Talk:John Kerry VVAW controversy

Contents

1 Reverting anon edits 2 Preliminary arbitration ruling 3 move article? 4 material that will date quickly

Reverting anon edits

Someone has edited this page anonymously, making multiple edits within a space of a few minutes to add yet another link to a URL hostile to Kerry. I note in passing that we have seen this kind of behavior before.

Wikipedia is not a collection of links. There are plenty of websites that are being used to express someone's opinion about John Kerry, be it pro or con. We are not going to try to link to all of them. We don't even need to link to a representative sampling. We already have links to, for example, the blatantly POV anti-Kerry article in the Sun. The "Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry" site and the SBVT site that I've de-linked don't qualify for linkage. JamesMLane 09:34, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thank you James.. I was just about to do that. Irregardless, those links shouldn't be there- I'll keep a watch as well. Lyellin 09:41, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Preliminary arbitration ruling

• Effective 24 August 2004:

User:Rex071404 is banned from editing the below listed pages while his arbitration case is ongoing:

• John Kerry
• John Kerry presidential campaign, 2004 and
• John Kerry VVAW controversy

See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Rex071404.

--mav 05:44, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

move article?

This article should be at John Kerry in VVAW, and be a historical and fact-based account of John Kerry's role in the VVAW, rather than a reporting of the current controversies surrounding that role. Martin 23:23, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

material that will date quickly

During the course of his Presidential campaign, as well as his previous campaigns for senatorial seats, his work with VVAW is raised as a subject of controversy. During his campaigns for political office, however, he has been charged with making inconsistent statements about two events in 1971: an antiwar demonstration at the United States Capitol in April, and a VVAW meeting in November.

Removed. We should be writing about the VVAW and what Kerry may or may not have done, rather than focusing on the implications for this year's big event. Martin 23:38, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I understand your point about not being distracted by "this year's big event", but the controversy over what happened in 1971 is a legitimate subject for an article. It's just not significant enough to include in the main John Kerry bio. An analogy that I think I mentioned (somewhere in hundreds of kb of archived Talk): The article on Rick Santorum was becoming too cluttered by the attention devoted to his attacks on gays, so that subject was spun off into a separate article, Santorum controversy. I think that's the best solution here. As for its dating quickly, you're certainly right that, like the Santorum controversy, it will drop out of the headlines (indeed, to a great extent, it's already done so). Nevertheless, I don't see why an encyclopedia can't memorialize even an ephemeral controversy that was significant while it lasted.

This page started out as a place to summarize one particular event in Kerry's life, namely his being criticized over two VVAW incidents. (The first incident, the Capitol demonstration, was independently significant and was covered in John Kerry, with this article including only the subsequent attacks on Kerry.) With the article's new title, and the removal of the reference to the criticism, it's become seriously misleading. It suggests that the most important (indeed, the only important) aspects of his VVAW participation were the Capitol demonstration and the Kansas City meeting. In fact, more significant events are described in John Kerry. We're left with these alternatives:

1. Status quo - This article gives an inaccurate picture of the subject it says it's covering.
2. Move the rest of the John-Kerry-in-VVAW info here - This would be absurd in terms of the main article. Kerry's Senate testimony on behalf of VVAW was the incident that launched his political career. It can't reasonably be left out of the John Kerry biography.
3. Include the information in both articles - This would mean duplicating huge chunks of material (virtually all of John Kerry#Anti-Vietnam War activism (1970-1971)) in both articles.
4. Delete this article and be left with no article that reports the attacks on Kerry about the demo and the meeting - This would lose information that some readers would want. Even though it's not the most important information about Kerry, it might as well be retained somewhere.
5. Return to the prior setup - obviously, the alternative I favor. JamesMLane 13:37, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In my opininon, James is absolutely correct. This article was never intended to be an account of Kerry's involvement in VVAW. These are two only piddling incidents in that involvement. It was strictly intended to address a controversy. And it was initially started because some editors absolutely insisted on a detailed account of this in the main Kerry page. It's absurd to have such detail over this in the main article, so it was put here.

I agree that an actual article on Kerry/VVAW would be useful. This article is not it, nor was it ever intended to be. If we try to transform this article into a proper balanced account about Kerry in VVAW, then some editors will predictably hyperventilate about suppressing criticism. In short, there needs to be an article specifically on the criticism. Not becaue it's important, it isn't. But because it relieves pressure on important articles; that pressure is otherwise never going to go away. Wolfman 16:07, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Ok. fair points all. Martin 22:39, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Martin, do you object to moving it back? It's not immediately pressing, but I'm putting a link here from the Swift Vets page. And, no point in keeping track of dead links if there's no objection to a move (or do links move automatically?). Also, I think it would be nice to go ahead and at least get started on a real article of this title. It's looking at least 50/50 like he's going to be president, so it would be nice to get something up before it becomes really contentious. Wolfman 15:40, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think only a sysop can do it, right? The former site at John Kerry VVAW controversy isn't blank, but of course is now a redirect... Well, the bottom line is that I feel a little unclear about this situation and I'm afraid that anything I do will send the edit history off to oblivion. JamesMLane 17:23, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I moved it back for now. A proper article on John Kerry in VVAW or similar would make fascinating reading for me: the Vietnam protests are something I feel quite ill-informed about, and it'd be interesting to learn more about it via the history of someone in the news today. Martin 01:29, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)