[WikiEN-l] Arbitration Commitee Seeking Comment

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

On 6/6/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> 
> > People find it very difficult to accept that a problem may have no
> > solution or that a question may have no answer.
> 
> It doesn't apply to all the disputes, but I might go further and say
> that some of the content disputes are an extention spilling over into
> our encyclopedia of real-world disputes, often between well-credentialed
> experts.
> 
> To take just one example, the mess of psychology, psychiatry, philosophy
> of mind, and associated fields isn't resolved in the real world, so it
> would be unreasonable to suppose it will be nicely resolved in
> Wikipedia.  Things like, does mental illness exist; if so, what is it;
> should it be treated with therapy or drugs or both or neither; etc.; are
> questions that have settled answers in some fields, unsettled ones in
> others, and often conflicting settled answers between fields.  So you
> end up with people arguing "this article should say [x], because
> psychiatry experts agree", and others arguing "no, it should say [x] is
> false, because philosophers agree [x] is a prima facie illogical
> position", and all sides can produce volumes of peer-reviewed literature
> to support their position.
> 
> The only real solution I see is to simply document these viewpoints.
> Wikipedia isn't the place to settle whether psychiatrists are
> pill-pushing pseudo-scientists, or psychologists are out-of-touch
> scientists who don't understand medicine, or philosophers should just
> butt out entirely, but we can document what they all say.
> 
> -Mark

Now, I think you make an interesting point here. "Don't assume
disputes in the real world can be resolved in Wikipedia." There's a
lot of issues here in Wikipedia that are not (or a lot les
controversial) in the real world. Those are the ones we should try to
solve first.

--Mgm