[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

Sun Jun 12 17:37:06 UTC 2005

steven l. rubenstein wrote:
> 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.

I fully and totally agree with every bit of this.

And I repeat very very firmly that I will never support _popular voting_
as a substitute for doing this kind of serious work to get things right.

--Jimbo