Talk:Water privatization/archive

Archive February 2008-May 2011

Comment

POV. --218.237.187.188 (talk) 10:08, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

I fixed one broken link to the "We Wont Pay Campaign" and added what the oppositions views normally are. I think this is required as previously it sounded like the opposition were just people against change. When sadly, many of their views, in England anyway, proved to be correct. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kaspar Silas (talk • contribs) 20:21, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Communism

I found this in the anti-privitization area----"where people had to deal with communist practice." It seems like an inappropriately inserted bias against a broad topic. I know that generally, the western world considers communism to be a dirty word or something. Please, understand that this is a bias. Not all Muslims are terrorists (I do not know if you see the connection here). I changed it; change it back if you feel it is appropriate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.112.218.97 (talk) 03:32, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

sds —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.150.163.226 (talk) 05:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Biased

This whole article seems very slanted in favor of the privatization of water. I'm not sure how but I know it can be tagged for being biased and I think it should be.

The only section on opposition is one small section; the rest of the article has the feel of giving reasons why privatization has and should occur.

RedCitizen (talk) 04:32, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree... See my new post

I agree. All the information is from the World Bank, and it's friends. I made a new post to the introduction to counter the bias.

My post would fit better under the "Impact of privatization" or "Opposition to water privatization" section, but I suggest that it stay in the introduction until the article can be fixed.

Privatization is all about making money, regardless of consequences to human beings or nature, and is all about funneling money from a population to make to make a rich few richer. Higher profits; lower wages. Wal-Mart hiring foreign slave-wage labor and paying it's domestic workers at federal minimum wage so they can sell products at lower prices, thereby killing the small businesses when it moves into town, eventually becoming the only food/grocery/clothing/product store in the country, with all money going to them, is a good example. Say bye, bye to living wages (and maybe even minimum wages); and being able to keep up with your bills, which are also sent from other privatized business, with the same agenda.

This article needs to reflect the real consequences of water privatization. Water is our most basic physical need we all have in common, and bad things happen when a few people try to own/privatize somtehing like that.

Its all relatives (talk) 01:27, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Who wrote that article?

I've rarely seen such a biased article - that's far away from Wikipedia's standards. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.157.192.56 (talk) 10:42, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

POV of Bolivia section and duplication with 2000 Cochabamba protests

User 128.112.17.242 added a comment in the edit section stating "I tried to fix this, but it's unfixable. There is soooo much bias here and lack of citation. Notably, the part about how people were protesting with one "slogan" while "chanting" other". Since user 128.112.17.242 did not leave a comment on this page, I am adding her/his comments here for the sake of completion. It would be welcome if User 128.112.17.242 registered as a user and/or participated in the discussion on this page.

Coming back to the origins of the Bolivia section, it seems to me from what has been written above that Its all relatives added the Bolivia section with an anti-privatization message in order to counterbalance a perceived bias in favor of privatization in the remainder of the article. If one takes for granted that both the Bolivia section and the remainder of the article are biased, adding two biases does not make an unbiased article. Water privatization is a controversial, political and emotional topic. In such a situation. I would believe, abiding to a neutral point of view and citing credible sources should be especially important.

I did notice that this article has undergone a number of heavy edits that seem to be primarily politically motivate, both from opponents and supporters of privatization. The current section on the impacts or privatization is, in my view, biased in favor of privatization and draws primarily on one source, an article by Fredrik Segerfeldt in the Financial Times which is quoted at length without clearly showing the quote as an indent. If one goes back in the history of the article, pervious much more specific information on the impact of privatization has been removed. I do not have the time to find who removed it and if any reasons were given, but I would - as a minimum - suggest to reintroduce the information that has been removed, apparently arbitrarily.

Coming back to the Bolivia section, I also noticed that there is already a detailed article about the 2000 Cochabamba protests on Wikipedia. The talk page of the article Talk:2000 Cochabamba protests shows, not surprisingly, that the article has been discussed with claims of NPOV and critcisms becauase of a lack of references. Interestingly, these issues have apparently been dealt with. 2000 Cochabamba protests now heavily quotes an article from the New Yorker and a PBS documentary. At the risk of being criticized, more people would perceive these two media sources as neutral and objective compared to the two main sources of the Bolivia section, the advocacy group Public Citizen and the video "The Corporation". The latter has a clear anti-privatization message and is focused on the protests and not on how to improve the water supply of the city, which apparently remains dismal under public management nine years after the protests.

Given all the previous debate, why reinvent the wheel and create a POV section on Bolivia instead of making reference to the existing article 2000 Cochabamba protests? That article may not be perfect, but at least it has undergone some discussion in the Wikipedia community and has become better as a result of it.

Also, the Bolivia section deals only with Cochababma and not with the equally important water concession in La Paz and El Alto (1997-2005). In my view the country sections in this article should be kept very brief, giving equal weight within each country section to various cases of privatization in that country. They should also link to existing articles on water privatization such as Water privatisation in England and 2000 Cochabamba protests.

I hope that this contribution helps to make this article more concise and objective, and also to encourage people to disuss on this page instaed of charging ahead and making heavy edits to the main article.--Mschiffler (talk) 11:55, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Serious work required

This needs to be seriously gutted and rewritten. What is project business anyway? To lie about corporate power? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.180.61.194 (talk) 23:26, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

It seems like there's a broad consensus on this talk page that the article needs a lot of work. I agree. Someone has marked a bunch of detail in the lead as irrelevant, is there any objection to it being removed? If not, I'll go ahead in a day or two. delldot ∇. 20:47, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I guess no one objects so I'll remove the detail. delldot ∇. 20:59, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality

This is clearly a topic that can provoke heated exchange and opinionated, biased sections. Many sections in the current article are quite clearly biased either one way or another. I suggest that each side write their own version of events in the article, making it clear it is a pro-privatization or anti-privatization side (as in privatization proponents argue that ...). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Meznaric (talk • contribs) 19:03, 31 May 2011 (UTC)