I'm afraid the proposal will work to the advantage of one side of the dispute, to the detriment of the other. One side is generally well educated and familiar with looking at both sides of an issue; the other is not, with no meaningful access to either education or sophisticated cultural memes.
To put it bluntly, this sounds like "the side I like doesn't win when we're being neutral".
Sometimes being genuinely neutral will have the effect of helping one side much more than the other. For instance, if evolutionists and creationists try to be neutral the resulting article will be much more supportive of evolution than creation--not for any sinister reason, but simply because *evolutionists have good sources and creationists don't*. A policy which requires good sources will favor the side which has the good sources.
If you go into a creation/evolution dispute saying "isn't it unfair that the evolutionists are well-educated and sophisticated, and can easily find sources, while the creationists can't?" you're badly misunderstanding what's going on. It's true that the creationists are less educated, and may have some trouble editing to Wikipedia standards because of that, but the main reason they can't edit well is that the sides don't have equal merit to them, and the side with less merit is going to have more trouble editing.
This is true of ethnic disputes as well as creationists.
Ken Arromdee wrote:
I'm afraid the proposal will work to the advantage of one side of the dispute, to the detriment of the other. One side is generally well educated and familiar with looking at both sides of an issue; the other is not, with no meaningful access to either education or sophisticated cultural memes.
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Sometimes being genuinely neutral will have the effect of helping one side much more than the other. For instance, if evolutionists and creationists try to be neutral the resulting article will be much more supportive of evolution than creation--not for any sinister reason, but simply because *evolutionists have good sources and creationists don't*. A policy which requires good sources will favor the side which has the good sources.
This may make a fair point. It does of course assume that we can objectively determine "good sources". This is actually hardest in "current affairs", sub-sector "highly controverted matters". Propaganda canot instantly be seen for what it is, in all cases.
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This is true of ethnic disputes as well as creationists.
But this is too sweeping. Typically in cases of say, communal violence, it is anyway not a question of whether killings on both sides of the story can be sourced, but of problems of neutrality based on undue emphasis. People will get penalised for too much reliable stuff put in articles, which will be judged a bias on their part, when it is all quite verifiable.
Charles