[WikiEN-l] DON'T BAN RK – hes indispensable

Thu Oct 2 12:56:19 UTC 2003

I am going to make strong pleas against any moves to ban RK or marginalize him. While I’m not arguing that we tolerate his bad behavior in the short-run, it is crucial that we tolerate having to deal with, and act against, his bad behavior instance by instance in the long-run. To sum up my argument, RK’s bad behavior is an indispensable asset for Wikipedia.

Yes, his tendency to overreact, aggressiveness, and lack of ability to channel disputes into a more substantive debate, rather than an all-out personal conflict, is confounding his difficulties with other users, underlying this conflict is the nature of the articles on which he has been working. On Wikipedia his fields of interest (Israel, Judaism, and anti-Semitism) inherently attract a polarized core of contributors, which pits committed supporters of Israel against pro-Palestinian advocates.

Of course, certain practices and behavior are better at channeling them toward cooperation. Although I did say that his personality is at the heart of this whole attempt to ban you, the dynamics of his edit wars mean that he has to act as he does! While other topics polarize as well, the ideology of the extremists on both sides, along with their ingrained prejudices against each other, discourages them from yielding any concessions to each other. Moreover, it encourages both sides to seek to prevail at all cost, and escalate the conflict into a zero-sum game. Since both sides are too fearful of the aims of the other, RK is always forced not to retreat and make concessions to the other side (that might be his personality, but the often raving lunacy of his crudades is means of putting checks and balances on his opponents in the long-run).

Although he can be paranoid irrational at times, and he’s raving and not strategizing, his aggressiveness is well-suited in that it might be the only pattern of behavior that will work for him. Moreover, since he is almost always outnumbered in any dispute, he naturally has to lodge just as many salvoes, and make just as much noise, as many users put together.

The fair-minded users who favor his banning ignore one the only fact that matters: the end result of most of his edit wars has been neutrality. There's a lot of noise, but everything's fine afterwards. Wikipedia needs his forceful dedication to his side of the issues.

RK and RK alone provides a counterweight to large number of contributors, and determines whether or not his side is equally powerful (despite being under-represented in terms of the number of contributors) in each edit war.  Right now, we have a “balance of power” on the Israeli-Palestinian articles that yields stalemate in edit-war after edit-war. Thus, Wikipedia gets the quality of writing, accuracy, balance, and neutrality needed for to emerge as a viable sourcebook.

Thus, even if he did do something that warrants a banning, Wikipedia needs to accept his actions at all cost in order to maintain balance on the articles on the Israeli-Palestinian articles.

His absence would mean that conflict would ease considerably over the Israeli-Palestinian issue, thus meaning that they written at a far faster rate by the remaining users. But that would be the result of a terrible development. 

This would be at the cost of allowing his antagonists to achieve an all-out victory, and be able to exercise such a degree of control over the articles that there would only be a façade of neutrality. While I did not reach this conclusion when I was subjected to my first RK experience (disagreeing with him isn’t pleasant), I now realize that his absence would be a crushing blow to Wikipedia, an unprecedented experiment whose success is not a foregone conclusion.

The dynamics of the disputes on Wikipedia that arise over the Israeli-Palestinian issue mean that neutrality is only going to be attained when both sides are finished terrorizing and brutalizing each other, after a zero-sum battle has ended in a stalemate. If RK weren’t here, that would mean that the other side would consistently win. 
RK’s role as the lose cannon on the Israel-related articles - always suspicious, prickly, and aggressive – bolsters the influence of his side of the issues. You cannot deny that RK has steered dozens of articles toward an orientation further from that of his antagonists. He often starts off adding grotesquely POV content, but that’s toned down after a fierce battle with his ever-observant opponents. Although his opponents are more subtle in slanting articles, there are more of them, and other users usually have no sympathy for RK. Whereas RK can inject hysterical propaganda in a few articles, many other users can inject subtle biases in many articles. However, fear of RK’s tyranny is a check on them; and when RK mobilizes his energies into a hysterical fit, balance results from the ensuing struggle. 

In short, if Wikipedia is to present both sides, it’s contingent on letting RK be RK. He generates chaos and a lot of ill-will. He’s often obnoxious (but he can magnanimously admit that he was wrong – I believe that he took my advice to stop calling a very well-respected user an anti-Semite). He even alienates his own supporters, and often attacks potential allies with great bitterness. But due to the nature of users who are attracted to the Israeli/Palestinian article, the only way to get balance is stalemate after stalemate after stalemated zero-sum conflict between equally powerful and committed groups of antagonists. Among the non-academic partisans who take the time to write about this dispute, the fanatical camps on both sides make it impossible for the two sides to put aside their differences and agree on what a neutral article is. It’s too idealistic to expect them to have the dexterity to cooperate and quit wasting time by sniping at each other. RK’s intransigence, and often
 flat out bizarre behavior, but it’s an indispensable part of a confluence of opposing forces required for Israeli-Palestinian neutrality.

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