[WikiEN-l] Are things getting worse?

Sat Feb 14 17:33:15 UTC 2004

Jimmy-
> Is the amount of internal squabbling getting worse or better?  My
> rough sense is that it's getting worse, but maybe I'm just tired of it
> and therefore perceiving it to be more of a problem lately.

It's getting a little worse. I think one reason is that we have devoted so  
many pages and places to dealing with conflicts. The worst of all, in my  
opinion, is the "Wikipedia:Conflicts between users" page. It is  
effectively a public arena. Making a dispute ever more public is not a  
very good idea. It attracts spectators and more combatants, and it  
increases the feeling of the individuals involved that they have to "win"  
to avoid public embarrassment.

Things worked better early on because you were a private mediator everyone  
could talk to by email. This model, of course, is not scalable, and we  
need to find a scalable one that emulates its advantages.

I think the "Conflicts between users" page should redirect to the page for  
requesting mediation. I also think that mediation and arbitration need to  
be "privatized" to some degree.

The mediation commiette itself is fairly ineffective as it has neither a  
carrot nor a stick. For reasons unknown to me, the arbitration committee  
currently only accepts cases directly referred to it by you. This should  
be changed ASAP.

I think before we talk about stuff like trust metrics, we should optimize  
these processes.

Another reason things have gotten worse is that we now have over 200,000  
articles, and Wikipedia has reached significant prominence. We have  
comprehensive pages about almost any controversial subject. These pages  
naturally attract highly devoted people, but they find out that most of  
the stuff they know is already covered, only that they disagree with the  
*wording* of certain sentences and paragraphs.

These disputes about particular words or phrases are often the most  
difficult to resolve, as there are no clear authorities either party can  
cite, and NPOV simply doesn't work here. Take the recent dispute on the  
[[Atheism]] page about whether to write "God" or "god": There are plenty  
of sources for both variants, and it's impractical to write something like  
"God, sometimes spelled god". Even the compromise that has been found - to  
use a neutral word like "deity" - does not always work.

Or how do you apply NPOV to the question whether the article about 9/11  
attacks should have "terrorist" in the title? Do you want to call it  
[[September 11, 2001 attacks, sometimes referred to as terrorist]]? As Mav  
has often said, NPOV simply doesn't work in page titles.

In my opinion, voting is a lot more appropriate for these minor disputes  
than for major ones, and that should be reflected in our guidelines. Often  
these questions are simply matters of personal taste, and why not let the  
taste of the majority decide when there's clearly no solution that makes  
both sides happy?

> What can we all do to build a sense of love and harmony?

What we always do: Refine our processes. It's a delicate balance. If you  
have too many rules, people feel constrained by them, which causes  
unhappiness. If you have too few, people disagree about interpreting them,  
which causes conflict. Right now I think we can deal with a little more  
unhappiness if it gives us a little less conflict.

Regards,

Erik