User:Warren Schudy/Neutrality notes: Difference between revisions

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== Interesting discussions on neutrality and edit warring in forums ==
== Interesting discussions on neutrality and edit warring in forums ==


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== My interpretation of the neutrality policy ==
== My interpretation of the neutrality policy ==


When writing an encyclopedia, there's a tension between readability and neutrality. One could make a repository of human knowledge that consists of sourced quotes only with no organization, which would be very neutral but unreadable. Therefore, when something is uncontroversial, one can
We're trying to make an index and summary of human knowledge. Different humans have different knowledge, so there's an obvious question - who's knowledge do we summarize? One obvious answer is to summarize everyone's knowledge. Therefore, [[Sun]] would include:
:When asked about the mass of the sun, most people will say they do not know or say something along the lines of "really heavy". A tiny minority quote figures of "1 solar mass" or "about 2 times 10^30 kg".
This isn't really what we had in mind. Therefore, instead of summarizing what people know, we should instead ''summarize what people would know if they tried to find out''. The mass of the sun is uncontroversial, so practically anyone who tries to find out the mass will come up with basically the same answer. Therefore a reasonable summary is "2 times 10^30 kg".
 
On the other hand, if you ask different people to find out about [[global warming]], the answers you receive will differ substantially.
 
Remember, the article on [[sun]] is not about the star; it's about human knowledge about the star.


== Proposed solution(s) ==
== Proposed solution(s) ==


These proposals are roughly sorted by severity. The first couple are reasonable tools for any disagreement, while the latter ones are for extreme cases only.
None of these are actual changes in policy, but rather suggestions that I think would be helpful as official, guiding suggestions.


===One ===
===One ===
First, an idea on how to reduce useless arguments on talk pages. If meat-space people negotiated contracts in the same way as Wiki users negotiate article wording, someone would write a contract, the other party would change it, and then they'd start philosophizing violently about contracts and forget about the task at hand of agreeing on one. In reality, negotiation of contracts is guided in large part by the parties making proposals and counter-proposals that hopefully converge to a compromise. I think wiki disagreements could benefit from a requirement that parties to a dispute accompany most talk page posts with a proposal for the article text. This would focus the parties on the task at hand.
First, an idea on how to reduce useless arguments on talk pages. If meat-space people negotiated contracts in the same way as Wiki users negotiate article wording, someone would write a contract, the other party would change it, and then they'd start philosophizing violently about contracts and forget about the task at hand of agreeing on one. In reality, negotiation of contracts is guided in large part by the parties making proposals and counter-proposals that hopefully converge to a compromise. I think wiki disagreements could benefit from a suggestion that parties to a dispute accompany most talk page posts with a proposal for the article text. This would focus the parties on the task at hand.


===Two===
===Two===
Secondly, consider a neutrality dispute where person A insists on paragraph X and person B insists on paragraph Y. One compromise is to simply say "A says X and B says Y", which is factual but not readable (and violates self-promotion policy). Nonetheless, "A says X and B says Y" might be a good starting point for negotiation; instead of worrying about which of "X" or "Y" is neutral, worry about how to make  "A says X and B says Y" readable, again guided by proposal and counter-proposals.
Consider a neutrality dispute where person A insists on paragraph X and person B insists on paragraph Y. One compromise is to simply say "A says X and B says Y", which is factual but not readable (and violates self-promotion policy). Nonetheless, "A says X and B says Y" might be a good starting point for negotiation; instead of worrying about which of "X" or "Y" is neutral, worry about how to make  "A says X and B says Y" readable, again guided by proposal and counter-proposals.


===Three===
===Three===
Moderate the talk page so only
Some people, such as myself, have a habit of bringing up neutrality issues on articles as they are being developed. Keeping an article balanced as it is being written is awkward, and many of these arguments become moot as the article develops, so insisting on strict neutrality of drafts is probably counterproductive. Therefore I propose:
===Four===
* Discourage people from discussing nit-pick neutrality issues in the early stages of an article's development. If an issue comes up anyway, encourage people to just ignore the issue, leave the article as is, continue writing the article, and come back to it later.
Thirdly, neutrality disputes related to politically-charged articles such as global warming, terrorism and evolution seem to be especially likely to scare away experts. (See http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1459.0.html for 2 experts, Nancy Sculerati and Russell Potter,  who quoted these sorts of articles in their reasons to leave Citizendium.)
* Encourage people to put the following template at the top of in-progress articles that don't seem neutral:
Here I'd like to propose a further policy for those politically charged articles where the expert consensus is challenged by a vocal minority of mostly non-experts. Evolution and global warming are obvious articles of this sort, but articles such as terrorism are likely a different sort of beast.
::: ''This article is under development. The parts that have been written so far may not be a balanced and neutral presentation of the subject.''
 
If a talk page of an article of this type is burdened with unproductive neutrality issues, I propose that an editor can put the article in time-out mode. When an article is in time-out mode, the neutrality policy is suspended for that article and non-expert points of view may only be expressed in a special section of the article. The mainstream is of course still expected to maintain a reasonably neutral point of view, but complaints about neutrality are not allowed. Before an article can be approved, the time-out must end and the neutrality issues resolved.
 
