Welcome to the club, Ed. Let's call it the club
of
people frustrated
with ''inclusivity bias''. You're in good company
here, so put up your
feet and have the barmaid bring you a glass of good
[[Scotch]].
I think this type of thing was one of the reasons for
the I-E fork. They use the sympathetic point of view,
unless they're wrong, in which case they say the right
point of view.
You have hit upon the number one reason why good,
evenhanded
contributors leave the Wiki, and why many of those
who stay become
frustrated and limit their edits to mechanical
changes and work on a few
pet subject areas. It is also the reason why most
credentialled people
have left the project.
No, people leave the project because of people like
RK, who claim they're doing something equivalent to
inclucivity bias, saying that the other people are
wrong and they're using the only reasonable point of
view; the other people are
neo-nazis/environmentalists.
''Inclusivity bias'' is my term for
the pattern of
putting the [[burden
of proof]] on editors making content changes in
broad areas. The
trouble is that the Wikipedia culture is
deletion-adverse and
reversion-adverse. Wikipedia culture is to include
things until they
are proven unmeritous. If you cut paragraphs,
revert bad edits to an
article, or try to have an article deleted--unless
you have proof, you
get NO support from the community.
So what's wrong with that? Don't you have some kind of
reason to delete content? If you don't think (and
prove, if someone asks) that the content is
inaccurate, why should you delete it?
And you need that community support, because you are
up against people
with strong feelings, who want to paint subjects a
certain way. You
mention environmentalism, but that's just one of the
many areas where
this is a problem. The Israel/Palestine issues,
articles on different
religions, articles on cults, politics, and world
trade all have the
same problem.
You're just going against NPOV. You just think that
everything should be "right". Well, who's to say who's
right? You? Someone from the other side? The concept
of NPOV is to show all sides and let the reader
decide.
I think the culture has to change. I don't know how
to do it. I've
tried, and it is *excruciatingly* hard to walk into
an article that has
bias, that clearly has a problem with facts and with
neutrality, and
accomplish anything good. The usual outcome is
outpouring of anger,
edit wars, and hard feelings all around, and the
well-meaning editor
just ends up making enemies. What *should* happen,
is that the
community should rise up and *support* people who
are trying to help out
in these situations.
What's your definition of neutrality? Is including
other points of view that are "wrong" not neutral?
What kind of support? Well, people should be
rushing to your side to
reinstate your edits when some POV writer keeps
reverting you. Other
people should be coming to the discussion, and not
just adding and
refactoring ad nauseum, but actually trying to push
the process towards
a decision. What we need more of are editors who
are willing to
approach a controversial topic that they don't feel
strongly about, and
staying there with tenacity, requiring sources for
questionable edits,
flat-out reverting inappropriate garbage, and doing
their own
cross-checking.
Is the POV writer deleting other people's points of
view or in any way making his POV the only one there?
Is he asserting that he's right while leaving other
POVs there (although asserting that they're wrong)? If
it's one of the first two, then you have a case, but
since Wikipedia is a wiki, it's easy to change (but if
you get into an edit war, you can report it to the
list). If it's the third one, then it's very easy to
fix; just make minor changes in the language (eg. some
say that..., proponents claim..., etc.).
This is all going to get worse as Wikipedia becomes
more important in
the real world. When its #90 at
alexa.com, you can
bet that somebody
from Monsanto and somebody from Greenpeace will both
be here trying to
steer the articles around on GM food.
Louis
The article on GM food should reflect both points of
view. If the Greenpeace and Monsanto people read the
Wikipedia policies, they can have their opinions and
not be trolls. If they are trolls, and reason is found
that they are trolls (instead of assuming that all
edits should be reverted until proven otherwise), and
an edit war starts, then the involved parties can
write to the list for discussion of banning, or they
can use the planned arbitration pannel. But banning
when you're in an edit war with someone for including
their POVs is going too far.
LDan
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