Sean writes:
I am very worried that we are seriously discussing the formation of a committee empowered to prohibit unpopular content from Wikipedia and to ban those that feel that it is important to record it.
Isn't that a deliberate lie? What facts (written in NPOV format) did Larry Sanger try to censor? What facts (written in NPOV format) did Steve Rubenstein try to censor? NONE.
I strongly object to this strawman attack - which borders on an ad homenim attack - on the discussion of improving Wikipedia.
Folks, we still have a major problem. There are many people here who unfortunately refuse to cite sources, engage in original research, write things that are just false and bizarre.
For years many of our best contributors have been driven away due to these problems, and the Wikipedia leadership has done little to address the core problem: While we enforce rules about "playing nice", virtually no one attempts to seriously enforce our rules and policies on citing sources, verifiability, and just plain making sure that our articles do not contain flat-out bullshit.
There are many people who are exceptions to this, of course, like Steve R. and JayJG. For them, following Wikipedia policy such as citing sources, verifiability, and removing original content are actually important, and not just lip-service. However people like them are working on an individual basis. That just doesn't cut it for an encyclopedia of tens of thousands of articles!
For some time Steve Rubenstein and a few others have pointed out this flaw, and have made the quite reasonable suggestion that we have some sort of ArbCom to deal with content disputes. (Remember, the entire point of this project is to create reliable encyclopedia content. Everything else is an aside.)
Yet at every turn people who ask for such minor and obviously useful control mechanisms are attacked with strawman criticisms, falsely accused of censorship, and are generally treated with disdain. Is it any wonder that Wikipedia still has a relatively poor reputation among many college, university and high school teachers?
Until we take our primary goal seriously - dealing with content problems - Wikipedia will remain at beast a curiosity, an "encyclopedia" filled with questionable content.
What's most shocking about this is that the problems we face are so easily solvable (for instance, set up volunteer ArbComs for article content) but every proposal is attacked in heated and misleading ways.
Robert (RK)
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