[WikiEN-l] Times article (London)

[Andrey]

"Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political
meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent
voices".

Everyone who is engaged in everyday editing rather than idle discussions may
recall plenty of incidents that confirm the validity of this assessment.
There is no mechanism capable of stopping a group of people based in the
same country and probably keeping in touch outside Wikipedia from pushing
certain agenda into our articles. It is useless to argue and mediate because
these folks know why they came to Wikipedia at almost the same time and what
they want from the project. It is useless to complain, because ten to twenty
like-minded one-purpose accounts may bomb any ANI discussion or AfD.  You
may neutralize a troll or two or three, but not a group of determined users
who share the same real-life background and exhibit divergent patterns of
behaviour.

A fresh example is the activity of Tartu-based accounts on WWII- and
Holocaust-related subjects. We are told, to quote one of them, "there were
two sides in the war, but it is erroneous to believe that, since SU won,
only the Soviet opinion on the war is relevant and the others should just
shut up". One or two editors interested in the subject are expected to stand
up to a legion of people advocating in concert Neo-Nazi flavoured
revisionism bordering on the heroization of Fascism. No, thank you. If the
community at large is not willing to tackle certain unsavoury ideologies and
such views are allowed to pester mainspace, it brings the entire project
into disrepute. I'm not going to waste my day arguing that, in respect to
the Holocaust, the Soviet side was right and the Nazi side was wrong.

No amount of "consensus" will change the reality. Wikipedia may either
reflect that reality or may not. In order to prevent the process from being
gamed by tendentious bigmouths, we need a system of content arbitration on
history, linguistics, mathematics, physics, etc. The existing ArbCom does
not arbitrate content. People seek (and invent) behavioural issues in order
to get a hearing, hoping that their POV will be sanctioned at last. When
they fail in this ambition, they leave the project in frustration, while
newly registered accounts continue rehashing unresolved issues for years, ad
infinitum. There are some long-standing disputes that just need to be solved
once and for all, because the possibility of reaching consensus on them is
nil.

--Ghirla

On 8/16/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2267665.ece
>
> Stable versions would help with answering some of that criticism. Plenty
> of
> what he says is fair enough, IMO, particularly the point about the loudest
> voices winning purely by virtue of obnoxious trolling.
>
> C More schi
>
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