Elian wrote:
NPOV policy should be: "authors should write from a neutral point of view."
Of course, that's an ideal. You can never completely leave your personal views aside. But the important is: you can try. People who openly work for pushing POV in an article, shouldn't be allowed to edit that article at all. NPOV policy is not about "I insert my propaganda into an article and let others do the tedious taks of neutralizing it", it's "do your best to write from a neutral point of view. And if you are unable to do so, leave the article alone". And this policy should be enforced by the community.
I support Elian's idea. And I concur with the conclusions Rebecca made in an earlier posting. I decided myself to leave the English Wikipedia one year ago after getting tired of fighting POV vandals for months. Their names changed but their ways remained the same. I had great hope when the arbitration committee was founded but soon I felt that this committee is not an adequate measure for the problem.
If you reached general agreement about a version then there should be a fast process of barring a new generation of POV pushers from tearing all the success down. It is not reasonable that we should go through the painfully long processes of mediation and arbitration again and again while these new POV pushers have time enough to undo all the progress in an article.
I regard Adam Carr as one of the best editors Wikipedia ever had in the history sector. With the current system you can only hope that new NPOV defenders come and go to fight the POV pushers. The main arguments against a stable version policy appear to be dogmas about what a wiki should be. At last you need to come to a sort of content arbitration or locking selected versions from major edits. If not, I fear that one day the potential NPOV defenders will be used up.
Mirko
Mirko Thiessen wrote
If you reached general agreement about a version then there should be a fast process of barring a new generation of POV pushers from tearing all the success down. It is not reasonable that we should go through the painfully long processes of mediation and arbitration again and again while these new POV pushers have time enough to undo all the progress in an article.
Well, I don't like this. My experience in the mathematics side is that you get actual experts, of whom there are not so many, coming along indeed months after pages are first worked on. And that's what I'd like to see.
Please, can we not reason from the worst-case behaviour of the system? Taking anecdotal evidence as decisive, rather than trying to define the scale of admitted problems, is unworthy of the project. Systems that lock up pages can be useful (PlanetMath for mathematics, for example); but that is not what WP does well.
Charlrs
On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 09:16:08 +0100, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Mirko Thiessen wrote
Please, can we not reason from the worst-case behaviour of the system? Taking anecdotal evidence as decisive, rather than trying to define the scale of admitted problems, is unworthy of the project. Systems that lock up pages can be useful (PlanetMath for mathematics, for example); but that is not what WP does well.
I've been waiting for this voice of reason. As much as I appreciate Adam Carr's work, scores of useful contributors have come and become valuable members of the community.
There are about 500-700 very active Wikipedians in EN recently, up from 300 at the beginning of the year. Let's try to get beyond the anecdotal.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Andrew Lih wrote:
I've been waiting for this voice of reason. As much as I appreciate Adam Carr's work, scores of useful contributors have come and become valuable members of the community.
There are about 500-700 very active Wikipedians in EN recently, up from 300 at the beginning of the year. Let's try to get beyond the anecdotal.
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians. What's doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality articles on controversial topics. A quick look reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them. [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that mess. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates. There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.
The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular issue, are a major problem. The neutral arbiters tend to be people without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to the editing process.
-Mark
Delirium wrote
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians. What's doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality articles on controversial topics.
It is not proved, to my satisfaction, that there is any system that really will produce worthy articles on the core contentious topics. Which are basically: the more acrid parts of US politics, the Middle East.
I don't believe that the Oder-Neisse line controversies, which Delirium referenced, are as bad as they were. I think the issue of how to deal with communist history, which appears to have been the last straw for Adam Carr, is not one that is a daily problem.
Baby and bathwater: I'll take the word of those that look at it all the time that the Israeli-Palestinian area has suffered some 'balkanisation'. A point I have made before is that if you try to write contemporary history, especially without enough primary materials, you have a self-imposed problem.
Solutions: I'd be quite happy if the ArbCom did crank up its sanctions for egregious POV editing, but there is never going to be a shortage of POV editors until the world changes. I still like rapid pendulum arbitration and short-term page protection to take the heat out of edit wars.
Charles
This thread basically encapsulates my frustration over the occasional POV disputes that flare up on [[Malaysia]]-related articles. When I first came here more than a year ago, I felt many of our articles covering Malaysia were fine, i.e. [[Bumiputra]], [[Malaysia]], [[Mahathir bin Mohamad]]. A year later, I'm horrified at the state of these articles. Two of them have NPOV notices; all of them have been subject to pointless edit wars and constant NPOVing and POVing, wasting a tremendous amount of time. Recently, one anon has been reverting [[Malaysia]] to his biased version (which practically everyone involved on the article was and is reverting - recently, Malbear rephrased some of the factual statements the anon made, which hopefully will pacify this POV warrior). But I'm truly fed up with being a tiny drop in an ocean of editors who would almost certainly be unchecked in their POVing if not for me and two or three others. I wonder what these articles will look like around this time next year, as I've given up doing any NPOVing work on articles related to Malaysian politics that doesn't involve a quick revert.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
Delirium wrote:
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians. What's doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality articles on controversial topics. A quick look reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them. [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that mess. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates. There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.
The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular issue, are a major problem. The neutral arbiters tend to be people without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to the editing process.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Andrew Lih wrote:
I've been waiting for this voice of reason. As much as I appreciate Adam Carr's work, scores of useful contributors have come and become valuable members of the community.
There are about 500-700 very active Wikipedians in EN recently, up from 300 at the beginning of the year. Let's try to get beyond the anecdotal.
I don't think we're doubting that there are Wikipedians. What's doubted is that these Wikipedians are, in the current system, producing quality articles on controversial topics. A quick look reveals that a huge percentage of the controversial topics are either: engaged in endless edit wars, are locked, or have had the reasonable people abandon them. [[Gdansk]] and related articles have been in edit wars for over a year now, for example, and most reasonable people have given up on that mess. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict articles seem to have mainly degenerated into territoriality, with some "pro-Palestinian" and some "pro-Israeli" articles each guarded by a group of advocates. There are some exceptions ([[Israel]] is still pretty good, mostly through the tireless efforts of a a handful of people who watch it), but the amount of work it takes to keep a controversial article in a reasonable state drives people off eventually, so the article quality suffers.
I note that the Gdansk article needs a good copyedit.
TBSDY
The egregious offenders can be banned (as with MrNaturalHealth), but POV pushers who don't actually violate any of our rules, or even good contributors who are very biased and very motivated on one particular issue, are a major problem. The neutral arbiters tend to be people without a personal stake in the subject, and it's hard for any of them to match the time committment and passion that the POV pushers bring to the editing process.
-Mark