User:Warren Schudy/Neutrality notes

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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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