[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Kim Bruning]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 09:45:38AM -0400, Sydney Poore wrote:
> >        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization
> >
> > Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that
> > people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy
> > dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization.
>
> Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias
> and forcing a discussion,

Yes, and this bias against bias has a name, it's called "NPOV". 

If someone is POV pushing, then hell yes I'm going to confront them,
NameTheProblem, and attempt force a discussion. If they don't want to talk
after 3 such attempts (warnings), they can be blocked, or even banned
permanently.


We know many non self-preserving versus preserving systems:

*lawlessness versus rule of law
*bsd versus gpl 
*wordpress (1POV) versus wikipedia (NPOV).

If wikipedia is to not merely be a collection of opinions, NPOV is
rather important.

And the combination of NPOV and consensus forces people to confront
their biases, discuss them, and resolve them, and in that way reach
the closest approximation to the truth that we can achieve.

You may have heard of this process. ;-) It's what we use to write an
encyclopedia.

>  it is also not very practical that we be the host for discussions
>  on talk pages continuously with large groups of people.

Fortunately, this doesn't happen in most of the encyclopedia.
Consensus has worked rather well for 10 years and counting. 

> It fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated
> continuously on article talk pages. 

That's clearly pathological. Repeated discussions and positions fall under [[WP:3RR]].

The long consensus loop (also documented in [[WP:BRD]] for particular applications) applies. 


> Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions.

There is no other reason for talk page discussions. Wikipedia is
[[WP:NOT]] a discussion board. 

> But comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner
> perhaps leaving people feeling that no one cares about their
> views.

[Citation needed]. The rule of thumb is that if your concerns are
not addressed on the talk page for 24 hours (enough time for every
time zone to respond), you may go ahead and be [[WP:BOLD]] and apply
your content change.

> And lots of people want to look up information or 

This group I can sympathize with, somewhat, and I'm willing to
discuss the upsides and downsides to catering to this group. My
position here is that -in general- giving people the ability to hide
within their own culture leads to pillarization in the long term.
This is a most unpleasant state of affairs.

If you have a rotten tooth, do you go to the dentist to have it
pulled (even though this is briefly very unpleasant) or do you leave the
tooth to rot further (where at some point, you will suffer pain all
day) ?

>[people want to] edit an interesting topic without having a
>consciousness raising discussion. 

You mean edit an interesting topic using only their own POV, and not
taking other POVs or NPOV into account?

That's POV pushing. That's not permitted. Either reach consensus and
adhere to NPOV, or leave. That's a founding issue. It is
non-negotiable.

> 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.

The point of any wiki is to allow people to interact and learn from
each other. Some of the things you will learn might be 
uncomfortable. 

If you can't deal with this, then yes you might want to stay away.
Fortunately there are not many people who are like that in the 21st
century. (Though more than I thought)

> 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.

Participants/Editors are going to have to see all pages unmodified
or they cannot judge the page for POV issues, vandalism, or etc.

Pillarization among *participants* always leads to internal
strife. That must be prevented.

Non-participants are an interesting problem. We really want them to
become participants, rather than passive fence-sitters. 

A wiki usually serves its participants first, (with the world at
large being a secondary goal; after all - the entire world is
invited and welcome to participate if they want to). I can't ASSUME
things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do
(including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we
don't know.

sincerely,
	Kim Bruning

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