Charles Matthews wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I think you're right, in principle, to favour approaches where points of view out of the mainstream are documented in some way, rather than excluded by some sort of decree.
Of course I am. Being Right is my superpower. Err, whoops. Was that my outside voice?
That being said, WP will always want them documented in a certain low-rhetoric, crisp way with supporting cites. This is unlikely to satisfy anybody but the most level-headed, reasonable holders of said points of view.
I believe it will, at minimum, cut down on the number of people reverting the article after "attacks" have been "fixed" in some way, and will reduce the number of attempts to circumvent administrative rules. For one thing, the most egregious offenders act as blunt instruments, and probably won't know what to do about information they've posted that isn't deleted, but just gets shuffled around a bit to add a more professional tone. Such a person may not even necessarily realize that his bias has been bled out, as long as his (probably specious) statistics are still presented in some manner.
Keep in mind that people who push bias and ignore attempts at objectivity think they're being objective, and the phrasing they choose tends to be a result of the inability to recognize the distinction between biased and unbiased language. Bias in academic works is typically the result of blindness to one's own bias: we all do it, though the more alert of us might do it far less than some others. Altering pejorative or prejudicial language without altering core data can often mitigate problems of disagreement simply by leaving biased parties with no options but A) leave it as is or B) becoming truly irrational, even in one's own eyes.
In any case, as Jimbo has pointed out, the soft solution is preferable if it works. Considering Wikipedia is entirely built upon the notion that collaborative peer review selects for good information and presentation, it seems to me that the softest solution (apply Wikipedia's core precepts faithfully and fully) is also likely the most effective, in cases such as this.
Acrid contention is to be expected, unless and until one gets 'insidious POV-pushing': people prepared to operate on a time scale of years within the norms and with the general grain of the way WP works. We have ways of ring-fencing some of the contentious issues (not all); we don't currently have much idea about regulating the latter.
"Insidious POV-pushing" is probably far more prevalent than you realize. In fact, I suspect that every non-stub article in Wikipedia has at least indirectly suffered at the hands of that phenomenon, though in probably no greater degree than any Other Encyclopedia. Even attempts to mitigate or eliminate bias involve some degree of POV advocacy. If real bias begins to appear in an article, I haven't much fear that it won't be corrected in due time, though.
The real problem to examine here, I think, is in such issues as ballot-stuffing and revert-wars. If the Stormfront troopers start engaging in regular revert-wars, that's fairly easily addressed by such administrivia as the 3RR and, if that proves ineffective, it just points out something that needs work.
As for ballot-stuffing (which has already happened once with Stormfront, apparently), I'm of the opinion that votes are counterproductive under most circumstances, anyway. Votes are calls for a majority opinion -- POV bias by definition -- rather than a function or extension of the economics of public content reference materials. Much like a capitalistic market tends, in a vacuum, toward an equilibrium of wealth production, so too does the semi-social machinery of Wikipedia's publicly editable content tend toward an equilibrium of data purity, at least when it mostly operates in a vacuum (without too much bureaucratic red tape).
In short, the "solution" in this case (in my opinion) is three-fold:
1. We should simply become better, and more alert, editors.
2. We should treat system abuses as an opportunity to improve administrative rules.
3. We should avoid opportunities for tangential and auxiliary functions (like polls and votes) to be sabotaged, most likely by minimizing the incidence of such functions: if it can be done without a vote, but still be accomplished in the spirit of community, it should be.
-- Chad