[WikiEN-l] Featured editors?

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com>:

> Joshua Zelinsky wrote:
>> ...People forget that when we say that Wikipedia is not censored we
>> are talking about articles. There's nothing wrong with banning links
>> or other matters in other space if it will benefit the encyclopedia.
>
> I'm not sure I can agree with that.  In general, banning and
> censoring things is *wrong*, and saying it's okay under some
> circumstances as long as it "helps the project" is somewhat too
> Machiavellian for my taste.  It's like saying that accepting
> advertisements to support the Wikimedia Foundation is okay if
> it will benefit the encyclopedia, or spamming Usenet newsgroups
> urging people to make donations is okay if it will benefit the
> encyclopedia.

I agree that other moral considerations can override building the encyclopedia
(I believe the canonical example someone made a while back was that 
even if you
could shoot a massively disruptive vandal, you shouldn't). However, I disagree
that this is one of them. Simply put, some zones are free speech zones and
other s are not. While in the ideal world, I'd like them all to be free speech
zones, Wikipedia is not one of them. If a group of friends had a long rambling
conversation about how a date went on ANI we'd ask them to take it elsewhere.
So we already are not making non-article space a free speech zone. The cause
for it is simply different. Different venues are useful for different things,
and we may in some circumstances need to decide that Wikipedia is not a venue
for certain types of links.

> As you said in the part of your message I snipped, attempting
> to ban or remove things from non-article space can result in
> large amounts of unnecessary drama, not to mention wasted time,
> extreme positions becoming solidified, productive editors being
> alienated, etc.  I know I'm not alone in suspecting that the set
> of removals that will actually have a net benefit to the
> encyclopedia (and hence be acceptable under your proposition)
> is near zero.

Yes, I suspect that the set is very small. I for one don't see why some 
editors
have gone through old archives and unlinked many of these. It seems like a
waste of time when we have many other things to do. (But I'm not going to
bother making noise about it because the resulting drama would outweigh any
possible benefit)

>
> Furthermore, something I'm noticing more and more lately is that
> an inescapable part of this sort of banning and censoring is a
> disquieting element of paternalism.  The removals are performed
> by a small number of presumably-trusted senior editors, on the
> grounds that they know that the material being removed is
> "hurtful to the project".  But since part of the alleged hurt
> is always the associated hype and drama, the removers tend to
> ask that the removals not be discussed either.  We're supposed
> to trust that the person doing the removing knows what's best
> for the project, knows what's best for us, is better at deciding
> for us what we should and shouldn't discuss than we are ourselves.
> Obviously, the bigger and more disparate the project becomes,
> the harder it is to maintain that kind of trust.

I think I have a higher level of trust for many of the editors concerned. And
certainly one very basic idea in Wikipedia is transparency. But there are
limits to that (which is one reason we don't have all deleted articles visible
to all editors). I do agree that these issues are a serious concern, and they
will get only worse as the project gets larger.