User:Isonomia/Sandbox

Will the last person to leave Wikipedia – Lords Reform please switch off the lights

House of lords reform is essentially a debate about the future of the House of Lords. Simply reporting on the events would be a lie, a bit like saying “after the election adult Hitler became German Chancellor”, without mentioning he didn’t actually win, that the result was very contentious and given some idea of the implication to groups like the Jews.

Wikipedia is an extremely hostile environment to those who are not familiar with it - and particularly those with a “flamboyant” topdown, incremental writing style, which in its early form is meant to be thought provoking (ie. provoke some thought – byu the writer!) All I can imagine is that most articles are researched by an in-crowd, rather than written by outsiders. The result is bound to be that most articles are written conservatively, from evidence, which has been written conservatively. Perhaps in many subjects this does not affect the balance of the article.

However, in the case of House of Lords, it is a debate between tradition and change; between establishment and non-establishment. To report on it with a very heavy conservative bias will heavily skew the article toward one of the positions and blatantly mislead the reader.

For example only to report the government statement that “87% of consultees” supported their proposal would be a lie, for it does not explain why the government immediately shelved their plans. Now having read and digested many of the responses, I think I could make a stab at giving a fair picture of the debate.

To understand the Wik editor
To learn the style of wiki
To learn the rules of wiki
To learn how to find help
To learn how to talk taking half an hour to find out about ~ ~ ~ ~
(possibly over ½ my 30hours on this article have been wasted on piddling details like this!)
To learn how to take highly contentious writings and make them neutral
To research all the detailed aspects of reform
To learn how to tone down my own views and make them balanced (probably the most hard)
To find the research

Of course, much of the information is already going out of the public domain. I sought for half an hour to find a very good comment in the Times, but it is only now accessible by subscription (though I have the main details)

The way to obtain a balanced view, of course, ‘’’’’is not’’’’’ to simply state the official reports, because these are overwhelmingly biased in favour of the established view of the part in power. What is needed is to create a framework by which the many different views can state the case that was made for their views, whilst allowing counter views – that was my intention and a good one.

But, as far as I can see this isn’t possible in Wikipedia to start such a framework, because inevitably it is started by people who favour one view and before balance can be achieved it is deleted.

Therefore, since an article written in the hostile environment of Wikipedia will be a distortion of the debate, I vote to ‘’’delete.’’’

I was going to post this on the talk re lords reform, It’s going to take a bit of time to make sense, and in any case I don’t really believe it will make much difference, so its going on the sandbox