Thread:Comments:German footballer Mesut Özil announces retirement from international football over 'racism'/Not racist but political reasons/reply

Don't confuse encyclopedic neutrality with news neutrality; they're fundamentally different. Wikipedia articles can easily fail news neutrality, and vice versa. Certainly if one were writing an encyclopedic article on the matter, one would have background on the political issues involved; but then, encyclopedic article writing is apt to involve huge protracted debates about how much of what sort of background to put in and what spin to put on it and similar stuff that is disallowed for news articles &mdash; most of that is analysis and directly violates news neutrality. Could there have been additional background on Erdogan provided? Perhaps, though one would have to step carefully through a minefield of potential non-neutrality; one would need sourcing on the nature of Erdogan's unpopularity in Germany. That path could easily make a huge undertaking out of what ought to be a simple operation of writing a news article about this event. For a news article such as this, one ought to be asking whether there is a misleading omission of information; is the situation being whitewashed, as with (this was a memorable example) an article once submitted to us about the last US combat troops leaving Iraq after the Iraq War, that managed somehow to get through a medium-long article without ever giving any hint that the war had ever been at all controversial in the US. (That Iraq article, btw, was not-ready'd for non-neutrality, had an Al Jaz source and a bunch of information added, and was a profoundly different and quite solid article when published.) This article documents what Özil said about their reason for retirement. It documents German fan reaction to the photo with Erdogan, and comments made refer to politics and elections, implying that there is political controversy surrounding Erdogan. It documents the German Football Association's reaction, lightly, near the bottom. The primary perspective represented is that of Özil, other perspectives are acknowledged.