User talk:Arcticocean/Arbitration and content

Thank you

We've needed this essay for years. I wish more people understood this. An ideal question I would ask to AC candidates this next round would be "Please comment on this essay whether you agree with it," it would say a lot about how in touch the candidates are with the needs of supporters of NPOV. Heimstern Läufer (talk) 02:23, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

It was inspired partly by your own wonderful essay :). AGK 23:46, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Apply to MHP

It is interesting to apply these ideas to the current MHP mediation. It seems to me that in that mediation there are two parties of extremists, and a middle-ground party of moderates. The extremists have a common interest in not having any comments or criticism at all on "their" point of view. The mediation is currently going in the direction that the two extremists each get their subpage, while the moderates all leave, since everytime they make rational sensible remarks about the bridges between the two solutions, they get shouted down by the extremists. The extremists are very very good at using wikipedia policies in order enforce their narrow and personal POV. The moderates make attempts to refer to the content, to refer to common sense, they use common pedagogical devices to explain what probabilities and conditional probabilities mean. The extremists call this "OR". The moderates get disgusted and discouraged and finally leave the field to the extremists, who carve up the page between them.

"Les extremes se touches". We have an unholy alliance, it reminds me somewhat of Stalin's secret pact with the Nazi's. Both wanted to consolidate their own position and both were focussed on destroying the moderates in their own areas of influence. Both felt it was better to save the ultimate battle between one another for another day. Bosnie-Herzegovinia is another example.

The result is a kind of Balkanization, a kind of freezing of the wikipedia pages to reflect ancient battlelines. Stagnation. Meanwhile, outside of wikipedia, life goes on, and these old conflicts are forgotten, a new synthesis takes over. Perhaps 20 years later wikipedia will probably catch up, but in the meantime it is useless as a resource, it is in fact a force of reaction.

Oh well, wikipedia is wonderful, and since humans are humans, it has its blemishes. Richard Gill (talk) 08:25, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Own set of problems

I've already experienced editors persuading admins to act as their proxies in content disputes, resulting in ham-fisted idiocy. Individuals who are not intimately familiar with a subject area are as likely to exacerbate problems as to improve a situation. And, particularly, to pre-judge editors based on labels already bandied about. On the face of it, some degree of involvement regarding content is required. In the real world, that is an outside, objective peer review by experts. A peer review by folks quoting the dictionary for what words mean in the the context of some content dispute is not likely to improve, let alone resolve, matters.

My first suggestion would be to bar endless WP:ALPHABETSOUP quoting/wikilinking to lecture and denigrate editors instead of having a conversation about a topic in plain English. WP:ALPHABETSOUP disuades any new blood from entering subject areas.

Unfortunately, to the point above about Balkanization, WP does reflect the outside world. If WP appears to not have moved on, then it's only our wishful thinking that the outside world has improved. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 21:57, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Not attempting to rain on your essay, but the only means for reliably addressing content is external juried expertise. Anything less is a crap shoot. Unless WP is going to fund academic peer reviews, the best solution is for admins and ArbCom to meddle less in content, not more—that is, strictly observe hands off and not lend sympathetic ears to POV pushers crying they are being stonewalled (by reputable sources) and hurling WP:ALPHABETSOUP at their editorial opposition. That seems to me something that is achievable. Deal harshly with expletive-laced rudeness and sock-puppetry to start. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 23:24, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

You make a good point, but I think in many cases we can very accurately evaluate content without having to resort to consulting subject experts. AGK [•] 14:53, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

What content-arbitration is not

I did initially have this as part of my essay, but upon reviewing it a few months after writing I don't think it's necessary—and the shorter an essay is, the better (usually). So I'm moving it here so that it's available as background to anybody that wants to read it.

This essay does not advocate, and indeed discourages, content adjudication. It does argue that looking at an editor's contributions to determine whether they have serially violated NPOV is necessary.

"Content arbitration" is a confusing name, and so I have intentionally avoided using it in this essay. To most, "content arbitration" suggests an approach where the Arbitration Committee would intervene in the most inextricable content disputes, examine the academic and editorial arguments for each viewpoint, and issue a ruling on which suggested version of the article content should be used and which should be discarded; or in short, it would say "you and you are right, and you are wrong". That is not what I advocate.

What I do suggest is that the Committee examine the merits of an editor's contributions or wider approach to a given article or topic, so as to determine if that editor is promulgating a version of content that does not confirm to our core content policies (verifiability, no original research, and neutral point of view). Where an editor is "pushing" such edits or views, they must be removed from the affected areas of content, because they are savagely hampering our project.

This approach is necessary in 2010 and beyond, because the present Arbitration process is beset not by the old cases of "editor X is making wide personal attacks", but by more complex cases wherein groups of editors in an entire topic area are both behaving disruptively and using covert, difficult-to-detect means to sculpt entire articles so that they unduly favour one set of beliefs—or, one point of view. These POV-pushers are who the Committee needs to neutralise, and looking at their edits to determine whether they are undermining our NPOV policies is the only way to do that.

AGK [•] 22:11, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Tendentiousness

I must say I agree completely with what you wrote here. The question is how do we bring this about and thus maintain the neutrality and ability of Wikipedia to grow? The people who become uncivil are the easy cases but as you say some remain always polite and do so for years on end slowly and persistently pushing their POV, picking one sided comments from sources that agree with them, taking material out of context, etc.. It is very hard to support / show tendentiousness or have an edit restriction placed on an editor with a conflict of interest. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:50, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

My answer is also the core recommendation of my essay: that ArbCom use the approach detailed in the text of my essay when evaluating disputes. If the next round of editors running for ArbCom cited this approach as their platform for election, and were then elected, then the approach would enjoy the support of the community and could be put into practice at the highest level of dispute resolution. Easier said than done, I guess! AGK [•] 21:45, 8 February 2011 (UTC)