[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[David Gerard]

On 14 September 2011 14:45, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore at gmail.com> wrote:

> Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias
> and forcing a discussion, it is also not very practical that we be the host
> for discussions on talk pages continuously with large groups of people. It
> fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated continuously on
> article talk pages. Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions. But
> comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner perhaps leaving
> people feeling that no one cares about their views.
> And lots of people want to look up information or edit an interesting topic
> without having a consciousness raising discussion. There are many
> opportunities for people to interact and learn from each other without us
> placing them in a position where they feel like they need to do it or stay
> away.
> So, I don't think that pushing people to see material that they are not
> comfortable seeing is necessarily beneficial to WMF projects or the person.


You appear to be confusing editor fatigue with reader fatigue.

Doing stuff because it reduces editor conflict has, so far, been an
effective way to reduce value to the readers. This is why we don't
have POV forked articles: they solve a problem for the editors at the
expense of the readers.

You are also putting forward pretty much the same excuse for POV forks
that Microsoft did in pushing POV forking for Encarta editions: where
they wanted to make something marketable that would play nice and not
risk upsetting people, rather than because the content was actually
neutral, accurate or authoritative. That is: something for the
convenience of the publisher, at the expense of the reader.

The real world is holistic - everything links to everything else, and
I'd have thought it *really obvious* that carving out chunks of that,
particularly in the cause of making your own life easier over that of
the reader, is POV-pushing.


- d.