User talk:Pir

Hello Pir, welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian.

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If you have any questions, see the help pages or add a question to the village pump. Angela 22:56, Sep 14, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your message on the Butler Inquiry/Iraq Intelligence Commission (UK). I agree that these pages should be merged (under Butler Inquiry - check Google, and you will see that it is being referred to by this name). When they announced the Hutton Inquiry they didn't give it a name either, and the BBC called their section the "Kelly Inquiry" for quite a while. So far as I can see there's no way to guess what will end up being the name of an Inquiry (the "Shipman Inquiry" is named after Shipman, not the Judge; the "Bloody Sunday Inquiry" is named after the incident. I guess it will be the Soham Inquiry.) I think these names are just coined by the media, and end up being used by everybody. Washington irving 19:42, 12 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Washington. I agree with you on nomenclature, 'Butler inquiry' is best. Won't be around for a few days, but I will probably have time to help merge both articles after that. pir 20:03, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Good work on attempting to remove bias. From the owner, down through his chain of command - the developers, beneath them the admins and then the typical American white collar reactionary user, it is quite a battle to remove the heavy right wing bias from all of this. But if you don't get flustered or angry and, unlike them, stick to the rules, and work together with saner people here like secretlondon, Wik, Viajero and so forth, you can get somewhere. One of their old tricks is one of them will provoke you, you'll respond, and then they will hold that against you. Just join together with the sane ones, follow the rules and keep a cool head, we'll win by attrition eventually. The efforts of the sane people collectively can't be scattershot, so I would suggest focusing on the larger pages, such as some you have, Hugo Chavez, war on terrorism, U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. It is possible to maintain NPOV there if a group of the sane people concentrate on it. It's less easy to do this on less popular pages, you can give it a try, but if it becomes an edit war it's not really worth the time. You can let other people worry about that. Venceremos 07:43, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I am not necessarily on a mission to remove right-wing views. In fact I find it much better if they stay in the encyclopedia, they just need to be marked clearly for what they are, and we need to add facts, as well as other balancing views. Everyone should have their say, facts and views need to be seperated, and it is always very revealing to see who holds particular views. I am an optimist, in the sense that I believe the truth will always win. That is why I love Wikipedia. pir 13:53, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Venceremos: here's an example of what I mean. VV didn't like the paragraphe about Torture and murder in Iraq committed by British and US troops (In fact initially the whole article, esp. the title, seems to be inspired by right-wing Iraq war propaganda, but now that the situation in Iraq has changed, it's returning on them.). So he added a sentence to weaken it : However, such misdeeds on the part of individual soldiers violate the US and Britain's policies on combat and occupation, and soldiers who break the rules have been subject to court martial. Of course this is not NPOV, because it is simply his own interpretation that these are acts committed only by "individuals", and of course these are just the "official" USUK policies. So I changed these. Then Rei pointed out that no court martials have taken place (so far nobody has provided any evidence to the contrary). What we end up with is a NPOV sentence which makes the whole paragraphe much, much stronger: Such misdeeds violate the US and Britain's official policies on combat and occupation, and soldiers who break the rules are theoretically subject to court martial.

The observant reader will compare official policy and effective practice and deduce that the incidents of torture are in fact likely to be have the backing from superiors. The article has made a step towards NPOV at the same time a step towards the truth.pir 03:20, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)