User:MjolnirPants/sandbox 3

Why Arbcom should take another American politics case

Atsme is a wonderful person with a great deal of patience and a kind heart. She is very easy to work with in other subject areas and a joy to banter with on user talk pages. That being said, she can be ridiculously frustrating to engage with on political talk pages. Diffs showing my own frustration with her have been provided above. However, this isn't just reflective of Atsme, but of the topic itself, as any trip through the minefield can be.

Our political articles are suffering because we've let things get as bad as they are. Good editors turn into immature dipshits (not referring to Atsme here) when they get into arguments on political talk pages, or at the very least become opinionated demagogues, loudly pushing a POV while equally loudly proclaiming not to have any POV at all. Imagine a Wikipedian who would disagree with the statement "Everybody has biases." I can, but all of those WPians are short-terms who end up indeffed. Every reasonable person knows we all have biases. But that understanding disappears for many of our best editors the moment they click on a talk page of an AmPol article. I can't count the number of editors with blatantly obvious political POVs who had the sheer audacity to tell me directly that they have no political views.

I almost always have more productive discussions with creationists and fringe theory pushers than I do with editors in AmPol. It's disgusting, it's ridiculous and it's beneath the dignity of any respectable editor to wallow in it. Yet too many of us do, because it was a slow slide into the abyss that we could not see from the inside.

If anyone doubts me, go look for an RfC in AmPol with, let's say, at least 10 participants. It doesn't matter really what it was about, so long as it wasn't utterly mundane (such as whether to use em-dashes or regular dashes). Go find one. When you do, you will find an RfC in which one side of the debate was beaten into submission through either exhaustion or sheer numbers. You will find that the editors who took a certain political stance (liberal or conservative, pro-Trump or anti-Trump, etc) in that discussion will have reliably taken the same exact stance in every other discussion they were involved in. You will see someone rather obviously getting upset. If you don't see someone trolling, show that RfC to an editor with opposing politics to your own. They'll find a troll. Because that's what AmPol has become: a proxy battleground for the culture wars raging in the West right now. Well, we're an encyclopedia. We're supposed to be above that shit.

It's long past time for the Arbs to wade in and start to break things up. As I've said before: the constant bickering and fighting isn't a symptom of the problem: it's the problem itself. In such a divisive political climate as exists now, many fair-minded and experienced editors (read: admins) are refusing to hop in and hold others to task. And who can blame them? We have editors engages in projects that are just this side of academic research attempting to prove WP has a political bias. Anyone making an argument for anything in the topic -regardless of their position or the qualities of their arguments- will be inevitably accused of bias. There are clearly demarcated sides, despite the majority of participants claiming not to have any political views at all. But it's obvious! Which of us couldn't, right now, put together a list of the right-wing editors and another of the left-wing editors? If you say you can't: you're either a liar or you've never spent much time editing in politics. And all of our lists would be all but identical. It's obvious that the topic is a battleground, and who in their right mind wants to wade into that and immediately get caught up in the press? No-one. I don't blame the admins for not jumping in.

With individual admins unwilling to strictly enforce the DSes on AmPol, it's time for the Arbs to get their own hands dirty. Put out the fires and soak everything down to prevent new ones for a while. Give editors who care the chance to rebuild that topic, and stay vigilant for future arsonists. Most of all, try to make the cesspool that is AmPol work like the rest of Wikipedia. If we can't do that, then we might as well just all quit editing, because we've given up on being an encyclopedia. ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants Tell me all about it. 21:20, 28 June 2018 (UTC)