[WikiEN-l] Right of rebuttal

[Gregory Kohs]

Dan Tobias wrote:

>> Why should any part of main article space (or
>> templates included in it) be controlled by outside people and used to
>> present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality?

Why?  Maybe because all parts of current main article space are controlled
by "inside" people and used to present their (perhaps distorted) view of
reality.

By policy, rule, and decree, the "outside" people are told to try to voice
their concerns on Discussion pages, which we all know, are not mandated to
be heeded.  So, the "outside" people don't have equal power.  If the
guideline is that contributors to the article should have no conflict of
interest in the topic on which they're editing, almost by definition,
experts are thus driven out by those who merely know how to do citation
searches in the library (if even that).  So, Dan, that's why Ray thinks it
might be more "neutral" if such a space could be provided to "outside"
people to even the playing field and maybe get the "inside" people to
understand how things actually work among the experts in the area that the
article covers.

But, Geni's concerned that this will take up too much server space.

Why don't the "outside" people just do what Angela does -- serve "inside" on
the Board for a while, then go "outside", but retain the special "insider's"
privilege of editing articles (like the one about Wikia) directly from the
"outside"?  I guess that rule doesn't scale so well.

Greg