Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
So the editor who's trying to delete something has to do, say, 100 times the work of the person who added it.
I don't think that's true. If it is, then we should engage in a concerted effort to be conscious of it and make it not so. Basically, I think we should have a general attitude against _mere_ deleting, in favor of _correcting_ and _improving_. But that alone doesn't put any additional burden on the revisor that wasn't on the originator.
the sciences. It's fairly easy to check the atomic weight of silver, but much harder to refute an assertion that Count Leonard III was a pivotal figure in British tactics used in the 100 years war. He's not, I just made that up, now what do you suppose it would take to refute that?
But you don't have to refute it. It isn't necessary to prove a negative in order to remove something. All that you have to do is say something like, in your own delightful wording, "moving unsourced material to talk pages". And then put a note on the talk page saying something like "This is interesting about Count Leonard III, however I was unable to confirm it. Can someone post a source before we put it back in the article?"
I'm sure that would carry plenty of weight.
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. I support NPOV, and don't think that it's the encyclopedia's job to take sides. But having an NPOV policy does not prevent conflict, as we've seen. NPOV is not a pallative for disagreements about articles.
Well, it is true that NPOV policy doesn't prevent _all_ conflict, but it's designed to help prevent _most_ conflict, and more importantly, to ensure that there is at least the _possibility_ of a resolution.
With an NPOV policy, there are still problems in three areas:
- There are disagreements about the facts.
There are, for example, people who believe that Roundup (the herbicide) is carcinogenic. It isn't, but based on a single irresponsibly written study (Ericson & Hardell), this belief persists. Some people might consider statements like, "Roundup, a known carcinogen, has seen increasingly widespread use on fruit and vegetable crops each year since 1995." Someone might try to compromise by replacing "known carcinogen" with "suspected carcinogen," but even that view is fringe enough that it doesn't belong in an article about vegetable crops.
One issue here is whether or not it belongs in the article, and that's a tough one to treat. I suspect an article about Roundup could more easily cover that controversy, and that the throwaway statement on the vegetable crops article is likely best just left out completely.
For example, it would likely be best to avoid "Roundup, generally considered safe, has seen increasingly..." too. If there's ongoing genuine controversy, then perhaps it's necessary for even the vegetable crops article to say something like "Roundup has seen increasingly widespread use on fruit and vegetable crops each year since 1995. There has been some resulting controversy, which is covered in more detail in the article on [[Roundup]]."
(Stylistically, that's a bit odd, because we usually write each article as self-contained and without mentioning other articles.)
- There are disagreements about what is important and what is not,
and hence, the relative amounts of emphasis something should be given.
This is a problem particularly outside the sciences.
This is certainly true, and the usual solution, which works fairly often anyway, is to break the article down into component parts, so that the issue just vanishes. I concede that this is not always possible.
- Closely related to #2, there is difficulty coming up with summary
statements for difficult, involved problems.
Often such statements can be crafted, with careful participation of several writers over time. When someone new to the article comes in, they may (inadvertently or deliberately) destroy a fragile consensus.
That's true, but that's also the essence of the NPOV process. So it isn't really a problem for the process, it _is_ the process. If you see what I mean...
I think it's great to have articles on UFOs, the "Reciprocal System of Theory," and how G.W. Bush stole the presidency from the rightfully-elected Al Gore.
Hmmm, I think I agree with you, but would have phrased this ever so slightly differently. I think it's great to have articles on UFOs, the "Reciprocal System of Theory," and how some people think that Al Gore tried to steal the presidency from the rightfully-elected G. W. Bush. O.k., I am just having fun by reversing it, but my real point is that having an article about what some people think is fine, but an article titled "How George Bush stole the election" isn't fine.
But I'm pretty sure that's what you meant anyway.
But none of these should pervade the article space. We wouldn't want a UFO enthusiast to get a bot and edit all the city articles and add a list of UFO sightings for each city. And we wouldn't want every article that has a reference to Al Gore to refer to him as "Al Gore, rightfully elected president of the United States."
That's right.
I don't think that banning users solves anything, and did not suggest it in my post.
Do you think it never solves anything? I agree completely that banning has an uneven track record. Sometimes it works! Other times, it just generates monsters from people who would have otherwise merely been annoyances.
One of the things that my strong 'libertarian' political views tell me is that "there ought to be a law" is a constant temptation, but often a siren's song. People misbehaving on the Wikipedia? Ban 'em!
But sometimes this just drives the undesirable activity onto the 'black market' or whatever.
--Jimbo