THIS RFC IS CLOSED - Please do not edit
The Arbitration Committee has a problem to pose to the community, and would like to solicit commentary and solution-suggestions from contributors.
In the light of some recent commentary [on the arbitration committee mailing list], I'm going to offer my own analysis of the situation. I think this is a very fundamental question and should have input from all members of the committee, and Jimbo too.
It very much used to be the case that arbitration was between one user who was clearly in the right and one user who was clearly causing trouble. (Because, really, until the commitee was created, there really was no way to get rid of troublemakers -- Jimbo exercised his authority so sparingly that it effectively gave them carte blanche to cause trouble). It's no surprise that most of the cases for the first 6-10 months dealt with ejecting troublemakers who had been allowed to roost for far too long.
Now, with the three revert rule acting as an "electric fence" (so to speak) to contain people from fighting revert wars of epic scale (along the lines of people reverting 100 times in a day), and the arbcom available to sort out the matters that are clearly black-or-white, things have become more, well, grey. Mark me this - from here on out, our primary problem will not be users who do nothing but cause general angst, but POV pushers -- people who edit Wikipedia with an agenda (even if they are not aware of it) While this makes our job infinitely harder, THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY A BAD THING. It is a sign that Wikipedia is maturing, that we have successfully established rules and mechanisms to ensure that good decorum is maintained
The $64,000 question is, then, what do we do about POV pushing? The arbcom has, for-better-or-for-worse, avoided getting involved in "content disputes". Now, I don't really like this way of phrasing it - many of our disputes are, ultimately, a dispute about content. We have already in several cases in which we sanctioned users for persistently editing with a particular bias, in violation of our NPOV policy. I think these are obvious examples of us getting involved in a content disputes. It would be more accurate to say that we have avoided dictating what an article should or should not say. Overall, I think this policy has been both good (in that it avoided concentrating too much power in one group of users) but it has also had a marked and demonstrable downside. Often times, POV disputes come down to two people (or groups of people) arguing that their version is better, and they are unable to come up with a compromise. Ideally, this where the mediation commitee would step in and help the disputants solve their problems. Unfortunately - at best - the mediation committee (which is currently dead and I don't see it coming back anytime in the near future) was only marginally effective in this regard. It became more of a stepping stone to the arbitration committee and then was ignored all together.
As a result of our no-content-dispute policy, the arbcom has not really had an effective means of solving these POV disputes (which is, as [arbitration committee member] alluded to earlier, why we have had so much trouble coming up with remedies). We have effectively hamstrung ourselves. More importantly, if the arbitration committee won't do it, who will?
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a quick or easy fix for this. I think the only way to remedy this would be to modify the whole dispute resolution process. It's been over a year since it was last changed, and it's about time we updated it to reflect the experience we have gained.
The solution I would pose is - we need someone (or a group of someones) to fill the vacuum we have created. For the purposes of this email, let's assume it's a group of people that I will refer to hereafter as the 'content committee' - no pun intended. This group would have the authority to decide that one particular version is better, and to impose a binding solution on the disputing parties. Ideally, they would be competent in the area of dispute or a related area. Nor do I think this job would even be particularly hard -- more often than not in a POV dispute, it is quite obvious even to a layman that one version is neutral (or mostly so) and the other is horribly POV.
This commitee would be subordinate to the arbitration committee. We would act as a sort of court-of-appeal, as well as reserving for ourselves the right to hear disputes about behavior. So to summarize -- in effect, I am proposing we replace the mediation committee with a committee (a) comptent in the subject area, and (b) capable of imposing a binding solution on the disputants, while (c) allowing users to bypass this step directly in favor of arbitration. In effect, we became a committee that looks at people behaving badly in general, while they look at specific articles that need a voice of authority to settle a disputes.
Now, just to get into a few other details that should be mentioned. Hypothetically, let's say we created this Content Committee (actually, if we want them to have comptence in a particular subject area, we would probably need to create multiple commitees or at least have ad-hoc ones handy) At first, there would no doubt be a tremendous rush to have them sort out hundreds upon hundreds of issues pertainting to every trivial dispute on Wikipedia. I think it needs to be made clear that the barriers to entry required for this group to take a particular case should be very high. Just because you have a disagreement with user:X on article Y doesn't mean you need to run to the Content Committee. I also think it's important that the people on this committee(s) be accountable to the community. Far be it for me to propose instruction creep (I coined the term, afterall), but if we were to have such a committee, it would probably be a good idea to have yearly elections alongside the arbitration commitee elections in December.
I'd appreciate hearing what all of you think of my idea.
I see no reason to replace the Mediation Committee. All that needs to happen there is for some folks who are skilled in mediation to take an interest. That will come as more people are aware of our problem. I will certainly do it after I leave the Arbitration Committee. Although I have only basic training in mediation and no actual experience.
