Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
geni wrote:
On 3/7/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Obviously, the larger and more contentious the community, the bigger the challenge of consensus. But we cannot undertake such a debate without an open analysis of parliamentarianism's defects. Such a system encourages the forming of parties that will promote and protect particular policies, and who will be happy to have their POV succeed by a bare majority. It leads to the tyranny of the majority.
Parties generaly require a representive democracy. What we have is closer to the athian system.
Oh, I don't know; first there were the Inclusionists, Deletionists and Mergists; then there were the "joke parties" like the AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD; then the ultra-conservative nuts like the Association of Moral Wikipedians, Wikipedians for Decency, and finally the Catholic Alliance of Wikipedia...
...and now, while the people who still take the ADW and AIW seriously are largely confined to AFD/DRV (where they've become anally retentive process fetishests), two new powers have emerged: the Pro- and Anti- Userboxes camps.
An interesting thing to note about all of the wrangling is that most of it has been about "What is Wikipedia"; the Inclusionsionist/Deletionist debate was largely about whether we should have articles on schools or not, and the Userbox debate seems to be about whether user pages are free webspace where you can promote your political agendas or not.
I don't know if anyone ever took those things seriously, let alone to a factionalist partisan level. I know I didn't. I just joined the ADW because I *tend* to agree with the deletion of most articles I see on VfD/AfD, and even if I disagreed with the rest, I couldn't stomach the behaviour of the inclusionists. I *think* I later joined the AMW, because I think merging is a good compromise. I would have joined the AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD, but I think my "bipartisan" approach has already made it clear that I don't pre-judge articles. :p
Most hard-line partisan deletionists and inclusionists would be that way even if the ADW and AIW were never founded, IMO. I've never seen any reference to either of those in AfDs, because the vast majority of deletionists and inclusionists at least behaved politely to one another. Only a couple of rogues polluted the image of either side.
The userbox debate, on the other hand, has both sides assuming bad faith of the other, and those taking a stand who don't ABF or otherwise act like dicks are in the clear minority. It's the opposite of the deletionist/inclusionist debate. Most of the "anti-userboxes" people I've seen love to speedy/support speedying as many userboxes that might be deemed factionalist as possible, regardless of disagreement because "it's the right thing to do". Most of the "pro-userboxes" people I've seen will immediately yell "ZOMG ADMIN ABUSE" when an admin blocks a pro-userboxen fellow because they *think* the admin blocked the fellow for that reason, or when an admin speedies a userbox, regardless of whether it really is divisive. (Case in point: the deletion of the UDUIW userbox, which I already brought up on the list.)
The userbox debate has been particularly poisonous to the Wikipedian community because of how starkly the lines have been drawn, and how belligerently those on either side of the line have behaved towards one another. Whereas once the rogues were in the minority in the deletionist/inclusionist spectrum, it is now commonplace to see people yelling assumptions of bad faith and incivil remarks from the tree-tops, while the voices of those trying to be reasonable/civil on either side are drowned out.
I think those trying to speedy delete/keep all userboxes have got it wrong -- userboxes are not important in the long run to the fate of Wikipedia. What's important is reasoning with each other, assuming good faith, and spreading WikiLove. If we can't do this, we haven't just lost the "userbox war", we've lost the war to build an encyclopedia through the wiki process. And that, my friends, is where I believe we are headed. And please, don't cast the blame on "rogue deletionist admins" or "unacculturated newbies". Practically *everyone* involved in this dispute has been up to their neck in bad faith and WikiHate. I don't know about you, but if sacrificing userboxes (or sacrificing the deletion of divisive userboxes) is what it takes to restore good faith and WikiLove to the community, I'd take the latter over the former any second.
John