[WikiEN-l] Strawman attacks on recent proposals

Mon Jun 6 19:23:07 UTC 2005

Sean writes:
> 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.

Isn't that a deliberate lie?  What facts (written in NPOV
format) did Larry Sanger try to censor?  What facts
(written in NPOV format) did Steve Rubenstein try to
censor?  NONE.

I strongly object to this strawman attack - which borders
on an ad homenim attack - on the discussion of improving
Wikipedia.

Folks, we still have a major problem. There are many people
here who unfortunately refuse to cite sources, engage in
original research, write things that are just false and
bizarre.

For years many of our best contributors have been driven
away due to these problems, and the Wikipedia leadership
has done little to address the core problem: While we
enforce rules about "playing nice", virtually no one
attempts to seriously enforce our rules and policies on
citing sources, verifiability, and just plain making sure
that our articles do not contain flat-out bullshit.

There are many people who are exceptions to this, of
course, like Steve R. and JayJG. For them, following
Wikipedia policy such as citing sources, verifiability, and
removing original content are actually important, and not
just lip-service.  However people like them are working on
an individual basis.  That just doesn't cut it for an
encyclopedia of tens of thousands of articles!

For some time Steve Rubenstein and a few others have
pointed out this flaw, and have made the quite reasonable
suggestion that we have some sort of ArbCom to deal with
content disputes.  (Remember, the entire point of this
project is to create reliable encyclopedia content. 
Everything else is an aside.)

Yet at every turn people who ask for such minor and
obviously useful control mechanisms are attacked with
strawman criticisms, falsely accused of censorship, and are
generally treated with disdain.  Is it any wonder that
Wikipedia still has a relatively poor reputation among many
college, university and high school teachers?

Until we take our primary goal seriously - dealing with
content problems - Wikipedia will remain at beast a
curiosity, an "encyclopedia" filled with questionable
content.

What's most shocking about this is that the problems we
face are so easily solvable (for instance, set up volunteer
ArbComs for article content) but every proposal is attacked
in heated and misleading ways.  

Robert (RK)

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