[WikiEN-l] Re: Anti-scientific bias has me hopping mad!

<<I-E Fork/sympathetic POV>> I have seen some of their articles and don't believe that the slight change in perspective makes the core problems go away. If they had the size and diversity of user community we have here, they would have the same problems. <<Reasons people leave the project>> I agree that many of RK's edits were unhelpful, and the RK and people like him drive good editors away from the project. But it was RK's vitriolic putdowns, allegations, and attempts to confuse the discussion by deleting portions of talk pages that made him so hard to accept. To be sure, many of his edits were POV, but some of the crap he reverted out of hand, deserved to be reverted out of hand. Had he done so in a caring, loving way, with an edit comment like "moving unsourced material to talk page," and then made a genuine attempt to work with the other contributor to get the article fixed, he would have accomplished great things here. <<what's wrong with putting the burden of proof on the editor>> Well, we have to decide on the bias. Presently, if someone adds something to an article, they generally aren't expected to provide sources, though it is encouraged. If another editor wants to delete something, they *are* expected to provide sources, at least if challenged. Now, it is difficult and time consuming to try to refute facts one at a time. So the editor who's trying to delete something has to do, say, 100 times the work of the person who added it. That imbalance does not make for good articles, It also makes people frustrated who would otherwise try to work through articles, removing the junk, and making them more NPOV. That is especially true outside the sciences. It's fairly easy to check the atomic weight of silver, but much harder to refute an assertion that Count Leonard III was a pivotal figure in British tactics used in the 100 years war. He's not, I just made that up, now what do you suppose it would take to refute that? Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. I support NPOV, and don't think that it's the encyclopedia's job to take sides. But having an NPOV policy does not prevent conflict, as we've seen. NPOV is not a pallative for disagreements about articles. With an NPOV policy, there are still problems in three areas: 1. There are disagreements about the facts. There are, for example, people who believe that Roundup (the herbicide) is carcinogenic. It isn't, but based on a single irresponsibly written study (Ericson & Hardell), this belief persists. Some people might consider statements like, "Roundup, a known carcinogen, has seen increasingly widespread use on fruit and vegetable crops each year since 1995." Someone might try to compromise by replacing "known carcinogen" with "suspected carcinogen," but even that view is fringe enough that it doesn't belong in an article about vegetable crops. 2. There are disagreements about what is important and what is not, and hence, the relative amounts of emphasis something should be given. This is a problem particularly outside the sciences. 3. Closely related to #2, there is difficulty coming up with summary statements for difficult, involved problems. Often such statements can be crafted, with careful participation of several writers over time. When someone new to the article comes in, they may (inadvertently or deliberately) destroy a fragile consensus. Having all points of view represented in the encyclopedia is great. Having points of view present that are not supported by facts ("wrong"), are great to have in context. I think it's great to have articles on UFOs, the "Reciprocal System of Theory," and how G.W. Bush stole the presidency from the rightfully-elected Al Gore. But none of these should pervade the article space. We wouldn't want a UFO enthusiast to get a bot and edit all the city articles and add a list of UFO sightings for each city. And we wouldn't want every article that has a reference to Al Gore to refer to him as "Al Gore, rightfully elected president of the United States." I don't think that banning users solves anything, and did not suggest it in my post. Louis