To address the comments made. The mediation committee does not have formal means of enforcement. This is something maybe we should look at creating. What is needed is a group of people who actively research the topic and come to a tentative and enforceable conclusion. The mediation committee is described as the counterpart to ArbCom but seems to be without teeth.
While my experience is mainly with the English Wikipedia the same issues seem to arise in other languages. During the debate over including images of the Rorschach ink blots on Wikipedia the same debate was going on in many other languages.
What we have is the occasional small group that unreasonably pushes a one sided promotional point of view to the detriment of the encyclopedia. They often edit on only a single subject area and take up a great deal of resources of editors who are trying to write an encyclopedia. One can go to a number of different places and get a couple of users to comment but none of these comments are ever binding and in a number of debates I have been involved in have been dismissed as uninformed.
What is needed is a "finding of facts" not related to user behaviour but content after a review of the literature. These interpretations with discussion would than be implemented until which time the literature on the subject matter changes. This would allow people to resume productive editing rather than going around in circles for sometimes years generating millions of bits of text and spending hundreds of hours.
On 9 August 2010 20:45, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
To address the comments made. The mediation committee does not have formal means of enforcement. This is something maybe we should look at creating. What is needed is a group of people who actively research the topic and come to a tentative and enforceable conclusion. The mediation committee is described as the counterpart to ArbCom but seems to be without teeth.
This has been rejected on Wikipedia repeatedly. Not for ideological reasons, but practical ones.
* articles are in a continous state of having to prove themselves; * the en:wp arbitration committee expressly avoids content issues, and their forays into them have always ended up ludicrous failures; * experts are generally respected, but still have to show their working, and there is no mechanism to get idiots out of their faces.
The last of these is the real sticking point for a lot of people: you can hardly move on Wikipedia without bumping into someone with a string of qualifications who knows much more about the topic at hand than you ever will. But we have no way to keep idiots out of their faces.
The trouble is that attempts to make something that lures experts but keeps idiots out of their faces have so far failed and/or attracted no attention, even from the experts (Citizendium, Scholarpedia). That is, they sound like a good idea; but in practice, Wikipedia has so far been the least worst system.
This is less than ideal in all sorts of ways. But a system of content arbitration requires that the arbitrators be smarter on *all topics* than *everyone else in the world put together*. This may not be feasible in practice.
You could fudge it with a system of committees. But a credentialist system of expert committees is one of the things that killed CItizendium: pseudoscientists, who have no actual expertise but understand the social importance of sheepskins, moved in and took over. [1]
- d.
[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium#Crank_magnetism
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