The problems of POV pushers and content disputes are important but not necessarily linked with mediation. In fact, having some definite procedure is vital for making mediation work. If you can say to a POV pusher, "Ok, I can see that you are pushing a point of view and if you go on to further proceedings, others will see it too and you may end up with your editing restricted" then you can start bringing them around to a discussion of how they can ensure that that their point of view is included but not to the exclusion of other points of view. One reason mediation works in life is that litigation, and strikes, are ruinous. Our arbitration procedures are only onerous. Fred Bauder 21:25, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
If a POV pusher can see, by looking at previous cases, that other point of view pushers have not only succeeded in fighting off charges of point of view editing, but been complimented by the Arbitration Committee for their "good work", it is rather difficult to negotiate or mediate with them. Fred Bauder 22:05, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
I believe that the original scope of the arbcom allowed them to handle content disputes. Why not return to that original mandate? Snowspinner 23:16, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
Arbcom is a wasite of time just like mediation. Unlike mediation arbcom is active. Since no one helped me resolve my case (even though a few notable attempts were made) I am exterminated off of the picture. You need a degree of SOLID rules and HEAVY enforcement. No maybes no BUTs. NO POV whatsoever policy probably is best otherwise its always a failing system as raises the "who determines whats NPOV and what isnt?" question. While sounding like martial law its actualy fair. There are different levels of pov pushing. Destroying a user is one of them. There should be a structure that "cures" the {{POV}}, {{disputed}}, {{totallydisputed}} articles. Since any idea I thought could improve wikipedia via a few wikiprojects were either "vandalised" to death by even admins or was overwhelingly rejected I no longer suggest ideas. Cat chi? 01:59, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
This is an excellent point/issue to raise. It is true that for a long time, conflicts over content could not be resolved unless re-packaged as conflicts over personal behavior and submitted as such to the ArbCom. Now, the ArbCom fills a crucial role. But remember, we are an encyclopedia first, and a wiki-community second. Contenat must be a priority here. I still believe in the wiki-idea, and do not want to refashion ourselves as something more like Nupedia. Be that as it may, we need a meachnism for handling content-related disputes. Obviously such a mechanism would not apply to all content-disputes. Most of us have been involved in content-disputes that were either resolved immediately or after a few days' discussion on the article talk page. But when a dispute goes on for weeks, we need a mechanism. I've been here a long time and although I have no objection to people seeking mediation under such circumstances, the Mediation Committee is not a solution; it is ill-equiped to deal with issues of content. We have two kinds of guidelines: guidelines and guidelines. The ArbCom is really the only body that can enforce behavioral guidelines. It only makes sense that we have another committee to enforce content guidelines. This committee can be independent with a narrow brief (Jguk's proposal) or it can be given a broader brief, but supervised by the ArbCom (Mav's proposal), but we need one of these two proposals to be developed, run by Jimbo, and, if he agrees, institutionalized. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:19, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I find any kind of idea of having a 'content committee' or similar abhorrent, and a reversal of everything wiki. Dan100 22:32, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
ArbCom should stay behavoiraly focused. Let the content disputes work themselves out. If you eliminate two persons causing edit wars, if the content is all that important, the rest of the community will sort it out, or maybe it simply isn't all that important.-- Tznkai 14:20, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
As phrased, the content committee has to be competent (across a vast range of subject areas) and yet elected once a year (so can't be flexible about recruiting new members to deal with disputes outside its competence). I feel this is likely to cause problems with disputes in specialist areas (yes, I'm thinking of global warming and related...) William M. Connolley 22:45, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC).
I believe that ArbCom should remain focused on behavoir issues. The solution to this problem is to revive the mediation committee. In any type of anarchist social system (such as Wikipedia), mediation methods are crucial. Content disputes cannot be settled by arbitrary committees. Kaldari 19:14, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
While, I truly believe that Wikipedia needs to improve its mechanisms for dealing with content disputes, it occurs to me to wonder something... Why does the Arbcom need our permission to consult with experts inside or outside of Wikipedia, if that would be useful to you in forming opinions about what is reasonable? Looking at histories and talk pages, it is not difficult to work out which editors are working in which categories of material. Is there any reason under the current system why you couldn't go ask them what they think? It's not the same as annoiting a content committee, and you would have to use your own judgment about who to ask and how to weight their opinions, etc., but I can't imagine its worse than getting buried in areas outside your expertise. Also, it might be useful to try this kind of informal process of consulation and solicited opinions, before trying to create a panel of official experts. Dragons flight 05:55, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
A "content arbitration committee" which merely decides whether a given fact is adequately sourced should be set up - ideally in a way that enables it to give quick binding answers. Anyone ignoring binding answers could be taken immediately before the existing behavioural arbitration committee.
Users will be able to approach the content arbitration with new information/sources even once a decision has been made - but the old decision would remain until explicitly overturned.
For instance: Suppose User 1 adds the following statement to the Bill Clinton article: "Bill Clinton was the best president America has ever had". User 2 removes this as POV. A content arbitration committee would find that the statement isn't adequately sourced. It may be then that User 1 adds the statement "According to the organisation XYZ, Bill Clinton was the best president America has ever had". User 2 removes this as POV, but in this instance User 1 provides a source, so the content arbitration committee would accept this statement as sourced.
What the content arbitration committee would not do is say whether a given statement should actually appear in any given article.
