[WikiEN-l] Neutrality enforcement: a proposal

[Charles Matthews]

David Gerard wrote:
> The trouble with ethnic conflict articles is that, rather than a few
> problem editors, there's an effectively infinite stream of partisans.
> (For whatever reason: local education is often partisan rather than
> NPOV?) So, even though a core of opinionated-though-neutral editors
> accumulates, there's an eternal stream of people who don't know and
> don't care about NPOV or Wikipedia principles in general - as far as
> they're concerned, someone is being WRONG on the Internet.
>
>   
Proponents of "neutrality enforcement" need to make a case meeting a 
number of points.

(1) Why is this not a classical slippery slope, in which every area with 
conflicts on the site will eventually want its own watchdog?
(2) The thing is obviously BITEy, and as David says there will be people 
constantly bitten.
(3) Provides a disincentive to compromising, if instead there is a 
mechanism to lobby privately and remove an "opponent".
(4) Bottom line, we believe content is firmly in the hands of the 
community. Such a proposal tends to turn this into content being (for 
the worst cases) in the hands of a small group not subject to direct 
democracy/accountability of any kind. I rather agree with Fred Bauder's 
comment that we would tend to see the pendulum at one extreme in such 
cases. In any case this seems a massive innovation in the handling of 
content, and I feel no happiness whenever the 'hard cases' drive content 
policy.

Charles