Gregory Kohs wrote:
Dan Tobias wrote:
> Why should any part of main article space
(or
> templates included in it) be controlled by outside people and used to
> present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality?
Why? Maybe because all parts of current main article space are controlled
by "inside" people and used to present their (perhaps distorted) view of
reality.
I don't think the solution to this is to allow "outside" people free
reign to present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality as well. It
doesn't improve the overall situation and it formalizes the very thing
we're trying to fix. We don't even allow advertisements _outside_ of the
article's content.
By policy, rule, and decree, the "outside"
people are told to try to voice
their concerns on Discussion pages, which we all know, are not mandated to
be heeded.
Which seems fine to me since "outside" people sometimes make
unreasonable demands that we should be free to decline. What would
Daniel Brandt put into his guaranteed-free-from-editing "rebuttal"
space? Or Gene Ray? I can imagine a lot of troublesome possibilities.
My question is, do we have many situations where "outside" people post
something reasonable on a talk page saying "this article misrepresents
fact X and here's a variety of sources that back this up" and our
"inside" people proceed to ignore it anyway? Without some evidence that
there's a systemic problem allowing this sort of thing to go on I don't
see a major problem here.
So, the "outside" people don't have
equal power. If the
guideline is that contributors to the article should have no conflict of
interest in the topic on which they're editing, almost by definition,
experts are thus driven out by those who merely know how to do citation
searches in the library (if even that).
If the COI guidelines are such that anyone who is simply an expert on a
field is defined as having a conflict of interest and is therefore
excluded from editing in it, then IMO there's something wrong with the
COI guidelines. There's no need to propose radical alterations to
Wikipedia's basic philosophy and software, work on fixing the COI
guidelines instead.
Why don't the "outside" people just do
what Angela does -- serve "inside" on
the Board for a while, then go "outside", but retain the special
"insider's"
privilege of editing articles (like the one about Wikia) directly from the
"outside"? I guess that rule doesn't scale so well.
"Outsiders" can become "insiders" much more easily than that, just
sign
up for a user account and hang around editing for a while. They would
still have some limits when it comes to editing the specific articles
they have conflicts of interest on but it opens up a broad range of
other possibilities. We've got notice boards and talk pages galore on
which to make complaints and draw attention to problems like this.
And there are other approaches that even "outsiders" can take; the ORTS
system, posting here on this mailing list, and in extreme cases
contacting the Foundation or its representatives. An office action is a
thing an "outsider" can have done that explicitly overrides
"insiders",
at least temporarily.