Revive the Mediation Committee. - Mgm| (talk) 19:37, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
Overhaul the mediation committee into something huge, w lots of members and a carefully crafted ability to facilitate binding decisions. These decisions would need to be able to be reviewed, as often as necessary. The current committee is failing due to its smallness in size, and its lack of power. I suggest basic changes like:
For the most part, do nothing. POV editors often cause an improvement in an article because they draw attention and cause refactoring. If all parties are behaving civilly and attempting to be constructive, then the end result should be an improvement. If they are not, then ArbCom can act without considering the POV edits directly. A related idea is that myopic editing should be discouraged, in that we should be more liberal in asking people to take a break from a specific article or set of articles if that is all they are editing, especially where the subject is controversial. We can do this because our community is large enough that it should never cause an article to go without an editor. Wikipedia is not a open pulpit, and we should discourage editors from only working on a small number of articles so that all our articles can be a community project. The discouragement should apply to all users, not just ones we judge to be POV pushers, but we should look the other way for articles where there is no controversy since there is no evidence that there are other editors who wish to contribute.-- Gmaxwell 21:25, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I support this. Indeed, being able to persuade a user to take a break from an article and especially to also edit more than just one article would give that user an opportunity to gain perspective. To see how Wikipedia works well elsewhere, away from that user's narrow area of interest or, and this is the issue which it is said is trying to be addressed, away from their own POV pushing. Paul Beardsell 09:14, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So far this is the best idea on the page. Hierarchical content creation will drive a lot of editors away from Wikipedia, and especially from controversial topics (because now the fight is "not their job;" and further, their contributions will be seen as mattering less in light of the content committee's overrule); yet the cure for controversial topics is more editors, not less. This is one idea to "spread things around more," I'd like to hear others. Demi T/ C 22:34, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)
Agree totally. No way should Raul decide which POV prevails in articles. There's already far too much of that. Let the arbcom enjoy witchhunting dissidents and leave the content to the rest of us. Letting the general idea be current that editors are discouraged from focusing on "issue" articles is reasonable -- it shouldn't be yet another policy though. Grace Note 04:25, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hold tight and wait for Mediawiki 1.5, and hope that the m:Article validation feature can save us.
Or to phrase this more appropriately, look for formalised, structured ways of bringing outside editors into contentious articles. The ideological basis for not having a content committee from day one was sound - the aim was not to concentrate editorial powers into the hands of a small number of users. And feel free to criticise me for being too postmodernist here, but surely all Wikipedians edit with bias, whether conscious or not. A better way might perhaps be to allow either MedCom or ArbCom to enforce policies like WP:V, which are long-standing and well understood, rather than grant them sweeping new powers. WP:RFC is my preferred option for now, although it could be expanded. At least with a well-formed RfC to start from, ArbCom can act without being seen to be editorialising. -- bainer ( talk) 00:05, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I really like these ideas. All hail m:Article validation feature! Sam Spade 00:37, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree with the preference for RfC's, but it seems an unreliable mechanism right now. Some RfC's bring a crowd of additional editors to look over a specific dispute and give their opinions, but other RfC's are virtually ignored. How could we increase participation in RfC's? Every time you respond to an RfC, you're allowed one extra revert for that 24-hour period? :) The point of that joke is that we don't have any immediately obvious way to increase participation. Furthermore, in some cases, the new people commenting will be divided along the old lines, so we're right back in the situation that Raul is addressing. Still, I see more promise in having many people spend a little time on these disputes than in having a few people on a committee or board that has to spend a lot of time on the problem. JamesMLane 11:40, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree Wikipedia needs a body of people who are willing to volunteer their time to help resolve content disputes, but I think that the methods of such a group should be cast in a less confrontational way than Arbitration. I would suggest we form a fairly large group of experienced, trusted editors who can be called upon to help forge a consensus for the purpose resolving content disputes. Their role should be to take a serious look at the issues in dispute and work with the parties involved to decide how the article should be written. For the sake of a name, maybe call it a "content advisory board" or something similar. Once a consensus has been reached among the parties and their advisors (primarily through discussion, rather than voting), it should be considered binding in the same way as any other consensus, meaning that while other approaches can be discussed, blatant disregard for the consensus would be a behavioral issue subject to Arbitration if neccesary. Dragons flight 00:10, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Note: I have made a somewhat different suggestion below, #12, which reflects a reinement in my thinking after some time for reflection. Dragons flight 15:26, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)
Really interesting idea - I was about to write roughly the same. There could be some overlap with the group of admins (who, as I would understand it, would represent trustworthy editors); however, I would recommend for an admin who is somehow involved in the topic to not use his position for exactly this group of articles in order to avoid a conflict of interest (as happened a bit with Cyprus_dispute, Hellenic_Genocide, Turkish_Cypriot_Genocide (now moved) et al). This outside experienced editor - the "advisor" - should know basically about the topic and read up a bit more about it. He should try to remain as neutral as possible, but has to have some executive power as well. As mentioned above, he must be in a position to enforce a reached consensus on users who have a blatant disregard for wikipedia behavioral standards. He should also be able to enforce consensus building and to prevent editing wars, like for instance locking/unlocking the article (in this case, a special notice should be placed on the relevant page - "Temporary Lock") and blocking users for a short period of time. All in all, he should be Superman w/o the laser view ;) - Snchduer 01:22, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A "content advisory board" is an idea that would utterly doom Wikipedia, in my opinion. Do we write what is demonstrably neutral and verifiable, or what the content advisory board tells us we can write? Arbcom can already decide when an editor is writing neutral and verifiable information and when he is not, simply by checking for references, so what purpose would the board serve? -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 01:48, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
If people are unable to come to agreement on content in Wikipedia, this is no business of arbcom's, or anybody else's.
If editors misbehave, Arbcom should bash their heads together, something it does very effectively and is deservedly proud of.
If editors don't misbehave, I don't think that it can be legitimately stated that a problem exists.
Wikipedia cannot write stable articles on subjects about which there is significant disagreement that cannot be expressed in a manner neutral enough to satisfy all major parties.
