[WikiEN-l] IAR

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 8:21 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 7:28 PM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> How does IAR help limit Civility violations, personal attacks, and slander?
>
> That's an easy one.
>
> If there was a strict rule set up on these things, a checklist that one
> could definitively say yes or no, then there would also be users who would
> find ways around it, ways to offend, upset, annoy, provoke, or distress,
> that they could claim wasn't strictly "against" the rules. We saw that with
> "civil POV warriors".

The danger there has always been that examination of civility gets
elevated over examination of POV pushing. The POV pushing should
always come first and be examined first. If you don't do that, the
danger is that people use claims of civil POV-pushing to bludgeon
opponents in content disputes, and say "look, he is being civil, how
awful!". The correct approach is to say "he is pushing a POV".
Otherwise the arguments descends into whether or not someone is being
civil, and the correct debate (over whether and who is pushing a POV)
gets missed.

Quite often, you find that both sides are pushing a POV.

> IAR guarantees that no matter how sneaky their evasion, we can say to
> someone "yes you did follow the strict rules. But you're still not following
> the spirit of them."

That applies especially to POV pushers accusing others of pushing an
opposite POV. Sometimes *no-one* is editing with NPOV in mind, and are
merely battling to get others banned. Those are the most depressing
disputes.

Carcharoth