You make your point well. Then, if the object is "figuring out ways of isolating idiocy that don't amount to iron fist control." then it seems to me that the best way of accoomplishing this is to make forum shopping a firm criterion for closure of discussion. Is it still an essay? Why don't we propose it as a guideline?
On Nov 14, 2007 8:56 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 14, 2007, at 11:37 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
If you don't support open discourse for everyone, you don't support it at all.
You're mostly just restating the basic paradox here. Yes - we want an open discourse-based project. On the other hand, an extended six month saga of forum shopping a doomed cause is not useful - it's counter- productive, engenders bad faith and assumptions thereof, increases wikistress, and sucks time and air away from the business of improving articles.
Endless toleration of idiots (where "idiot" is defined as "inability or refusal to contribute desireable content") is not the goal of any productive system, no matter how open the discourse. The trick is figuring out ways of isolating idiocy that don't amount to iron fist control.
In the article space we mostly have a system in place to identify POV pushers and other idiots and isolate them through blocks, social censure, and reversion until they get annoyed and leave. Equivalent behaviors in the policy space are far more accepted, and for good reason - we have our basic content principles well spelled out (NPOV, Verifiability, etc). It's a lot harder to reduce the policy space to first premises and then isolate those who do not adhere to them.
This is, incidentally, why inclusionism/deletionism debates never end and often get so contentious - we don't have the same well-defined definition of what a useful contributor is on deletion debates that we do in the article namespace.
All of which is to say, I think the problem is rather more complex than people are making it out to be, and has a significant component that persists even after the two obvious statements ("Shoot the idiots" and "open discourse is important") are made.
-Phil
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l