Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
James and Erik became frustrated to the point where they each were trying to line up support and get you involved. I consider that a failure of the "Wiki consensus editing model," and the collateral damage (that is, Erik and James' frustration and anger, and that of others who tried to help) isn't worth it, even if the article is better in the end;
Well, it certainly wasn't a good thing, but other than some heated words and then some apologies, it didn't really amount to much, did it?
also, it does not scale so when we have ten times the active participation we do today, the process, such as it is, breaks down.
Well, when we had 1/10th the active participation that we do now, people said that it wouldn't scale. And yet, so far, it has.
Consider this: Erik and James are both longtime contributors, highly valued, and who have worked together and supported each other on many various times in the past. Both are strong personalities, and strong personalities sometimes clash.
Humans being human beings, the occassional unkind remark and hostile response is not something that we can design a system to completely avoid.
My point is: no system other than a mutual commitment by all of us to be kind, quiet, thoughtful, caring, loving, task-focussed, etc., is going to magically turn us all into perfect people.
Perhaps there are two separate things. Most disruptive and counter-productive behavior by longstanding users has its roots in disputes over content. Provide a fair, effective means of resolving the content disputes, and >poof<, the cases of disruption requiring bans become rare.
My point, I suppose, is that while there are certainly many ways that we can improve things, we already have a revolutionary new tool for effectively resolving content disputes, one which works far better than anything which ever existed before, and we use it daily to very good effect. What tool is that? NPOV policy tied to wiki technology.
The 'mutually assured destruction' and 'radical equality' of wiki editing *is* the fair, effective means of resolving content disputes. Abandon that and yes, we could have more peace and quiet -- like Nupedia. Keep it, and we're going to have to put up with a certain amount of noise and ruckus.
arbitration, well, if we are going to have an arbitration committee, there isn't going to be much for them to do if they aren't going to hear article disputes :-).
Well, actually, yes, there will be a lot to do. The key is that arbitration and potentially even banning have always ended up being about behavioral problems, not content problems. Yes, there is overlap between the two. And yes, a philosopher might imagine a situation where a firm position on the content is necessary to resolve the behavioral dispute.
But by and large, banning should boil down to a situation where someone refuses to try to accomodate reasonable alternative presentations, refuses to get along with others.
Ideally, we would find some way to bring about a culture change to encourage more supportive and facilitative work on the part of Wikipedians in general. Had their been a greater amount of this in the Mother Teresa article, I think the dispute would have been contained and resolved. Instead, Wikipedians reviewed the article and made their own edits; though the article may have improved, that didn't help the dispute much.
Yes, I'm very much in favor of refining and extended our culture to be "more supportive and facilitative".
Toward this end, I wish people would be a LOT less quick to talk about banning others. I wish people would be a LOT less quick to just delete stuff that they don't like, rather than editing it or adding to it.
But remember, I'm a veteran of Usenet flame wars in the old days. Compared to other environments, our culture is really astounding, even when we have our bad days.
--Jimbo