[WikiEN-l] When goals conflict: There is no "right" for everyoneto edit Wikipedia

Mon Feb 21 10:28:26 UTC 2005

Matt R wrote

> I would argue that it is quite sufficient to do what we normally do --
examine
> the conduct of each individual editor, his actual edits, and react
accordingly.
> Guilt by association makes me very uneasy.

Certainly editors should be judged by what they do, not what they are - as a
general rule.  Most such general statements do get shot down.

>I posit that Wikipedia
> would be better off with a well-behaved, NPOV-writing Neo-Nazi than
without;
> could such an individual exist?

The question is really more like: suppose an editor had far-right views and
that the _only way_ that was apparent was a small annoucement on his (male
is more usual) user page.  Something like 'I belong to [[X]]', where X is an
organisation documented in an article that included, uncontested, the usual
dreary hate items.

Well, this is a hypothetical.  We would more likely get someone saying they
were a member of, for example, an anti-immigration lobbying organisation in
a country where immigration is a political issue.  In this latter case there
is fairly clearly a case that we have to go by behaviour, even though
statements like, say,  'I vote Le Pen'  in the French context, can cause
very grave offence.

Charles