David Gerard wrote:
The trouble with ethnic conflict articles is that, rather than a few problem editors, there's an effectively infinite stream of partisans. (For whatever reason: local education is often partisan rather than NPOV?) So, even though a core of opinionated-though-neutral editors accumulates, there's an eternal stream of people who don't know and don't care about NPOV or Wikipedia principles in general - as far as they're concerned, someone is being WRONG on the Internet.
Proponents of "neutrality enforcement" need to make a case meeting a number of points.
(1) Why is this not a classical slippery slope, in which every area with conflicts on the site will eventually want its own watchdog? (2) The thing is obviously BITEy, and as David says there will be people constantly bitten. (3) Provides a disincentive to compromising, if instead there is a mechanism to lobby privately and remove an "opponent". (4) Bottom line, we believe content is firmly in the hands of the community. Such a proposal tends to turn this into content being (for the worst cases) in the hands of a small group not subject to direct democracy/accountability of any kind. I rather agree with Fred Bauder's comment that we would tend to see the pendulum at one extreme in such cases. In any case this seems a massive innovation in the handling of content, and I feel no happiness whenever the 'hard cases' drive content policy.
Charles