Indeed - while experts should not be allowed a monopoly on articles, they should certainly be allowed some measure of control: ie, they cannot remove information, or turn it into POV, but...
Well, unfortunately it would seem we have academics with one POV vs. loonies with another. Rarely do we have Academics with one POV vs Academics with another POV, which is what we need if Wikipedia is to be reliable: sensible neutrality, rather than insane neutrality. We don't want people like Edo Nyland or Antifinnugror able to insert their POVs as if they were academic opinions on the level of those of, say, Oswald Szemerenyi or even Joseph Greenburg.
Mark
On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:55:58 +1100, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
I think the experience of academics on Wikipedia is much the same as the experience of non-specialists on Wikipedia, or of academics acting as non-specialists. Academics, as well as other non-insane people, must fight with various kinds of looneys if they want the Wikipedia article in question to be accurate and neutral. Dispute resolution only works where the POV-pushers also break rules of behaviour, otherwise the only solution is to fight forever. Put the article on your watchlist, revert and argue for as long as you both shall live. In the case of popular articles, there's a constant stream of new POV-pushers, so you have to keep arguing and fighting even after the original warriors have gotten bored and left.
Larry Sanger wants a shortcut out of this process for experts. I would prefer having a shortcut even for non-experts. Various models have been proposed in the past, "content arbitration" is a particularly neat term for it.
-- Tim Starling
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