[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues.

[James Heilman]

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.

-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.