[WikiEN-l] Factions vs. Division (was Re: Divisive and Inflammatory Behavior, was CSD T1)

On 5/16/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: I would prefer a term like "ideological factions" to "division". Division is natural and happens all the time when people disagree. Even permanent groups devoted to particular topics are something we want to promote and develop further. It's the formation of permanent _ideological_ factions which tends to hurt Wikipedia, and these are again distinct from user groups devoted to particular topics. It's within factions that phenomena like vote stacking and POV pushing occur. And it's the convenience of adding an ideological userbox with categories to your page which may contribute to forming a faction. The last thing I want to see is people on [[Talk:Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]] arguing that a new guy who tries to fix up the currently awful "Criticism" section is trying to "divide the community" by focusing on "contentious and inflammatory content" with "clear intent to disrupt and provoke." In reality, it might well be that an ideological faction of Mormons is dominating the article -- in which case they would be the ones acting against the spirit of Wikipedia by trying to drown out criticism. (No offense intended to Mormons with this arbitrary example.) There's the additional risk that even a well-defined policy on "division" will lead to heavy-handed enforcement, which itself would lead to division and hurt. For instance, many users currently have strong political and religious messages on their userpages. With a new guideline against "divisive behavior", I can easily see some people with good intentions who might start warning these people that their user pages are "divisive because of their ideological content", etc. They would cite Jimbo's words like gospel, link to the new guideline, and eventually try to enforce it by editing out problematic content, etc. But those people (the ones with the userpages) aren't forming factions, and their userpages only declare their biases. Certainly we can use common sense when something is clearly designed to attack and provoke. I support a statement or guideline against forming ideological factions. I think a statement against division would be interpreted too broadly. As for those userboxes about ideological associations, these could either be converted into boxes about topical associations ("This user is a Christian => This user is interested in Christianity"), "defactonized" by removing categories, or deleted. By the way, I think the ideological distinction of "inclusionist" vs. "deletionist" is probably more harmful to Wikipedia than most userboxes have ever been, because it tends to overshadow reasoned discourse without prejudice. Erik