[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

Mon Jun 6 18:00:00 UTC 2005

Sean Barret wrote,

>Silly statements that are so very hard to spot that they cannot be
>rebutted and can only be corrected by rendering them unexpressible are
>not silly.  They may be wrong, but they are not speedy-obliteration
>candidates.
>
>
>I am very worried that we are seriously discussing the formation of a
>committee empowered to prohibit unpopular content from Wikipedia and to
>ban those that feel that it is important to record it.

This is not a constructive comment.  I am sure everyone else understood I 
was using a hyperbolic example just to make the point.  Anyone who has done 
serious research in the social sciences or humanities (and this certainly 
doesn't require a PhD.) can recognize inaccurate assertions that people who 
have not done serious research probably will not recognize.  This is a 
fact; no one would dispute that someone who has seriously researched 
physics can tell the difference between a good or bad explanation of the 
Uncertainty Principle, or the theory of Special Relativity.  The same goes 
for articles on history, politics, culture, and so on.

Moreover, no one has mentioned "unpopular" content and Sean is just waving 
a red herring to distract us from a serious problem.  In one of my own 
messages -- here or at the project page -- I pointed out that one use of 
such a committee is to ensure that the content is being presented in an 
NPOV way, or to ensure that the sources are properly represented.  Anyone 
can assert something and cite a book.  But in some cases readers need to 
know whether the author of that book was published by a university press, a 
trade press, or a vanity press, or whether the book was written by someone 
with a PhD. in Biblical Studies or Geology.  You might think that disputes 
revolving around such questions would be easy to resolve, and of course, in 
many cases, they are.  But sometimes they are not, and there is a need for 
some mechanism to arbitrate content.

Finally, Brian reminds me that I must repeat that Wikipedia is first and 
foremost an encyclopedia.  In an encyclopedia, accuracy is of the utmost 
important.  Brian should not put in inaccurate content, and then protest 
its deletion because it is "unpopular."

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701