"As a result of our no-content-dispute policy, the arbcom has not really had an effective means of solving these POV disputes." Well taking the hotheads out of the mix does help, and is all that arbcom can be expected to do. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 01:01, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Right on! The main proposal here is essentially a power grab by the ambitious and not yet quite powerful enough, in their own opinion. In my view there isn't so much wrong with Wikipedia that abolishment of the ArbCom or, failing which, its impeachment would not fix. Paul Beardsell 02:57, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
But the proposal is much more dangerous than it seems. Essentially it means that those unable to make their points in the editing process would be appealing to an editorial panel. It would be a move away from common authorship, a body of work created by its users, to one more like Brittanica. It would kill wikipedia. Paul Beardsell 02:57, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Tony. The wikiway works far more often then it fails. It would be nice if more people got involved in RfCs and 3rd Opinions and nipped problems in the bud. It's amazing what a little education in wikiways and some suggestions of compromises can do. Dan100 10:34, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Copied here from a message I sent to the mailing list →Raul654 18:42, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Bad example. Religiousness and intelligence is just over a week old and has had ten editors. Not enough time for anybody to burn out and certainly not an example of an article becoming a "mess" because editors stay away. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 07:20, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ignoring the back and forth between Raul and Paul, I think Tony Sidaway has got the right idea. This is optimistic eventualism, but I happen to think that is more responsible than irresponsible, and is not lazy at all. The conflict between two points of view is both natural and good. The wikipedia community does a surprisingly well job of policing itself, the ArbCom, by its nature, is going to deal only with the worst, the ugliest, and the most problematic.
The big picture is what is at stake here, and I think that is what we should be focused on. Ultimatly even if the ArbCom, or another comittee with the content disputes delegated to them is given the authority to arbitrate content disputes, what power do they have, that normal wikipedians do not? They can ban disruptive users, and they can order pages protected, just like any other administrator. However, choosing a point of NPOV, and then "locking it" through protection, to me is the last resort, used only to protect from vandalism and massive edit wars spanning several users.
Wikipedia is not ideal. ArbCom is not ideal. Dealing with content disputes is not ideal. I cannot see any reasonable alternative however, that is not inherently worse and against the spirit of the community.
ArbCom sounds like its starting to burn out, which is not surprising. The only alternate solution I can see is to expand the ArbCom, with the same (self imposed) mandate of policing the actions of errant community members. Delegate cases too diffrent subcomittees, the more complicated issues to the main ArbCom, the clearer ones to smaller ones. Or simply get fresh blood in frequently to lower the stress load. The more time you spend on the microscopic, the more time you see the sick, disgusting, and terrible. Zoom out, and you see the beauty. You need to spend time doing both, or you're gonna go nuts. To me, that is where the main issue lies. Everyone who cares enough to post on here, has seen some truly stupid stuff go down, but even POV pushing on several articles can lead to a better one, quickly. In the short time I've been an editor, I've watched from afar the greatest selling female artist article, as silly as I personally find it, go from onesided, to multi faceted and beautifully NPOV.
Wikipedia isn't broke. This is a free content anyone can edit encylopedia opened to the unwashed masses. A little dirt and grime is expected.-- Tznkai 14:43, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'd never really heard of eventualism, and reading the article on meta now I find the perspective described there (that something else called immediatism may eventually take hold and become the predominant paradigm) inexplicable and frankly incredible. To wiki is to eventualize, nothing is complete. From
this to
this took eighteen months and a score of editors. Wikipedia is the greatest vindication any eventualist could ask for. --
Tony Sidaway|
Talk 17:09, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It's been my experience that there are some common themes in NPOV disputes, typically:
I would propose that we designate individuals who take it upon themselves to facilitate a structured dialogue on what precisely the points of disagreement are, consider suggestions to bridge the gaps, and if necessary, submit a proposed new version to the arbcom, explaining how the proposed version was arrived at. The arbcom will then be able to evaluate the proposed version and decide what to accept.
The designated individuals would get this responsibility by:
-- Leifern 15:03, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
My idea is somewhat similar to Raul's except it does not go as far. Here is my email response to Raul on the ArbCom mailing list:
Interesting idea. I floated an idea very similar to this a while back on WikiEN-l when there was a move to force the ArbCom to make these type of decisions directly. My idea was to have a content specialist subcommittee to the ArbCom that we would consult when content issues arise. They would *not* have any power to enforce their decisions nor any authority of their own. But we could declare their decisions binding for issues we present to them by an up or down vote (although I imagine that voting down would be as rare as jury nullification is in the real world).
This would, IMO, set up proper checks and balances.
The big issue as I see it, is recruitment of non-involved parties and whether or not this would be a standing set of subcommittees (each with their own set of coverage) or if we would have to empanel them on a case-by-case basis (we would likely have to do this at first to build enough subcommittees, anyway).
....
Each branch of the subcommittee would cover a different broad area of knowledge, such as biology, chemistry, or history. As the Wikipedia community grows sub-branches will be formed as needed (history will likely be the first area to have this happen). Members of the subcommittee would be elected by the community for their knowledge in the area (as demonstrated on Wikipedia or through outside credentials) and for their good behavior and neutrality. They would, of course, recuse themselves if they are involved in any case before them.
The content subcommittee would not declare certain facts in the outside world to be true, but would instead judge whether or not a user in arbitration has followed Wikipedia policies that concern content (such as No original research and NPOV). Making this determination is something that requires knowledge in the area of the content dispute.
NOTE: This is just a tool to make it easier for the ArbCom to see just who is being NPOV, who is violating NOR, and who is presenting fringe views as if they were mainstream.
