Charles Matthews wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I think you're right, in principle, to favour approaches where points of
view out of the mainstream are documented in some way, rather than excluded
by some sort of decree.
Of course I am. Being Right is my superpower.
Err, whoops. Was that my outside voice?
That being said, WP will always want them documented in a certain
low-rhetoric, crisp way with supporting cites. This is unlikely to satisfy
anybody but the most level-headed, reasonable holders of said points of
view.
I believe it will, at minimum, cut down on the number of people
reverting the article after "attacks" have been "fixed" in some way,
and
will reduce the number of attempts to circumvent administrative rules.
For one thing, the most egregious offenders act as blunt instruments,
and probably won't know what to do about information they've posted that
isn't deleted, but just gets shuffled around a bit to add a more
professional tone. Such a person may not even necessarily realize that
his bias has been bled out, as long as his (probably specious)
statistics are still presented in some manner.
Keep in mind that people who push bias and ignore attempts at
objectivity think they're being objective, and the phrasing they choose
tends to be a result of the inability to recognize the distinction
between biased and unbiased language. Bias in academic works is
typically the result of blindness to one's own bias: we all do it,
though the more alert of us might do it far less than some others.
Altering pejorative or prejudicial language without altering core data
can often mitigate problems of disagreement simply by leaving biased
parties with no options but A) leave it as is or B) becoming truly
irrational, even in one's own eyes.
In any case, as Jimbo has pointed out, the soft solution is preferable
if it works. Considering Wikipedia is entirely built upon the notion
that collaborative peer review selects for good information and
presentation, it seems to me that the softest solution (apply
Wikipedia's core precepts faithfully and fully) is also likely the most
effective, in cases such as this.
Acrid contention is to be expected, unless and until one gets 'insidious
POV-pushing': people prepared to operate on a time scale of years within the
norms and with the general grain of the way WP works. We have ways of
ring-fencing some of the contentious issues (not all); we don't currently
have much idea about regulating the latter.
"Insidious POV-pushing" is probably far more prevalent than you realize.
In fact, I suspect that every non-stub article in Wikipedia has at
least indirectly suffered at the hands of that phenomenon, though in
probably no greater degree than any Other Encyclopedia. Even attempts
to mitigate or eliminate bias involve some degree of POV advocacy. If
real bias begins to appear in an article, I haven't much fear that it
won't be corrected in due time, though.
The real problem to examine here, I think, is in such issues as
ballot-stuffing and revert-wars. If the Stormfront troopers start
engaging in regular revert-wars, that's fairly easily addressed by such
administrivia as the 3RR and, if that proves ineffective, it just points
out something that needs work.
As for ballot-stuffing (which has already happened once with Stormfront,
apparently), I'm of the opinion that votes are counterproductive under
most circumstances, anyway. Votes are calls for a majority opinion --
POV bias by definition -- rather than a function or extension of the
economics of public content reference materials. Much like a
capitalistic market tends, in a vacuum, toward an equilibrium of wealth
production, so too does the semi-social machinery of Wikipedia's
publicly editable content tend toward an equilibrium of data purity, at
least when it mostly operates in a vacuum (without too much bureaucratic
red tape).
In short, the "solution" in this case (in my opinion) is three-fold:
1. We should simply become better, and more alert, editors.
2. We should treat system abuses as an opportunity to improve
administrative rules.
3. We should avoid opportunities for tangential and auxiliary functions
(like polls and votes) to be sabotaged, most likely by minimizing the
incidence of such functions: if it can be done without a vote, but still
be accomplished in the spirit of community, it should be.
--
Chad