California Textbook Controversy

[Deshpande, Madhav]

Dominik says:  "The "history" feature of Wikipedia makes it easy to see what changes have
been made in the course of this article's evolution."

The "history" of this page tells you that the web-page is like a war-zone.


Madhav M. Deshpande


-----Original Message-----
From: Indology on behalf of Dominik Wujastyk
Sent: Tue 5/2/2006 7:10 PM
To: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
Subject: California Textbook Controversy
 
Starting on 25 January there has been a good objective summary of this 
issue on Wikipedia, at

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californian_Hindu_textbook_controversy

However, I noticed some days ago that this page now has a header 
announcing that

 	OM. This article is the current Hinduism Collaboration of the week.
 	Please help improve it to featured article standard.

Checking the links on who this Collaboration is, one finds that

 	The goal of each collaboration is to take an undeveloped or
 	underdeveloped Hinduism-related topic and improve it over the course of
 	the week, ideally to the level of a featured article. At the end of each
 	week, the topic with the most support votes will be selected for
 	collaboration.

 	The over-arching aim of this project is to improve Wikipedia's content
 	about Hinduism and also to give users a focus and an opportunity to
 	collaboratively edit content and to give us all something to be proud of.

This page in turn leads to the "Wikipedia: Wikiproject Hinduism" where a 
list of the participants of this re-editing project are listed.

 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Hinduism#Participants

The list seems to be entirely made of pseudonyms.

It seems that this group of forty or so people who define themselves as 
Hindus have taken it upon themselves systematically to collaborate on 
rewriting selected articles in Wikipedia.  They have recently voted to 
rewrite the California Textbook page and this rewrite is currently 
underway.

The "history" feature of Wikipedia makes it easy to see what changes have 
been made in the course of this article's evolution.

Best,
Dominik