[WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

[Jon Awbrey]

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Complaint:  Priority Inversion
Specifics:  Pseudo-Consensus Overturning the Big Three (and the Five Pillars)

JA = Jon Awbrey
MB = Matt Brown

MB: So I have some questions:

MB: 2. Do you think the editors should be forced to discuss
       the issue with you before removing this block quote?

JA: The general question is whether editors can be forced to do anything.
    The answer is that WP has no enforcement power against any persons,
    and thus it has no enforceable policies whatsoever.  All Management
    can do is to block IPs, but that has no effect on persons except to
    introduce a minor inconvenience into their ability to edit pages.

JA: I don't believe in force.  I believe in education and information.
    That is -- was -- the only reason for believing that WP might be
    worth spending some time and energy on.  But you can't force
    people to act according to the primary WP policies if they
    don't want to, and it does not seem like they want to.
    Something like 90% of what people have been saying
    to me on this List has been this:  "But we can't
    really do it by the Book, so let's just do it
    any way we darn well please."  That pretty
    much confirms what I had already seen in
    WP itself.

MB: 3. Do you think consensus should not be used to guide
       decisions regarding Wikipedia content?

JA: The question is not what I think.
    The question is what [[WP:Policy]] says.
    But there is no question as to what it says:

JA: The pages on [[WP:POLICY]] clearly identify the three content-definitive and
    non-negotiable policies of WP as [[WP:NOR]], [[WP:NPOV]], and [[WP:VERIFY]],
    reiterating three times over on each of their individually dedicated pages,
    with no substantive variation, the following norm of participation in WP:

Quote: These three policies are non-negotiable and cannot be superseded
       by other policies or guidelines, or by editors' consensus.

JA: You can't force people to prefer sourced information over ungrounded opinion --
    it's either something in the their bones, something they are trained to do,
    or something that the hard knocks of reality have cudgeled them into.

JA: When a small number of editors put their heads together and "vote" a bit
    of unsourced opinion into an article, then those editors are arrogating
    to themselves the role of the primary source for that opinion, which is
    to say that the opinion in question orginates with those editors, and
    that spells Original Research with a capital "O" "R", and that spells
    trouble in WP City.

JA: This is one of the main reasons why editorial opinion,
    con-sensus or con-census or otherwise, is just plain
    not permitted to overrule NOR, NPOV, and VERIFY.

Jon Awbrey

MB: 4. If so, then what decision making process should replace it?

MB: I hope I'm not putting words in Jon Awbrey's mouth by stating that he thinks
    the problem is that when consensus can be defined as "Me and three of my friends
    I IM'd to come and agree with me", there's a problem.  Especially when a "consensus"
    among like-minded people on the same side of an issue can be used to trump core
    Wikipedia policies and standard Wikipedia ways of working.

MB: Part of the issue is that there's always tension between deciding an
    issue for good on the one hand, and having every single opinionated
    person coming along to any article being able to re-open things for
    which an adequate conclusion has already been reached.

MB: Standard Wikipedia policy / practise here is that there are no
    permanent decisions on Wikipedia apart from core policy, but that if
    an issue has been decided by strong rough consensus, we're resistant
    to re-opening the issue unless the one wishing to re-open it can
    convince enough people that the previous rough consensus no longer
    holds.

MB: "Strong rough consensus" in my opinion means an issue that for the
    vast majority of contributors has a result they can live with - even
    if not outright approve - and that has been reached after a
    satisfactory discussion, a satisfactory attempt at compromise, a
    respect for policy, and with sufficient editors involved that are
    representative on the issue.

MB: IMO, a rough consensus is not a strong one, a good one, if it has been
    arrived at without discussion, without attempts to find common ground,
    without regard for over-riding policy, or without sufficient numbers
    of contributors or variety of points-of-view to be truly
    representative.

MB: There are many editors on Wikipedia who want to truly do the right
    thing and achieve good results.  There are enough others, however, who
    want articles to say exactly what THEY wish them to say, and who will
    game the rules and do everything they can to get their way.   (There
    are probably other categories of editors, of course, but this is
    simplifying).

MB: I have a feeling that another issue Jon has is that some contributors
    are too willing to remove things from articles if they don't like
    them, regardless of the work that went into them, the usefulness of
    the content, or in any way trying to achieve consensus for that
    removal.

MB: Jon, do I have your positions right?

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey
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