Karl Juhnke wrote:
--- "Michael R. Irwin" mri_icboise@surfbest.net wrote:
Personally I feel censorship in any form is a slippery slope towards totalitarianism and attempted mind control which is best avoided entirely, if possible.
Mike,
Your concluding sentence about the "slippery slope towards totalinarianism" clarifies for me why you comment at length on a situation about which you admit to not knowing the particulars. The details appear to be less relevant in your view of things than the abstract principle at stake.
Abstract principles can be important and useful. Governing principles are often stated well in the abstract and then ignored in practice. This often causes problems that could be avoided.
Our recent pattern is interesting. From the outside they look a great deal like previous incidents. A couple of which I personally witnessed. Others only fragmentary clues remained.
If one uncooperative person is banned then clearly the project can survive and prosper. If the only method for dealing with controversy is banning, then it may be inappropriate for me to expend further time here. Fear not! I am quite capable of disappearing when I decide too, nobody need yell "Good riddance!" to expedite the decision. Likewise I will simply take a break when I feel the need, and likely be back quickly. Some have put it on record that the project is at risk of losing good people if "problems" cannot be eliminated (by banning) after reasonable time. I merely wish to place it on record that similar risks are available from excessive banning. It has already been publicly alleged in several online forums (the spanish fork {hearsay, I do not speak spanish}, geocities, advogato, kurohin5, this mailing list, and meta) that censorship is a risk or problem here at Wikipedia. This is not a good reputation to cultivate. It discourages participation.
The current policy of edit boldly serene in the knowledge that others will do the same effectively forms a feedback loop that should converge on a product output of high quality mainstream views (NPOV'ed material substantiated in detail) if sufficient participation is available.
Moving from edit wars to routine banning risks breaking the fundamental assumptions implicit in the above.
I am prone to this sort of thinking myself, i.e. I think very abstractly and in terms of principle. For example, I don't drink a drop of alcohol myself, because even a glass of wine with dinner at home among the family is in principle connected to impaired brain function, drunk driving, alcoholism, wrecked kidneys, wrecked relationships, etc., etc. I must make a concerted effort to understand that moderation is possible, and that not every situation in life is a slippery slope.
This one seems to be one though. The frequency of incidents seems to be growing and the chosen response seems to be settling into a routine. Not necessarily a problem if the goal is to exceed the quality of a 1911 public domain encyclopedia or present a slightly more neutral world view (acceptable to "Western" scholastic authorities) than Brittanica. IMO Broad, deep, reliable requires more than merely regurgitating material already published for profit in western academia.
There are practical, incremental differences between modes of contribution to Wikipedia. It is apparently difficult to know exactly when to draw a line and say that someone is behving unacceptably.
Perhaps. Perhaps it merely has not been written down precisely. Perhaps, we aggressively advertise one thing on the front and orientation pages to encourage participation and then selectively enforce something else.
If community approval and trust is required to remain an editor then this should be emphasized up front so that newcomer's know to fan out and develop contacts with like minded people.
Eventually a trust metric similar to that used by advogato.com could be used by the community to establish peer ratings, if these are required to remain active in the community.
But
I would hope that we can clearly distinguish banning an individual from totalitarianism, to the same extent that we can distinguish incorporating opposing views from anarchy and descent into meaninglessness.
My hopes are similar. Personally I favor setting up some robust procedures that work well without resort to the current "owner" or enforcer. Mr. Wales has done an excellent job so far, but I hope and fear his available time for managing controversy and enacting bans will not scale up as rapidly as the contributing community.
It is also interesting to note that his diplomatic skills are not typcially currently brought into play until the current alleged problem is highly irate and defensive. This leads me to suspect that we may not be getting maximum benefit from his efforts. Of course this conclusion is derived from my contention that there is plenty of work to go around and we need access to as many viewpoints as possible. Others may feel a more homogenous cooperative group is perfectly capable of writing a broad, deep, reliable Wikipedia.
Without saying anything particular about Helga, I would encourage you to construct your arguments somewhat differently. Rather than identifying a single principle in a situation and imagining that principle at its extremes, try to identify *as many principles as possible* and imagine how each governs and regulates the others. You may find that your thinking becomes less clear and less easy to express, but in my humble experience, reality itself is not necessarily clear and easy to express.
LOL I may someday call on you as a character witness should others once again locally become tired of my efforts at fuzzy integrated reasoning.
I am well aware that tradeoffs are often required in real world projects. The trick is to avoid trading away the project's chances of success while being "practical". Nothing practical about iron with insufficient inpurities to achieve specified alloy properties. Typically, it will collapse far short of design goals.
IMO The current problem is not the diverse viewpoints that we are running off but that highly valued "regulars" with proven contribution records get tired of deleting or modifying front page material to keep the material's reliability up. I contend that reducing our project team or community's diversity is not an appropriate method of revision control. Elsewhere I have proposed implementing a "code walkthough" where approval by two or three logged in accounts is required to place changes on the current page.
This should easily reduce the poor material currently residing on the current articles by at least an order of magnitude, Without running off diverse viewpoints. Helga, Art, "24", myself, the previous incarnation of the Cuncator, and a few others no longer with us could learn to modify their writings to attract approval required to move from the draft to current page without much of the heated controversy and repetitive wasted efforts that currently results from the inverted process: Place your material on the current page and see if anyone deletes, modifies, or yells about it.
This method would allow Mr. Sanger (and the rest of us) to follow his widely published advice and ignore perceived trolls, at least until the material is reviewed/modified/approved by two others ..... possibly mistakenly. The "troll" may also be less defensive or even quiet while other faction members with better social skills help defend or modify the material. Factions could not be ignored, but this is no loss as they cannot currently be ignored. Also, it is a well known characteristic of negotiations that they proceed best with multiple items or views in play, this gives the parties face saving manuevering room.
On the downside:
1. Some people feel the immediate wiki gratification of "edit any page" will be lost from modification to: "go to the draft version in progress and propose any change for a random editor to approve".
2. Certain obvious problems such as people creating multiple accounts can be reduced somewhat via appropriate software.
Diplomacy efforts will still be required. The above is certainly not a cure all. The minute sufficient approval is gathered but the material is unacceptable to another faction then we have another controversy. It should be easier to mediate between two teams of 3 people than with one out numbered person placed on the defensive by the mailing list's current "run em off" tactics.
Others have proposed other solutions to help manage controversy or improve reliability and quality via other forms of revision control.
Well, I fuzzied up this email slightly in response to your request for less rigid adherence to extreme reasoning regarding singular issues. I hope it is still somewhat coherent. Perhaps I should emulate the star in "Mission to Mars", in all future lengthy fuzzy posts I may prepend:
"It wasn't me!" or "It was his idea!"
regards, Mike Irwin