want something like at least a dozen clear policy violations before you file a user RFC. and you'll need to show attempts by two editors trying to resolve the problem withthe editor. So try to point out what you think is wrong and what you think it should be changed to and try to work something out. A user RFC doesn't do anythign but generate comments, but outside editors will generally make comments that they think it clear that the editor did or did not violate policy. If enough editors come along and make the same comment, then it might get the editor's attention and they may stop what they're doing.

If it isn't about an editor violating policy, but just a recurring content dispute, you can request mediation. It may take a long time to get a mediator, and it isnt' guaranteed to do anything, and a bad mediator can be worse than no mediator, but its an option. There aren't a lot of mediators, so they may all be too busy to help.

That's about all you can do. Mostly, get familiar with NPOV policy, learn it, learn what it means, and try to get a controversial article to follow NPOV.

Good luck.FuelWagon 04:14, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

/Sandbox

{{helpme}} I am having a hard time getting an image to come out the right size in the article. I want to delete previous efforts to upload the image, both the image and the new pages I created. I don't see how to undo my own crummy work. Eperotao (talk) 15:34, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi Eperotao. If you want to upload another version of the same image, you don't need to delete the old one - just go to the file description page and click on "upload a new version of this file". Deleting content can only be done by administrators, but if you're the only author of the page you can request deletion by putting a {{db-author}} tag at the top. This only works if nobody else has contributed to the article, though. For specifying the size of an image, you may want to see Wikipedia:Picture tutorial. Hope this helps – if you have further questions don't hesitate to ask me on my talk page. Regards, Jafeluv (talk) 15:16, 10 September 2009 (UTC)