[WikiEN-l] Anti-scientific bias has me hopping mad!

Tue Oct 7 21:57:43 UTC 2003

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I'm getting awfully tired of watching environmentalists inject their
>junk science POV into articles. They palm off their own prejudices as
>scientific fact far too glibly for me to remain patient any longer.
>  
>
While I can sympathize with some of this, I don't think it's any sort of 
a special case.  Environmentalism versus its critics is an NPOV dispute, 
much like Israel/Palestine, pro/anti War on Iraq, pro/anti abortion, and 
so on.  We have a ton of NPOV disputes on Wikipedia pretty much 
constantly, and I don't think there's a great solution to it other than 
to hammer them out on a case by case basis.

That said, users on any subject who are consistently problematic should 
be asked to tone things down.  But if we banned all partisans, we'd be 
banning a good portion of our userbase (just banning all 
Israel/Palestine partisans would probably take out 10-15 of our more 
active contributors).

As for "issuing official warnings," how exactly are they official?  I 
could issue "official warnings," but they'd still just be me personally 
warning people.  As for suspending people, you *certainly* don't have 
the authority to do that any more than I have the authority to suspend 
you.  At this point I think only Jimbo has the authority to do anything 
officially, and soon hopefully we'll have some committees set up to do 
so as well.

-Mark