controversial articles and neutrality problems

This thread is going nowhere, and I know why: because my proposal, which may or may not be any good, does not address the central quality problems of articles on disputed topics. And these problems are two:

First, the disputes around these articles lead to a shift of emphasis from the main to the marginal. The dynamics of this shift are clearly visible in articles like w:Judaization of the Galilee. There is a dispute going on there about the background section: the proIsraelis want this section to show that Israel acquired the territory of the Galilee after a war in which its existence was threatened. The ProPalestinians want the section to emphasize that under the Partition plan the Galilee was never supposed to be part of Israel. Because of this disagreement, both sides have been adding citations and detail supporting their positions, resulting in a Background section that is inflated far beyond its importance or relevance.

This distortion is characteristic of many disputed articles. w:Mohammad Amin al-Husayni is so full of polemics on picayune that you need a Rashi commentary to understand it.

Not only do disputed issues get disproportionate attention, entire topics become inflated far beyond their importance. A prime example is w:Muhammad al-Durrah incident. That article, about a Palestinian boy who got shot during the second intifada, is 100 kB long. The article on the w:1948 Arab–Israeli War is 87 kB long. Was the al-Durrah affair really so important that it deserves so much attention?

I know Wikipedia is not like other encyclopedias, but in the eyes of the reader, the amount of space you devote to a topic is seen as an indication of the topic's importance. This is a fundamental distortion of truth inherent in the way Wikipedia is edited.

The second problem is article spawning. Proponents of a particular political position try to multiply the number of Wikipedia articles supporting their side. The Pro-Palestinians have, for example, written 153 articles on Arab villages depopulated as a result of the conflict. Almost all these articles are stubs, and are likely to remain so, as very little information is available about them. The pro-Israelis, not to be outdone, have 67 articles to their credit on Israeli settlements depopulated during the conflict.

I am not saying that each of these villages is not, theoretically, a legitimate topic for an article. As things stand, though, there is no question that almost all of the information in these articles could have been presented more succinctly and accessibly in other forms - for example in a table, showing the village size, population, date and circumstances of the depopulation. In those few cases where there is more information than this included in the article, a separate article would certainly be in order.

But I contend that the objective of these articles is not to present the information in the way that is most accessible, but rather in the way the maximizes the propaganda value.

I have no solution for these two problems, which, I believe, have a profound impact on the quality and reliability of Wikipedia's coverage of disputed topics.

Yeah, this is a really tough problem. It's one thing to settle an article. It's another thing to settle a policy on how to handle certain articles. But there's very little to stop someone from creating a new article if they can find one or two sources and carve out something barely distinct. With the most inflammatory content expelled from dhimmi, a group of editors managed to keep it alive at dhimmitude. Not even saying that the second article shouldn't exist, but we really just don't know how to handle these kinds of spin offs. We have an entire article called criticism of Facebook. I think there's a place for this kind of criticism, but I can't help but wonder if the very framing of the article (as a place for criticism only) is a major threat to neutrality...

And I really do think that neutrality is a big community health problem too.

I don't have many answers on this issue except to empower the community to resolve them.

(edit: i realize I can't link to Wikipedia articles here, so I'll leave it to others to look them up if they want.)