Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
So the editor who's trying to delete something
has to do, say, 100
times the work of the person who added it.
I don't think that's true. If it is, then we should engage in a
concerted effort to be conscious of it and make it not so. Basically,
I think we should have a general attitude against _mere_ deleting, in
favor of _correcting_ and _improving_. But that alone doesn't put any
additional burden on the revisor that wasn't on the originator.
the sciences. It's fairly easy to check the
atomic weight of silver,
but much harder to refute an assertion that Count Leonard III was a
pivotal figure in British tactics used in the 100 years war. He's not,
I just made that up, now what do you suppose it would take to refute
that?
But you don't have to refute it. It isn't necessary to prove a
negative in order to remove something. All that you have to do is say
something like, in your own delightful wording, "moving unsourced
material to talk pages". And then put a note on the talk page saying
something like "This is interesting about Count Leonard III, however I
was unable to confirm it. Can someone post a source before we put it
back in the article?"
I'm sure that would carry plenty of weight.
Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. I support
NPOV, and don't think
that it's the encyclopedia's job to take sides. But having an NPOV
policy does not prevent conflict, as we've seen. NPOV is not a
pallative for disagreements about articles.
Well, it is true that NPOV policy doesn't prevent _all_ conflict, but
it's designed to help prevent _most_ conflict, and more importantly,
to ensure that there is at least the _possibility_ of a resolution.
With an NPOV policy, there are still problems in three
areas:
1. There are disagreements about the facts.
There are, for example, people who believe that Roundup (the herbicide)
is carcinogenic. It isn't, but based on a single irresponsibly written
study (Ericson & Hardell), this belief persists. Some people might
consider statements like, "Roundup, a known carcinogen, has seen
increasingly widespread use on fruit and vegetable crops each year
since 1995." Someone might try to compromise by replacing "known
carcinogen" with "suspected carcinogen," but even that view is fringe
enough that it doesn't belong in an article about vegetable crops.
One issue here is whether or not it belongs in the article, and that's
a tough one to treat. I suspect an article about Roundup could more
easily cover that controversy, and that the throwaway statement on the
vegetable crops article is likely best just left out completely.
For example, it would likely be best to avoid "Roundup, generally
considered safe, has seen increasingly..." too. If there's ongoing
genuine controversy, then perhaps it's necessary for even the
vegetable crops article to say something like "Roundup has seen
increasingly widespread use on fruit and vegetable crops each year
since 1995. There has been some resulting controversy, which is
covered in more detail in the article on [[Roundup]]."
(Stylistically, that's a bit odd, because we usually write each
article as self-contained and without mentioning other articles.)
2. There are disagreements about what is important
and what is not,
and hence, the relative amounts of emphasis something should be given.
This is a problem particularly outside the sciences.
This is certainly true, and the usual solution, which works fairly
often anyway, is to break the article down into component parts, so
that the issue just vanishes. I concede that this is not always
possible.
3. Closely related to #2, there is difficulty coming
up with summary
statements for difficult, involved problems.
Often such statements can be crafted, with careful participation of
several writers over time. When someone new to the article comes in,
they may (inadvertently or deliberately) destroy a fragile consensus.
That's true, but that's also the essence of the NPOV process. So it
isn't really a problem for the process, it _is_ the process. If you
see what I mean...
I think it's great to have articles on UFOs, the
"Reciprocal System of
Theory," and how G.W. Bush stole the presidency from the
rightfully-elected Al Gore.
Hmmm, I think I agree with you, but would have phrased this ever so
slightly differently. I think it's great to have articles on UFOs,
the "Reciprocal System of Theory," and how some people think that Al
Gore tried to steal the presidency from the rightfully-elected
G. W. Bush. O.k., I am just having fun by reversing it, but my real
point is that having an article about what some people think is fine,
but an article titled "How George Bush stole the election" isn't fine.
But I'm pretty sure that's what you meant anyway.
But none of these should pervade the article space.
We wouldn't want a
UFO enthusiast to get a bot and edit all the city articles and add a
list of UFO sightings for each city. And we wouldn't want every
article that has a reference to Al Gore to refer to him as "Al Gore,
rightfully elected president of the United States."
That's right.
I don't think that banning users solves anything,
and did not suggest
it in my post.
Do you think it never solves anything? I agree completely that
banning has an uneven track record. Sometimes it works! Other times,
it just generates monsters from people who would have otherwise merely
been annoyances.
One of the things that my strong 'libertarian' political views tell me
is that "there ought to be a law" is a constant temptation, but often
a siren's song. People misbehaving on the Wikipedia? Ban 'em!
But sometimes this just drives the undesirable activity onto the
'black market' or whatever.
--Jimbo