[WikiEN-l] Neutrality enforcement: a proposal

[Ken Arromdee]

>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.

To put it bluntly, this sounds like "the side I like doesn't win when we're
being neutral".

Sometimes being genuinely neutral will have the effect of helping one side
much more than the other.  For instance, if evolutionists and creationists
try to be neutral the resulting article will be much more supportive of
evolution than creation--not for any sinister reason, but simply because
*evolutionists have good sources and creationists don't*.  A policy which
requires good sources will favor the side which has the good sources.

If you go into a creation/evolution dispute saying "isn't it unfair that the
evolutionists are well-educated and sophisticated, and can easily find
sources, while the creationists can't?" you're badly misunderstanding what's
going on.  It's true that the creationists are less educated, and may have
some trouble editing to Wikipedia standards because of that, but the main
reason they can't edit well is that the sides don't have equal merit to them,
and the side with less merit is going to have more trouble editing.

This is true of ethnic disputes as well as creationists.