Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Wiki-editing works great in most cases to drive
towards NPOV. The
game theory of "mutually assured destruction" means that partisans
have an incentive to try to "write for the enemy". What we are
considering now is how to deal with a situation in which an
*organized* group starts gaming our social rules (3RR in particular)
to undermine the natural incentive structure of wiki editing.
That strikes me as the real crux of the matter: this is more of a
contentious testing of the administrative rules of Wikipedia than it is
an actual assault on the project itself. There will always be those
with an axe to grind and an agenda to propagandize.
I'm not sure that anything at all "needs to be done" to deal with the
matter. In fact, there's not really anything necessarily wrong with POV
getting into an article, as long as no POV is pushed as the only valid
POV. Rather, multiple POVs* might be a more desirable status of an
article than no POV at all, where each is clearly identified as being a
particular perspective with identified adherents. Thus, if Stormfront
troopers swarm in and add some biased information as though it were
gospel, rather than actively oppose it, editors should simply . . . edit
it. Tidy up the language, make it non-repetitive, collect it in one
section, and label it as a particular perspective.
Where a Stormfront (darn, the militant racists get all the cool names)
activist enters some figures identifying the amount of money supposedly
cost the country by Zionists, stick it into an appropriate POV corral
and provide some academic analysis of where those figures might
originate. If treated properly, such attempts to monkeywrench the
bias-mitigating machinery of Wikipedia can actually become a rich source
of information.
I guess, in short, my point is that a lack of bias and a lack of
point-of-view are two different and separate things. Points of view are
good. Bias is favoritism to a particular point of view, and that's bad.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
--
Chad
* = I keep thinking "Personally Owned Vehicle" when I type POV. Bah.