[Wikipedia-l] How would you deal with this problem?

Sat Oct 19 18:34:56 UTC 2002

What is your feeling about the following sort of problem?  This sort
problem is what drove Julie Kemp away, not to mention a number of other
very valuable participants.

As a philosopher, I've studied metaphysics and topics in metaphysics in a
number of graduate courses and I continue to maintain an interest in the
topic of existence ("Is existence a property?") and metaphysics generally.
By no means am I an *expert* on the topic of reality, but I guess I'm the
closest thing we current have to one.

Last June or July I noticed that our [[Reality]] page was a complete joke.
At the time I felt I didn't have the time or patience to try to correct
it.  Unfortunately, the people working on the page kept at it for the next
few months and now, if anything, it has gotten worse: philosophically
illiterate, poorly written, completely biased, and fundamentally confused
about what an article about "reality" should be about.

So on the talk page I took some time out and went through the article,
line by line, and explained what was wrong with it.  When finished, I had
convinced myself that virtually no part of it was salvageable, so I wrote
about five paragraphs of a new article, and just completely deleted the
old one.

This upset Fred Bauder, who it seems was responsible for most of the old
article.  Without going into details (see the Talk: page if you want),
Fred maintained that the original article was superior to the new one.
After an exchange, I decided to give up; I wrote, "I'm not going to try to
improve this article any more. Go ahead and revert it to the old crappy
version. I'm not going to work on this article as long as you're working
on it."

So Fred did revert it, making my article into a subheading of his article,
called "A Philosophical Discussion" (as if I had been talking about a
different topic from the one he was addressing).  To his credit he
actually edited his old article and removed a few of the problems with it
that I had pointed out, but it still remains pretty much a confused piece
of garbage, in my opinion.

Then I realized that I had been driven away from working on something I
actually cared about and knew something about--just as Julie had been.  So
I decided to resist the desire to give up; I reverted my own article and
put Fred's below it.

I am extremely dissatisfied with this situation, however.  As in the case
with the [[racism]] article, there is now more than one article on the
page.  Having multiple articles is just a way to avoid controversy among
editors; it doesn't serve readers very well, for one thing.  I'm mighty
tempted to delete Fred's version again, but I honestly don't really know
what to do at this point.  (Thus, I'm writing to you folks.)

There's a general issue that this situation illustrates.  This isn't the
first time the issue has come up, obviously.  The issue is: when we've got
someone who is clearly more of an expert on a topic locking horns with a
stubborn dilettante who fails to see how little he or she actually knows,
what do we do?  Nothing?

Let me tell you, I can *really* understand why Michael Tinkler and Julie
Kemp left.  It's the same reason that a lot of other able minds never join
in the first place.

Is there *anything* we can do, consistent with our policies of openness,
to make the project more attractive to the best-qualified people, in the
face of the above problem?

--Larry