[WikiEN-l] Conflict resolution and text orientation (Was Effective bullying strategy)

[Martin Harper]

Hi.

I would like to comment on one aspect of our collective behaviour in these cases: 
We're focusing on the text that is being disputed, rather than focusing on the conflict 
generated by the text. This seems to be quite common, and I believe it was first 
noted by "Louis Kyu Won Ryu" in relation to the conflict over Mother Teresa. People 
who comment start talking first about whether the disputed text is accurate or not, 
and the conversation revolves around text.

There is some logic to this: often, improving the text resolves the dispute, and 
particularly for smaller scale incidents, many of us have realised than ten minutes of 
research is worth ten hours of edit war and debate. So this text orientated approach 
has its place. That place is on the relevant talk page, or the article itself, not on this 
mailing list. Also, note that while editing the disputed text is often effective, telling 
someone else to edit the disputed text has a long and distinguished history of 
abysmal failure.

However, I wonder whether this approach is perhaps overused. Sometimes disputes 
can be resolved or prevented by focusing on the people, rather than the text. 
Sometimes a dispute may not be resolvable right now, and we need to take a 
"damage limitation" approach, while we wait for someone to come along with the 
time, knowledge, and wisdom to solve the problem at text level. In this case, if the 
problem could be easily resolved at the text level, surely one of the frequent 
contributors to the Isr/Pal pages would have done so - if they've failed to do so, is it 
reasonable to hope that we can do so?

I think we should recall that Danny didn't come to this list asking us to write the 
perfect account of Palestinian views of the peace process. Indeed, I would imagine 
that the person most capable of writing such an account would be Danny! Rather, 
Danny came here to discuss the "bullying strategy" that he felt that Robert Kaiser 
was using. The same focus on behaviour is evident with most of the cases raised on 
the mailing list, which I think underlines my feelings. 

WikiLove,
-- Martin "MyRedDice" Harper