On 6/9/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Matt Brown (morven@gmail.com) [050609 07:42]:
I'm also concerned that turning policies into rigid rules, procedures, committees and the like may advantage those who like to rules-lawyer over those with less patience for minutae.
Yes. That's precisely my uneasy feeling about this discussion. POV pushers won't go away, they'll adapt to circumstances. If a hundred editors say Rush Limbaugh outdraws a peer-reviewed scientific paper as a reference on science, do they win the vote 100-1?
Also, I've seen no plans for when such content decisions are reviewable. Never? Once you win, is the question officially fixed?
I purposely didn't want to say a number for this reason. What I was trying to illustrate was the point in WP:V that the article in general should be verifiable by people who are likely to edit that article. So for an article on science, if a source is questionable, we ask some scientists, either literally ask some, or think like a scientist would. In either case, your example would probably be resolved in favour of the peer-reviewed paper.
As for reviewable decisions, I don't think there's an answer to that, party because Wikipedia is a wiki, and is always flexible and changing. I don't believe that flexibility should be abused, or in any way twisted to be an unfair advantage. As it says at Wikipedia:Consensus, consensus should not trump NPOV (or any other policy). Sometimes it may happen, and that's a bad thing, but sometimes that's just the price of being a wiki. Too many rules (as opposed to policies for editors to follow) reduce the wikiness.
The other point was that WP is (or wants to be) an encyclopaedia, and that some POVs have to be excluded. The way we do that is by assessing how much (academic) support they have, in terms of the context and subject matter. There's no need for content committees, as long as consensus decisions on WP:NPOV can be acheieved (mediation) and enforced (arbitration).