Well, having given this some thought for my
presentation last Thursday,
the way I explained the issue was to first
categorize conflicts into
"good faith" & "bad faith". Good faith is where two
or more people
disagree on the matter, but are willing to discuss
the matter in a
civil manner towards a consensus -- even if the
consensus is nothing
more than to agree to disagree (which is one way *I*
explain the NPOV).
Bad faith are specific destructive acts or types of
people -- vandals,
cranks & troublemakers. And these labels shuold only
be applied where
there is no ambiguity about the situation:
* A vandal is someone who thinks adding nonsense or
offensive material
to an article is proper behavior -- e.g. taking the
statement
"George Bush is president of the United States" &
changing "president"
to another word like "war criminal", "wanker" or
"donkey".
This sounds very cut and dried, but in reality there
are good faith people who would insist that George
Bush IS a war criminal. It sounds like we are in
danger of telling Rosa Parks to stop disrupting the
bus because the rest of us want to sit down. Surely
she is just doing that to cause havoc? What reasonable
black person would try to sit in the white portion of
the bus? There are unpopular opinions that we need to
listen to.
Let's focus on behaviors, like clear vandalism and
personal attacks, and stop getting wound up about
people's political opinions.
Norath
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