The reason why I think this would be a better plan than having a fully separate content committee is that cases are almost always an intertwined mix of behavioral issues and content issues. So having completely separate bodies looking at different aspects would be redundant and would very often result in a case being heard twice.
The potential danger of this plan that needs to be guarded against is the possibility of drifting from NPOV and toward an SPOV (specialist/sympathetic POV) where the view of so-called specialists dominates articles and outside views are marginalized more than is appropriate. So vigilance and oversight will be needed. -- mav 17:02, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I like this proposal, although it will take time to set up and there will be (of course) disputes over who should be eligible for any one committee. Also, I think this proposal needs to be formulated narrowly enough so that Wikipedia does not become nupedia (I am sure Mav has already thought of this). For the record, I also think Jguk's plan, above, is reasonable (as I see it, the difference is Mav's committees would push us in the direction of a higher quality encyclopedia; Jguk's would simply police violations of, and enforce, policies like NPOV, NOR, Cite Sources, and Verifiability). Perhaps the two are complementary. Perhaps at this time, we can only afford to enact one of these proposals, but I bet as the community continues to grow the other one will become important as well. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:45, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I can't really see this as workable. Do we have enough 'experts' in areas required? How would they be elected to these sub-committees? Dan100 22:14, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
This would really help clear up cases where one side is engaging in crackpottery. However, how would you define expertise for the purposes of the committee? I also think that while this would make what we're currently doing easier - I really want to get away from hearing content disputes in general. A dispute like the global warming one needs the dispute to be solved - not a swath of paroles on every single user involved - and under this, we'd still be dealing with the dispute by doing the latter. Ambi 04:07, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Mav is right that we won't know until we try. But the criticisms of Mav's proposals are very revealing. Wikipedia has been around for over 4 years, and has grown exponentially. If we still do not have as contributors people with a fair degree of expertise in the main areas we cover, then we are a failure. How can you write an encyclopedia without people who know what they are talking about, or, minimally, people who have the skills to adequately research new topics? If Dan100 (or anyone) thinks we don't have enough people like this for the committees Mav proposes, then Dan100 is saying that we simply do not have the capacity to write a good (let alone excellent) encyclopedia. That many editors seem to think this way is very disturbing. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:08, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am opposed to the subcommittee idea because I believe whatever processes/entities are created to deal with content disputes need to coexist with arbitration, not be dependant upon it. As a community, we need to find ways to improve our mechanisms for dealing with content disputes before they develop into bad behavior. Dragons flight 00:23, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
I think this idea is good only in theory. In practical terms, I think it raises more questions than it answers. (How many committees, how many people on a committee, how to keep them all current and running, how to vet the members, etc.) I think the effort would be more trouble than it is worth. (This comment added by Maurreen Demi T/ C 19:28, 2005 May 21 (UTC))
Mav, you've made fair points in response to me above. But just how would we select these people? As Ed Poor said on the mailing list, the only people who can judge experts are other experts.
Dan100 23:03, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
I rather like this one, too. James F. (talk) 20:44, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I completely agree with Mav's proposal. However, I would also propose forming a (small) oversight committee from current arbitrators/bureaucrats/admins to oversee the subject committees. This oversight committee would only be responsible for making sure everyone in the committees are acting fairly, are NPOV, and are qualified. This, I believe, would "check and balance" all the specialized committees and would also take the current strain off the ArbCom. Flcelloguy 13:29, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK, so Ed didn't quite say what I thought he did. But the fact remains - it's a nice idea, but I'd really like to some ideas as to how we could select people. Although Wikipedia has thousands of registered users, only a few hundred are active on a daily basis at any one time. Out of these people, would there be enough qualified in a specific area to form a committee? How would we find the people who are potentially qualified? How would we verify their qualifications? Would these people be willing to 'work' on such a committee, and be subjected to such scrutiny? Could all of this be done in a reasonable timeframe? Dan100 13:34, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for getting back to me Mav.
To be honest I'm seeing little appetite for taking any suggestions further, so the whole thing's moot really. Dan100 ( Talk) 21:51, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
What does it mean to establish consensus? Once established, what if one dissenting user continues to edit counter to that consensus--is that a disruption? It seems to me that some of what Raul654 is trying to address boils down to that. Let's not have an NPOV committee--we are all the NPOV committee, and the less we have to distinguish between "greater" and "lesser" users the better. But once we've "come to our decision," perhaps we need to make it clearer that editing in opposition to that consensus is disruptive; or that going on an editing crusade in the absence of a consensus to do so is also disruptive.
This could be added to the existing WP:NPOV and Wikipedia:Consensus. I'm not suggesting vote counts or anything similar here, just some additional nudging so that people will feel freer to involve themselves in subjects which are "fought" over--the more editors for these, the better (and note my support for Gmaxwell's proposal above). If people feel like they have done something useful in participating in a consensus discussion, rather than buying themselves an endless fight, they will probably be more likely to do so. Demi T/ C 22:53, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)
I love it. Let me expand it a wee bit: honor consensus. This means two things: First, document very clearly what the consensus opinion is, how it has been reached, and what alternatives were considered. This is necessary because we have many situations where new users make changes against an established consensus without being aware of it. This is because the consensus is not clearly documented, or only documented in the history of one talk page while being relevant to more than one article, etc. We need a form of institutional memory that does not require digging through talk page histories. Second, once consensus has been reached, it should be enforceable. (This was what one of the Gdansk/Danzig polls was about.) I'm not sure how to do this, but what good is consensus if nobody is bound by it, in a real, actionable sense? This proposal would eliminate the need for designated "Content Committees". Everyone with expert knowledge on a given topic should have articles in their field of expertise on their watchlist, or monitor a public watchlist for a given topic. Those editors then are in fact the "content committee" in a sense, because they can help establish consensus, but they don't need to be given a special status. Finally, there should be a way to crack down on extremely blatant POV pushing. We need to establish guidelines on what counts as blatant POV pushing, but assuming we have those, persistent POV pushing, especially without debate, could be made a blockable offense. -- MarkSweep 04:55, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia's job is NOT to determine what the "consensus view" of anything is. If there so much disagreement about some topic that it requires effort to reach a consensus, I think this means that there are SIGNIFICANT differences of opinion about what's what.
