Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
James and Erik became frustrated to the point where
they each were
trying to line up support and get you involved. I consider that a
failure of the "Wiki consensus editing model," and the collateral
damage (that is, Erik and James' frustration and anger, and that of
others who tried to help) isn't worth it, even if the article is better
in the end;
Well, it certainly wasn't a good thing, but other than some heated
words and then some apologies, it didn't really amount to much, did
it?
also, it does not scale so when we have ten times the
active participation we do today, the process, such as it is, breaks
down.
Well, when we had 1/10th the active participation that we do now,
people said that it wouldn't scale. And yet, so far, it has.
Consider this: Erik and James are both longtime contributors, highly
valued, and who have worked together and supported each other on many
various times in the past. Both are strong personalities, and strong
personalities sometimes clash.
Humans being human beings, the occassional unkind remark and hostile
response is not something that we can design a system to completely
avoid.
My point is: no system other than a mutual commitment by all of us to
be kind, quiet, thoughtful, caring, loving, task-focussed, etc., is
going to magically turn us all into perfect people.
Perhaps there are two separate things. Most
disruptive and
counter-productive behavior by longstanding users has its roots in
disputes over content. Provide a fair, effective means of resolving
the content disputes, and >poof<, the cases of disruption requiring
bans become rare.
My point, I suppose, is that while there are certainly many ways that
we can improve things, we already have a revolutionary new tool for
effectively resolving content disputes, one which works far better
than anything which ever existed before, and we use it daily to very
good effect. What tool is that? NPOV policy tied to wiki technology.
The 'mutually assured destruction' and 'radical equality' of wiki
editing *is* the fair, effective means of resolving content disputes.
Abandon that and yes, we could have more peace and quiet -- like
Nupedia. Keep it, and we're going to have to put up with a certain
amount of noise and ruckus.
arbitration, well, if we are going to have an
arbitration committee,
there isn't going to be much for them to do if they aren't going to
hear article disputes :-).
Well, actually, yes, there will be a lot to do. The key is that
arbitration and potentially even banning have always ended up being
about behavioral problems, not content problems. Yes, there is
overlap between the two. And yes, a philosopher might imagine a
situation where a firm position on the content is necessary to resolve
the behavioral dispute.
But by and large, banning should boil down to a situation where
someone refuses to try to accomodate reasonable alternative
presentations, refuses to get along with others.
Ideally, we would find some way to bring about a
culture change to
encourage more supportive and facilitative work on the part of
Wikipedians in general. Had their been a greater amount of this in the
Mother Teresa article, I think the dispute would have been contained
and resolved. Instead, Wikipedians reviewed the article and made their
own edits; though the article may have improved, that didn't help the
dispute much.
Yes, I'm very much in favor of refining and extended our culture to be
"more supportive and facilitative".
Toward this end, I wish people would be a LOT less quick to talk about
banning others. I wish people would be a LOT less quick to just
delete stuff that they don't like, rather than editing it or adding to
it.
But remember, I'm a veteran of Usenet flame wars in the old days.
Compared to other environments, our culture is really astounding, even
when we have our bad days.
--Jimbo