Andrew Lih wrote:
I've been waiting for this voice of reason. As much as I appreciate Adam Carr's work, scores of useful contributors have come and become valuable members of the community.
There are about 500-700 very active Wikipedians in EN recently, up from 300 at the beginning of the year. Let's try to get beyond the anecdotal.
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians. What's doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality articles on controversial topics. A quick look reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them. [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that mess. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates. There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.
The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular issue, are a major problem. The neutral arbiters tend to be people without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to the editing process.
-Mark