Wikipedia's job in such a case is not to determine who is right but to describe:
Back in the second half of the 19th century, scientists (i.e., experts in the field of medicine) had no idea about germs spreading disease. There was only ONE PERSON in Vienna who had the slightest inkling - this was before Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur. As Ray said,
Recall what our purpose is: to spread knowledge. If we take even baby steps toward the idea of using "majority vote" or 95% majority or the like to determine the CONSENSUS about what is true, we will FAIL as an encyclopedia.
Committees that need to take action, require consensus. Politicians choosing whether to support or oppose a military campaign or an international treaty MUST come to some sort of consensus. But the scientists and librarians and journalists and "intelligence" analysts who advise them must not give up searching for the truth, even when that search takes them away from the agreed-upon, politically formed consensus.
(Think of DNA testing proving that an inmate on death row is really innocent, for example. The jury came to a consensus that he was guilty, but then it turned out they were wrong.)
We dare not take the risk that politically correct viewpoints can trump independent discoveries (see Lysenkoism).
Hey, maybe I'm completely wrong about global warming - along with PhD's like Richard Lindzen and Sallie Baliunas. Twenty or 30 years from now, when the earth is burnt to a crisp and you guys are all saying I-told-you-so, at least I'll be able to say that I did not hound out Dr. C. from Wikipedia. When it came down to (a) the article is a mess, vs. (b) William felt compelled to leave - I agonized over it, but I think I made the right choice.
And he's still here, and we still need to come to terms with this "consensus vs. minority" issue in regards to NPOV policy. It's an issue that just won't go away. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 17:36, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
Reading some of the above proposals, I agree with many of the principles mentioned.
I don't think "POV pushing" should be a wikicrime. People are perfectly welcome to try to make sure that a particular POV is represented in a set of articles, as long as they don't try to exclude others points of view. Sometimes people present their own POV as if it were fact. This is easy to do unintentionally, if you don't know what you assume is the truth is actually disputed. Plenty of people seem to get carried away when writing about a certain topic, and lose the encyclopedic tone and NPOV that we would ideally like to see in all articles. This leads to biased articles, but the best solution for this is for people with other points of view to read them, notice this, and do something about it.
The problem comes when people unreasonably insist on things being a certain way. Sometimes that's because they don't understand the NPOV policy or they aren't willing to abide by it. Sometimes that's because they have a "POV of one" which is incompatible with most everyone else's idea of what a neutral article needs to say.
If we leave people to their own devices to form consensus on articles, we seem to end up with a lot of unresolved disputes. This is not so bad as long as the articles are tagged for the benefit of readers, but to build a respectable encyclopedia, we need things like this to get resolved.
I don't support the idea of an elite NPOV hit-squad, no matter how trustworthy. There will be inevitable questions of and accusations of bias. Also, people appointed to volunteer committee posts have a way of wandering off and neglecting their responsibilities. Dispute resolution is not also not particularly pleasant, and lends itself to burnout quite easily.
We currently have the RFC process for article content disputes. Personally, I've both used it to request outside participation, and jumped into article disputes myself. It seems to have worked well in all the particular cases I've been involved in.
It sounds like it may not work so well in all cases. Well, it can be enhanced. Instead of appointing NPOV judges, why don't we create a sort of informal NPOV jury pool for each dispute? We could create a simple script to randomly generate the names of active Wikipedia editors with a certain minimum number of edits. Boilerplate notices could be posted on their user talk pages (either automatically or manually by one or more of the parties involved) that their participation is requested in a dispute on a particular talk page. If they decline to participate (or don't happen to in a certain amount of time), either alternates can be chosen, or the pool can be made big enough in the first place that enough opinions are likely to be gathered in one round.
Having half a dozen people say to a person, "No, it's not just your opponent. You really are in out in left field on this one," seems to be quite effective in resolving certain kinds of overly stubborn opposition.
The Arbitration Committee need only become involved if someone wants to file a behavioral complaint about how someone is not cooperating in this process. I think the Arbitration Committee should be able to look at a dispute and say, based on the factions involved and the outside opinions gathered, this particular person is being somehow unreasonable - for example, insisting on a POV statement and rejecting all reasonable alternatives or NPOV encapsulations, disrupting the discussion process, refusing to discuss reverts, removing the dispute tag, etc. They should be able to see through the everyday partisan accusations that one's opponents are POV pushers, and be free to say, "Your opponents are participating in the discussion within reasonable bounds. Keep talking to them; ask for more outside opinions until you get this resolved."
