On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 6:37 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/04/2008, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
The converse is, when we say "use your good judgement and own knowledge" we enter unsolvable conflicts. Excessive sourcing is the only way to resolve this - in an article like Evolution or Armenian Genocide, you simply source the fuck out of everything and tell those acting in bad faith to take a hike - as it stands, on Wikipedia, there's no other way to deal with this. Attacking V/NOR et al. without replacing the absolutely critical functions it does perform would be suicidal.
The trouble is that building a structure rigid enough to deal with bad faith or even just blithering stupidity is utterly unsuitable for use by clueful editors of good faith, and is actually actively damaging right now.
You are not going to solve malice or cluelessness with a set of rules. I think the failure of the current incarnations to do so demonstrates this, and I really doubt the solution is more of the same.
- d.
No matter how much that's damaging right now, merely letting the malicious and clueless run about unchecked would not improve the situation. They're already problematically powerful, and this is about the only leverage that exists against them. Without a radical overhaul of the whole method of writing, no new leverages will be created. Everything is contraversial, and every article has cranks & the passionate trying to push junk into it. While it might've been possible to go without in 2004, and article writing culture today demands it or some huge substitute.
Until some other method exists to deal with POVpushers, bad-faith editors and cranks, these really are the pillars that support the whole structure.
WilyD