[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

[steven l. rubenstein]

Sean Barret wrote,

>Tony Sidaway stated for the record:
>
> > steven l. rubenstein said:
> >
> >>David, this is an issue I and others have raised repeatedly over the
> >>past  years: many irresolvable disputes center on content, and
> >>Wikipedia needs a  mechanism for dealing with these content-based
> >>disputes.
> >
> >
> > Why?  If the disputes are irresolvable, why is it necessary to bring in a
> > deus ex machina to declare a resolution?  Isn't it just more honest to
> > leave the irresolvable unresolved?  I find this, the current way, quite
> > satisfactory and if the arbcom really is accepting cases that are in the
> > realm of content disputes then they should simply be more parsimonious in
> > the kind of dispute they accept.
>
>
>No dispute is irresolvable once you get past that archaic idea of NPOV
>and accept OTPOV -- the One True Point of View.

Sean misinterprets my position, and Tony either misunderstands it, or just 
doesn't agree with me.  I do not believe that disputes over content are 
irresolvable, but I do think that there are POV warriors who insist on 
including content even if it comes from narrow and perhaps even 
disreputable sources, and deleting content that is the product of good 
research.  In many of these cases (which, I still remind you, is only a 
small percentage of all content-related disputes), debates on talk pages 
can go on for weeks and weeks.  Are these "irresolvable?"  No.  But a 
committee could review what the different sources are and how they are 
being presented (e.g. as mainstream authorities, as authorities taking a 
minority position, as popular opinion, as representing a fringe 
organization) and resolve the dispute by ruling on which sources are 
inappropriate, and by giving clear guidance on how the remaining diverse 
views can be represented in an NPOV way.  Is this effort an unnecessary 
waste of time?  No.  Debates such as the ones I am talking about that go on 
for weeks, even months, waste good editors' time, during which we have a 
second-rate article.

I just do not understand this mental block so many people have.  They have 
no problem with a mechanism that promotes more respectful relations within 
a more harmonious community, yet have a problem with a mechanism that would 
promote a better encyclopedia.  This is odd because the "better 
encyclopedia" is what this project is all about.

Sean seems to think that all content disputes can me handled through our 
NPOV position, and insinuates that my (and Jguk's and Mav's) desire to have 
a mechanism to resolve content disputes will impose one point of 
view.  This is nonsense for two reasons.  First, I have stated explicitly 
that NPOV is one of the content-related policies such a committee should 
enforce.  Second, read the NPOV policy carefully.  Id does not state that 
"anything goes."  NPOV does not require that our article on the moon state, 
"According to some, the moon is made of green cheese, although virtually 
all astronomers disagree."  Don't laugh -- silly statements like this are 
easy to spot when we are talking about physical phenomena.  But they are 
much harder to spot when talking about historical and cultural phenomena, 
which is one reason why some content disputes are protracted and cannot be 
resolved by mediation alone.

Steve

PS what is with this "states for the record" crap?  Do conversations on the 
list-serve have any authority over policy (that is, are these formal or 
informal conversations)?  Certainly, we keep a record of list-serve 
messages, but we are not writing for that record, we are writing for one 
another.  And why are some quotes introduced by "X wrote" and others, "Y 
stated for the record?"  Are Y's comments more official than X's?  What is 
the point?



Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701