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

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

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.

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.

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.

Three

Moderate the talk page so only

Four

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.) 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.

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

(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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