[WikiEN-l] Neutrality enforcement: a proposal

[Fred Bauder]

> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Lilliputian nationalist form a network and come over to Wikipedia,
>> turning
>> the article about Blefuscu into a travesty.  A lone Blefuscu native
>> sees
>> the
>> imbalance and tries to address it, engaging in mediation and eventually
>> arbitration.  Afterward the Lilliputians successfully get the
>> Blefuscuan
>> topic banned because the Blefuscuan isn't adding to the imbalance of
>> negative information about his own country.
>
>
> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
> wrote:
>
>> I'm afraid the proposal will work to the advantage of one side of the
>> dispute, to the detriment of the other. One side is generally well
>> educated and familiar with looking at both sides of an issue; the other
>> is not, with no meaningful access to either education or sophisticated
>> cultural memes.
>>
>
> Certainly is true that one side is nationalistic and self-centered and
> the
> other is undereducated and lacking in conceptual sophistication. But how
> does it help our
> discussion to to say either of these things?
>
> -SV
>

Our debate should be grounded in the realities of the situation. Remedies
based on abstract principlea will produce unexpected results when applied
to a situation which was not considered in their formulation.

Fred