At 01:49 PM 5/31/2010, AGK wrote:

On 31 May 2010, at 18:21, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com wrote:

...

But AGK is an administrator, and if he expects that "police" work will "almost always cause the administrator to gain enemies," I rather suspect that some of his work is less than optimal.

Irrelevant and incorrect. Shame, because I was starting to really like your ideas.

Interesting, AGK. Are the ideas important, or the personalities? Here, you just demonstrated my concern even further.

I did not have in mind that you were an abusive administrator, and I've never had occasion to review your work. It takes a lot of time, and I've only done it when presented with an abundance of evidence, and a simple comment like you made here wouldn't even begin to approach what it would take to move me in that direction.

I've certainly seen you make sound judgments, and nothing abusive comes to mind. But would I have seen it? I'm suggesting that the position you are taking reflects the kind of expectations that would arise from the experience of someone who doesn't understand how to administer neutrally and with maximal effectiveness in gaining voluntary cooperation.

The tipoff is the "almost always." This is high expectation, and it is almost certainly not true of skilfull administrative work in the area of behavioral policing.

AGK, I hope and assume that you were teachable. Or are you too "experienced" to remain teachable?

Hey, I'd love to review your work and be able to say, "I was wrong, actually, you were very skilled and did everything you could to avoid unnecessary bad reaction and disruption, but it usually happened anyway." Well, actually, I wouldn't love one part of it. It would convince me that the Wikipedia basic design was impossible, doomed from the start, if that's the way people are.

My experience elsewhere with organizations, however, leads me to think differently. With skill, real consensus is quite possible. It takes a lot of work, but once the work is done, it is self-maintaining. There is no more battleground. There is a community working together, including people who had, orginally, widely divergent points of view, and some of who may still retain those views, but they have learned to cooperate toward common and shared goals with others, and they have learned that when they do this, their own personal goals are more excellently accomplished.

Most "POV-pushers" on Wikipedia want the articles to be what they believe is neutral. Some of them, possibly, will be unable to recognize true neutrality, they would only be satisfied if the article completely reflects their own point of view and denigrates different points of view. But those are quite rare, in my experience, and real consensus process makes such an agenda quite obvious. Most of these will withdraw, it becomes so painfully obvious. The few that remain and who continue to argue tenaciously for what has been almost universally rejected, this is the group where blocking might become necessary. It should always be considered dangerous, and the standard I propose for neutrality is a measure, not an absolute. Neutrality is reflected in the degree to which all editors agree that text is neutral. If you exclude editors from that measure, you warp it, you create the appearance of consensus by banning a position. We should always know what the true level of consensus is with articles, and that may require, even, consensus to be assessed by some means off-wiki, or with some kind of restricted participation. Scibaby's opinion about global warming should be solicited!

Wikipedia might not please everyone, but it needs to know how it's doing. Or it has no way of assessing its own neutrality, and thus no way of even knowing if improvements are needed.