I think it's very important important not to come up with too many constraints on how an article should or should not be written. Many times, the dispute comes down to very minor things, like wording or how a particular thing should be spun. I have certainly seen situations where outside parties come in and make substantial re-writes that make the initial argument moot. The Arbitration Committee should only say, "User X is being unreasonable; they need to be removed from this discussion", or declare a demand for an article to be a certain way to be either POV or otherwise unreasonable (based on "jury" input). They should not mandate that certain things be included, or expressed in a certain way. Those decisions should be left up to community opinion. This includes standardization and usage questions, which often require site-wide voting to settle (or not settle). But the community also should not, after a few days of deliberation, say, this version is how this article is going to be written, and anyone who comes along any makes any substantial change to it is Violating Consensus. That will stifle growth and improvement. This is not to say that controversial points, and previous agreements accomodating differences shouldn't be well-documented so that future editors don't re-create problems that have already been fixed in at least one mutually acceptable way. Just that there may be more than one way to avoid a certain problem than what the warring factions happen to have come up with sometime last month or last year.
I would also note that in some cases, opposing factions are arguing in ignorance, and that instead of a random selection of equally ignorant people to come along and get them to play nice, what is actually needed is a subject expert or more research to shed some light on the subject. This can sometimes reveal that both sides have made incorrect factual assumptions, which will both resolve the dispute, and correct errors which readers would otherwise have been exposed to (whether the article was considered neutral or disputed). I hope that the "Wikipedians on the street" and the Arbitration Committee will be wise enough to identify these situations and act accordingly.
-- Beland 08:06, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Mav asked me to comment on his proposal, and I've read most of the rest of the page.
I don't follow the Arbitration Committee, so I don't know much about the situation, or the problem under discussion. It's not clear to me, for example, whether the issue is more a matter of pages that do not find consensus, or people who do not follow consensus; or how much knowledge of a given article subject would be called for to properly address such disagreements.
I think a lot of the comments above have merit. Some would be impractical, and some would need refinement.
Acknowledging all that, here a couple of my ideas:
The RFC Patrol might be able to address disagreements before they get too frustrating. I had an article RFC that brought no one to the article, as far as I could tell.
The volunteer subject consultants could be used by regular users or the arbitration committee. They could just list themselves somewhere, and possibly their qualifications. Any vetting needed or desired could be handled on a case-by-case basis. Maurreen 06:17, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You know, I've noticed that when disputes are posted on topical or regional noticeboards, they tend to get a reasonable response. There are a few under Category:WikiProjects, including the regional ones and a successful LGBT one that just started up recently. Active WikiProjects are also a good place for that sort of thing. Maybe we should encourage people who come to RFC to post to the appropriate special interest page, and encourage people to bookmark, watchlist, or affiliate themselves with noticeboards that align with their interests. People do add themselves as participants in these pages; if you are looking for a subject expert, this is not a bad place to start. (There's also the ability to look at who's editing articles on the topic, and leave them personal messages, but that seems more hit-or-miss.) -- Beland 04:54, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
When this issue was first described, I made some suggestions (Alternative Solution #6) based on my initial reactions; however, based on all that has been written here and some additional time for reflection, I've come to somewhat different conclusions about what should be done, and will outline my current thinking here.
I would propose creating a formal process that I would dub the "Content Dispute Forum" as a mechanism for addressing how Wikipedia's content policies (e.g. WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:NOR, etc) should be addressed to contentious issues. The goal of this forum would be bring ongoing content disputes to the attention of the community and arrive at community consensus for binding principles that would explain in detail how Wikipedia policy should be applied to the content issues at hand.
I would propose that the process for accomplishing this look something like this:
I see the process I have outlined above, or something like it, as having a number of advantages.
There are also a least a few disadvantages (and probably more that I can’t see).
Well, this is my current idea, hopefully people will find it interesting / useful. Dragons flight 08:49, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
I like this proposal a lot. IMO, the biggest problem would be attracting sufficient participation, however. It might need a strict word-limit on the statements, to ensure editors don't have to wade through megabytes of text. Meelar (talk) 17:46, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
I find that many of the solutions proposed above are either overreaching (putting general content disputes at issue, with designated experts, etc.) or insufficiently binding (NPOV "admins" with no particular authority to rule on disputes). Having been through a recent substantial (and unresolved) NPOV dispute over the prefixed use of styles in biographical articles (a dedicated minority of editors have blocked consensus and the ArbCom has declined to address the issue because of its content-centeredness) I believe that there needs to be some means to make a firm determination of the Wikipedia NPOV policy on such matters, without addressing larger questions of content, and without requiring a conduct dispute to be at issue. An NPOV subcommittee should be appointed and delegated authority by the ArbCom to hear such matters, to consider and make rulings when and if they choose to accept particular cases. These rulings should be binding but may be appealable to the ArbCom at its discretion. Whig 16:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The ArbCom can avoid being drawn directly into content disputes, while providing a mechanism for enforcement of the NPOV policy. Whig 16:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I don't see one. The ArbCom has authority which it can delegate in this fashion, and it seems essential that the NPOV policy be either enforced or allowed to wither on the vine. Whig 16:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Modern courts have a simple structure of: couts < higher courts < supreme court
We could use this model to be something like: RfCfUD (Requests for comment for user disputes) (any admin and regular user vote) < Admin Com (any and only admins vote) < ArbCom
A "one size fits all" content committee isn't going to work. There are simply too many content disputes going on, and some will take a quite disproportionate time to resolve. This is due to a combination of entrenched viewpoints and disputable facts (see Talk:Terri Schiavo/Mediation for a case in point). There's also the problem that, as we've seen in this discussion, there isn't yet widespread acceptance that a content committee would be reliable - would it simply substitute its own POV for someone else's?
