From: Andrey yaroslavl@gmail.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Times article (London) Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:45:16 +0400
"Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices".
Everyone who is engaged in everyday editing rather than idle discussions may recall plenty of incidents that confirm the validity of this assessment. There is no mechanism capable of stopping a group of people based in the same country and probably keeping in touch outside Wikipedia from pushing certain agenda into our articles. It is useless to argue and mediate because these folks know why they came to Wikipedia at almost the same time and what they want from the project. It is useless to complain, because ten to twenty like-minded one-purpose accounts may bomb any ANI discussion or AfD. You may neutralize a troll or two or three, but not a group of determined users who share the same real-life background and exhibit divergent patterns of behaviour.
A fresh example is the activity of Tartu-based accounts on WWII- and Holocaust-related subjects. We are told, to quote one of them, "there were two sides in the war, but it is erroneous to believe that, since SU won, only the Soviet opinion on the war is relevant and the others should just shut up". One or two editors interested in the subject are expected to stand up to a legion of people advocating in concert Neo-Nazi flavoured revisionism bordering on the heroization of Fascism. No, thank you. If the community at large is not willing to tackle certain unsavoury ideologies and such views are allowed to pester mainspace, it brings the entire project into disrepute. I'm not going to waste my day arguing that, in respect to the Holocaust, the Soviet side was right and the Nazi side was wrong.
No amount of "consensus" will change the reality. Wikipedia may either reflect that reality or may not. In order to prevent the process from being gamed by tendentious bigmouths, we need a system of content arbitration on history, linguistics, mathematics, physics, etc. The existing ArbCom does not arbitrate content. People seek (and invent) behavioural issues in order to get a hearing, hoping that their POV will be sanctioned at last. When they fail in this ambition, they leave the project in frustration, while newly registered accounts continue rehashing unresolved issues for years, ad infinitum. There are some long-standing disputes that just need to be solved once and for all, because the possibility of reaching consensus on them is nil.
--Ghirla
I agree in principle with the idea of content arbitration, though putting it into practice will not be easy. But it's something we need to think about seriously.
Also, stable versions. Islam being on the main page would not have been quite such the nightmare it became if one version of the article could not have been fought over. The fight would have been at a lower pitch. In the end it only calmed down when I threatened to block anyone who violated 1RR. Such measures should not have been necessary. Stable versions would have prevented a situation where we came to within a whisker of having to go to the backup main page.
Moreschi
_________________________________________________________________ The next generation of Hotmail is here! http://www.newhotmail.co.uk