Advantages:
* While the time-out is in effect, the expert mainstream point of view part of the article can be developed without distraction by issues which will only have a small influence on the final article. (According to neutrality policy expert views get more attention.)
* While the time-out is in effect, the vocal minority is encouraged to work on the criticisms section, hopefully refining their arguments so that when the time-out is ended, there is a well-written statement of criticisms to guide the merging process.
* Politically motivated flame wars can expand to fill any available time, so restricting them to a shorter period of time when the time-out is ended seems beneficial.
 
When ending a time-out, supervision of an independent neutrality editor, as discussed in http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1104.0.html and/or http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1105.0.html , sounds helpful.
 
The neutrality policy would be suspended only temporarily, so I don't think this would reduce the neutrality of approved articles much. However, it would give people an excuse to complain about our neutrality. In my view, risking a bit of expert-mainstream bias in controversial articles and/or an appearance thereof is an ok price to pay for fewer flame wars.


== Other proposals of mine ==
== Other proposals of mine ==

Latest revision as of 04:51, 22 November 2023


The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.


Interesting discussions on neutrality and edit warring in forums

http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,1462.msg13111.html#msg13111


Excerpts from Larry

Larry wrote:

people lose thread of what the issue is

Larry also wrote (same post):

Often, I've observed (but only once in these exhibits), the move from "Some people disagree with p, therefore we should not say that p without qualification," to debating the merits of p itself. But look, this is silly. We could simply have a rule against it. If p as a general claim is actually contentious enough that people want to argue about it on CZ talk pages, that means that the article will not actually state either p or not-p, because to do so would be contrary to our Neutrality Policy.

Larry wrote (later in that thread):

the desire to be right, and plain old rudeness.

More Larry:

I am toying with the general concept of making three rules, namely, (1) always to state a clear topic of discussion, (2) the topic should concern the wording of the article, and (3) only argue about that topic--never the topic itself.

Robert King, suggesting that troublesome authors be asked to write an essay as punishment:

Actually, I was totally serious when I suggested this. I think it is a very fitting "punishment" (although it's not really a punishment per se), and I believe forces the person to look at the issue objectively; think of it as a lesson in critical thinking.

My interpretation of the neutrality policy

We're trying to make an index and summary of human knowledge. Different humans have different knowledge, so there's an obvious question - who's knowledge do we summarize? One obvious answer is to summarize everyone's knowledge. Therefore, Sun would include:

When asked about the mass of the sun, most people will say they do not know or say something along the lines of "really heavy". A tiny minority quote figures of "1 solar mass" or "about 2 times 10^30 kg".

This isn't really what we had in mind. Therefore, instead of summarizing what people know, we should instead summarize what people would know if they tried to find out. The mass of the sun is uncontroversial, so practically anyone who tries to find out the mass will come up with basically the same answer. Therefore a reasonable summary is "2 times 10^30 kg".

On the other hand, if you ask different people to find out about global warming, the answers you receive will differ substantially.

Remember, the article on sun is not about the star; it's about human knowledge about the star.

Proposed solution(s)

None of these are actual changes in policy, but rather suggestions that I think would be helpful as official, guiding suggestions.

One

First, an idea on how to reduce useless arguments on talk pages. If meat-space people negotiated contracts in the same way as Wiki users negotiate article wording, someone would write a contract, the other party would change it, and then they'd start philosophizing violently about contracts and forget about the task at hand of agreeing on one. In reality, negotiation of contracts is guided in large part by the parties making proposals and counter-proposals that hopefully converge to a compromise. I think wiki disagreements could benefit from a suggestion that parties to a dispute accompany most talk page posts with a proposal for the article text. This would focus the parties on the task at hand.

Two

Consider a neutrality dispute where person A insists on paragraph X and person B insists on paragraph Y. One compromise is to simply say "A says X and B says Y", which is factual but not readable (and violates self-promotion policy). Nonetheless, "A says X and B says Y" might be a good starting point for negotiation; instead of worrying about which of "X" or "Y" is neutral, worry about how to make "A says X and B says Y" readable, again guided by proposal and counter-proposals.

Three

Some people, such as myself, have a habit of bringing up neutrality issues on articles as they are being developed. Keeping an article balanced as it is being written is awkward, and many of these arguments become moot as the article develops, so insisting on strict neutrality of drafts is probably counterproductive. Therefore I propose:

  • Discourage people from discussing nit-pick neutrality issues in the early stages of an article's development. If an issue comes up anyway, encourage people to just ignore the issue, leave the article as is, continue writing the article, and come back to it later.
  • Encourage people to put the following template at the top of in-progress articles that don't seem neutral:
This article is under development. The parts that have been written so far may not be a balanced and neutral presentation of the subject.

Other proposals of mine

(These don't particularly fit with the rest of this page, but I'd like to remember these somewhere, and here seems like a decent place.)

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