Minty-
There is a limit to how much one person can review,
but *you* can
choose to trust many people. Once you've seen articles reviewed by
your own list of reviewers, add the second degree reviewers. Friends
of friends.
This is a good model for a system where we want many different versions to
coexist, i.e. where we agree that there is not one "good" version", but
everyone might have their own preference of what constitutes a good one.
In Wikipedia terms, Robert Brookes might flag his POV version of the
circumcision article, for example. It certainly would be a good way to end
many edit wars as people would start maintaining their preferred branches
in parallel, not caring whether they are instantly reverted or not. The
fight over the current "top" version would become less dramatic.
I predict that such trust systems will evolve outside Wikipedia and will
develop Wikipedia content into versions written from a shared POV of an
individual community. To some extent, this is already happening
(Disinfopedia etc.).
If we establish trust-based versioning within Wikipedia, I believe it
means that we essentially abandon our belief that we can increasingly
approach a single article written from the neutral point of view. People
have been pushing separate branches already for a few controversial
articles; if we give them the tools to do so, this is almost inevitable,
in my opinion.
Humans are social creatures. When they feel very strongly about something,
they seek out others who agree with them - just browse the "Wikipedians"
pages on Meta. Ironically, I believe that if we want to maintain the NPOV
principle, we have to sabotage that natural instinct to some degree. We
have to focus on the one thing that connects us all, the desire to build a
great, neutral encyclopedia, and we have to be able to repress any
revulsion we feel at the stupid ideas of others.
My preferred approach is one where the peer review process actually
results in increased work on the article, where disagreements are resolved
not by flagging your preferred version, but by backing up your opinion
with citations for any individual statement of fact that is in dispute.
On the Featured Article Candidates page, we have introduced the principle
of "actionability". If an objection is not actionable, it can be ignored.
This principle needs to be developed further and permeate all of
Wikipedia, so that POV partisans cannot easily sabotage discussions.
Together with an improved discussion system that encourages refactoring
the results of discussions into policy pages, I believe we can deal with
many of the same problems that keep coming up again and again, like
explicit content or balance in controversial articles.
Regards,
Erik