[WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia

Mon Feb 7 13:48:14 UTC 2005

David Gerard wrote:
> > But we *must* kill the wiki in order to save it. Else all the editors will
> > leave in disgust and Britannica will not take us seriously. Possibly we
> > should vote on it.

Skyring wrote: 
> Votes are exactly the sort of things that POV-pushing groups can
> understand. As we see, they can organise themselves for votes. All you
> gotta do is stand up and be counted, the more times the better.

Yes!  But just to make clear, since I know David's views pretty well
and they are generally (roughly, mostly) the same as my own, he was
being humorous here and agrees with you completely.

We know a few things: first, as Charles Matthews (I think) put it: for
every 1 article where something awful is going on, there are 999 being
developed to a very high quality in relative peace.  We don't want to
break the 999 trying to fix the 1.

Second, we know that in some cases (I named 3 yesterday, but I can add
one more that I remembered last night: pedophilia related articles) we
have organized partisans who are carefully working to maintain a
biased point of view in the articles.

Third, we know as per Slim Virgin's explanation, that in the LaRouche
case at least, the bias being inserted into the articles is difficult
to grasp for people who haven't in some fashion made a hobby out of
knowing the subject area.  Pseudo-NPOV is a problem in those articles
and in the pedophilia articles.

Fourth, we know that the community loves *both* openness *and*
quality.  The Cunctator said it this way to me the other day: Openness
is the central principle of the community, but it is not the *purpose*
of the community.

To me what this means is: as always, we look for the softest possible
solution to these problems.  No need to start talking about
permanently locking articles and voting on the content yet.  Yes, this
would work, but there are other, softer, things that we should try
first.

Let me give VfD as an example.  VfD is a *means*, it is not *the end*
that we seek.  If NeoNazis come in and start negatively affecting VfD,
we will not just throw up our hands and say "Oh well, I guess the
majority wins, and if NeoNazis want to take over wikipedia, well,
that's democracy and we have to accept it."

What we will do is say: Look, VfD worked for a long time because the
people voting there, while not agreeing on everything, at least
approached the process with a sincere but diverse view of what needs
to be done.  When an organized group comes in to upset the process, we
remember the *purpose* of the process and *change the rules* -- a
little bit at first, no need to break what's more or less working, but
we do change the rules.

If they want to treat wikipedia as a game, they will lose.  They will
lose because we get to make up the rules.

--Jimbo

-- 
"La nèfle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org