You make your point well. Then, if the object is "figuring out ways of
isolating idiocy that don't amount to iron fist control." then it seems to
me that the best way of accoomplishing this is to make forum shopping a firm
criterion for closure of discussion. Is it still an essay? Why don't we
propose it as a guideline?
On Nov 14, 2007 8:56 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Nov 14, 2007, at 11:37 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
If you
don't support open discourse for everyone, you don't support it at
all.
You're mostly just restating the basic paradox here. Yes - we want an
open discourse-based project. On the other hand, an extended six month
saga of forum shopping a doomed cause is not useful - it's counter-
productive, engenders bad faith and assumptions thereof, increases
wikistress, and sucks time and air away from the business of improving
articles.
Endless toleration of idiots (where "idiot" is defined as "inability
or refusal to contribute desireable content") is not the goal of any
productive system, no matter how open the discourse. The trick is
figuring out ways of isolating idiocy that don't amount to iron fist
control.
In the article space we mostly have a system in place to identify POV
pushers and other idiots and isolate them through blocks, social
censure, and reversion until they get annoyed and leave. Equivalent
behaviors in the policy space are far more accepted, and for good
reason - we have our basic content principles well spelled out (NPOV,
Verifiability, etc). It's a lot harder to reduce the policy space to
first premises and then isolate those who do not adhere to them.
This is, incidentally, why inclusionism/deletionism debates never end
and often get so contentious - we don't have the same well-defined
definition of what a useful contributor is on deletion debates that we
do in the article namespace.
All of which is to say, I think the problem is rather more complex
than people are making it out to be, and has a significant component
that persists even after the two obvious statements ("Shoot the
idiots" and "open discourse is important") are made.
-Phil
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