Jimmy-

Is the amount of internal squabbling getting worse or better? My rough sense is that it's getting worse, but maybe I'm just tired of it and therefore perceiving it to be more of a problem lately.

It's getting a little worse. I think one reason is that we have devoted so many pages and places to dealing with conflicts. The worst of all, in my opinion, is the "Wikipedia:Conflicts between users" page. It is effectively a public arena. Making a dispute ever more public is not a very good idea. It attracts spectators and more combatants, and it increases the feeling of the individuals involved that they have to "win" to avoid public embarrassment.

Things worked better early on because you were a private mediator everyone could talk to by email. This model, of course, is not scalable, and we need to find a scalable one that emulates its advantages.

I think the "Conflicts between users" page should redirect to the page for requesting mediation. I also think that mediation and arbitration need to be "privatized" to some degree.

The mediation commiette itself is fairly ineffective as it has neither a carrot nor a stick. For reasons unknown to me, the arbitration committee currently only accepts cases directly referred to it by you. This should be changed ASAP.

I think before we talk about stuff like trust metrics, we should optimize these processes.

Another reason things have gotten worse is that we now have over 200,000 articles, and Wikipedia has reached significant prominence. We have comprehensive pages about almost any controversial subject. These pages naturally attract highly devoted people, but they find out that most of the stuff they know is already covered, only that they disagree with the *wording* of certain sentences and paragraphs.

These disputes about particular words or phrases are often the most difficult to resolve, as there are no clear authorities either party can cite, and NPOV simply doesn't work here. Take the recent dispute on the [[Atheism]] page about whether to write "God" or "god": There are plenty of sources for both variants, and it's impractical to write something like "God, sometimes spelled god". Even the compromise that has been found - to use a neutral word like "deity" - does not always work.

Or how do you apply NPOV to the question whether the article about 9/11 attacks should have "terrorist" in the title? Do you want to call it [[September 11, 2001 attacks, sometimes referred to as terrorist]]? As Mav has often said, NPOV simply doesn't work in page titles.

In my opinion, voting is a lot more appropriate for these minor disputes than for major ones, and that should be reflected in our guidelines. Often these questions are simply matters of personal taste, and why not let the taste of the majority decide when there's clearly no solution that makes both sides happy?

What can we all do to build a sense of love and harmony?

What we always do: Refine our processes. It's a delicate balance. If you have too many rules, people feel constrained by them, which causes unhappiness. If you have too few, people disagree about interpreting them, which causes conflict. Right now I think we can deal with a little more unhappiness if it gives us a little less conflict.

Regards,

Erik

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Is the amount of internal squabbling getting worse or better? My rough sense is that it's getting worse, but maybe I'm just tired of it and therefore perceiving it to be more of a problem lately.

What can we all do to build a sense of love and harmony? What can each of us do to alter our own behavior to be supportive of others, less argumentative, more productive?

Is the mediation/arbitration system working to increase internal political problems, or do decrease those problems? Or, is it way too early to tell?

My concern is that it seems to me that we're spending way too much time on internal court intruigues, to our detriment. Every day, it seems, there's some new crisis of management, some new emergency ban, some new sysop crossing the line.

Part of this was caused, I think, by a perceived power vacuum after the start of the year. I was out of the business of policing, but the arbitration committee was still not ready. Sysops felt a real need to do something to stop some real problem users. It was a vicious cycle.

But, what about now? How can we bring about peace?

--Jimbo _______________________________________________

I think one thing we need to remember is that in real life people die over some of the issues we are squabbling about. With this in mind, it is hardly surprisingly that people edit-war "to the death" over some of them.

I think some of the problems are a natural consequence of our growth. The larger we become the more likely it is that we get a wider range of POVs. As we become more prominant we will also attract more "netcranks" and the like.

We still have a geographical bias, partly but not soley due to the different levels of internet access amongst different communities and countries. As this divide narrows we will get more contributors who disagree with the current consensus on various articles. Most articles on countries and political movements have not been edited by people from the relevant country.

If we sometimes have trouble getting Wikilove between the US and UK then it will probably get worse as net access improves in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, for example.

I don't mean to be pessimistic but we need to have a strategy to deal with this.

Caroline/Secretlondon