[WikiEN-l] Neutrality enforcement: a proposal

[SlimVirgin]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 2:02 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>> wrote:

>* That's exactly right. All this group would be looking for are good-faith
*>* efforts to edit in accordance with the NPOV policy. It's not an attempt to
*>* control content, but behaviour. Perhaps we should change the title to
*>* reflect that.
*

*stevertigo* wrote:

> You lost me. If you say its all about the content, I'd be on board. You say
> its about "behaviour[-alism]," and I go now elsewhere to let you rethink the
> idea entirely.


Controlling content = "this article should or should not say X"

Controlling behaviour = "this editor should or should not do X"

In that sense, this proposal is about behaviour, because it is about
good-faith editing (behaviour) and not the result of it (content).

However, the whole content v. behaviour thing is something of a false
distinction. ArbCom prides itself on not controlling content,
but it does it all the time indirectly by controlling who can edit,
ruling on what counts as a reliable source, etc.

This is a proposal to enforce behaviour that upholds our own core
content policy, and there's no problem with that tension.
In fact, it's quite strange that none of our core content policies are
currently enforced, except for BLPs.

Sarah