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(a)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
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l