[Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While

[Fred Bauder]

Dispute resolution with respect to POV pushers may work if you focus on What
Wikipedia is not, the clause about propaganda and advocacy. For evidence you
need to show repeated removal of well referenced information which the POV
pusher is trying to remove and repeated insertions of poorly or unreferenced
information the POV pusher is trying to add.

This is not "content arbitration". Under our NPOV policy all well referenced
material is admissible. Subtle matters such as which comes first, what gets
its own section in the article, etc remain. POV pushers, in my experience,
focus on keeping out negative information regarding their cause, attempting
to attack the legitimacy of information sources others advance while
simulaneously advancing lame references of their own.

Fred

> From: Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:55:58 +1100
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project
> Has Been Around For A While
> 
> I think the experience of academics on Wikipedia is much the same as the
> experience of non-specialists on Wikipedia, or of academics acting as
> non-specialists. Academics, as well as other non-insane people, must
> fight with various kinds of looneys if they want the Wikipedia article
> in question to be accurate and neutral. Dispute resolution only works
> where the POV-pushers also break rules of behaviour, otherwise the only
> solution is to fight forever. Put the article on your watchlist, revert
> and argue for as long as you both shall live. In the case of popular
> articles, there's a constant stream of new POV-pushers, so you have to
> keep arguing and fighting even after the original warriors have gotten
> bored and left.
> 
> Larry Sanger wants a shortcut out of this process for experts. I would
> prefer having a shortcut even for non-experts. Various models have been
> proposed in the past, "content arbitration" is a particularly neat term
> for it.
> 
> -- Tim Starling
> 
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