I suggest that we should instead start small and concentrate on particular content issues that can be resolved by applying measurable criteria (i.e. resolving them mechanistically rather than having to make value judgments). Content disputes should not be resolved on the basis of POVs but on the basis of agreeing what is measurable and verifiable, rather than what is morally "right" or "wrong".
The issue of naming is, I think, a good place to start. Naming disputes can be extremely contentious (as in the case of Gdansk/ Danzig or, more recently, the Macedonian Slavs). Discussions very often degenerate into arguments about who has the most moral right to use a particular name or whose rights are being (supposedly) infringed in the process. Votes end up being the subject of campaigns by rival partisans seeking to put one over their rivals. The outcome of such votes can be determined simply by which side manages to get out more voters, not by the strength of their arguments; indeed, NPOV rules can end up being ignored entirely (see Talk:Macedonian Slavs/Poll for a prime example of this).
Naming disputes can be resolved mechanistically and in an NPOV fashion by applying objective criteria and disregarding subjective ones. For instance, the following are all objective factors:
and the following are all subjective:
A neutral panel could determine which of the objective factors are met while setting aside the subjective factors - something that partisans on both sides simply will not do. We can note the existence of the subjective factors but cannot allow them to dictate the outcome of naming disputes. This approach would facilitate transparency and consistency: if we have clear criteria for resolving content disputes, we can't be accused of making ad hoc decisions. Bear in mind that the process has to be seen to be fair in order to be accepted.
See my more detailed comments at User:ChrisO/Naming disputes. -- ChrisO 01:14, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am new to Wiki so this may all be tainted by my ignorance of local affairs, so with that apology made, I find this page is interesting because it seems to fail to grasp the nettle. If everyone is acting reasonably, then the implicit goodwill will always lead to a negotiated settlement without the need for outside intervention. But in Wiki, as in the real world, people sometimes care too much about their own POV and systems have to be put in place to keep the peace and resolve the disputes by force. Inevitably, this involves declaring winners and losers. What form this process of resolution takes is barely relevant. The only significant requirement is that the ultimate decisions have to be enforceable because, otherwise, the decisions will simply be ignored not only by the immediate parties, but also by future editors. Hence, the sequence of debate here should be: whether the current systems work — the extent of this discussion suggests problems; if not working, what are the specific problems and what strategies might resolve them? As it stands, this page is a rudderless ship because we are not asked to address particularities but are asked to suggest quasi-legal, binding/nonbinding, special referee/mediation/arbitration systems in a vacuum. If the major problem is behavioural (i.e. a failure to act reasonably in any given dispute), then the content of any page disputed is irrelevant. Whoever is going to make a decision, simply looks at what is said and done as editors, and decides whether this is behaviour up with which Wiki will put (or not). But, if the problem is defined as content based, then whatever system is proposed has to have some quality of fairness about it, which predicates some degree of subject expertise in the adjudication. But this is a dangerous door to open because it may be simply imposing the adjudicator's POV on the parties when what is really required is a compromise editing task to produce an agreed text that all the parties in dispute can live with. - David91 17:11, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So, if I understand your answer correctly, ArbCom's express remit or their consistent decision-making, excludes arbitration on content issues. Equally, although there is a NPOV committee, it has a discretion whether to accept content disputes. And mediation is voluntary so the immediate parties can refuse to resolve their dispute. There are also implicit assumptions that there are a significant number of disputes that are unresolved and that this "disturbance in the force" cannot be allowed to continue. At this point, my own ignorance takes over. Why is the jurisdiction of the NPOV committee discretionary? If it exists at all, it exists to resolve any dispute as to the neutrality of the content. Giving the committee a discretion seems irrational and a flaw that creating a further committee will do little to remedy. I repeat my simplistic view that the nature of the problem is conduct-based. What everyone on this page seems to be upset about is the failure of some editors to act reasonably. The answer, therefore, is to determine that narrow issue in each case and the consequence: a ban on those editors found to be unreasonable from contributing to the given pages, leaving the task of reaching a consensus version of the content to those editors willing to negotiate. Or am I missing something? - David91 08:42, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
THIS RFC IS CLOSED - Please do not edit
The Arbitration Committee has a problem to pose to the community, and would like to solicit commentary and solution-suggestions from contributors.
In the light of some recent commentary [on the arbitration committee mailing list], I'm going to offer my own analysis of the situation. I think this is a very fundamental question and should have input from all members of the committee, and Jimbo too.
It very much used to be the case that arbitration was between one user who was clearly in the right and one user who was clearly causing trouble. (Because, really, until the commitee was created, there really was no way to get rid of troublemakers -- Jimbo exercised his authority so sparingly that it effectively gave them carte blanche to cause trouble). It's no surprise that most of the cases for the first 6-10 months dealt with ejecting troublemakers who had been allowed to roost for far too long.
Now, with the three revert rule acting as an "electric fence" (so to speak) to contain people from fighting revert wars of epic scale (along the lines of people reverting 100 times in a day), and the arbcom available to sort out the matters that are clearly black-or-white, things have become more, well, grey. Mark me this - from here on out, our primary problem will not be users who do nothing but cause general angst, but POV pushers -- people who edit Wikipedia with an agenda (even if they are not aware of it) While this makes our job infinitely harder, THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY A BAD THING. It is a sign that Wikipedia is maturing, that we have successfully established rules and mechanisms to ensure that good decorum is maintained
The $64,000 question is, then, what do we do about POV pushing? The arbcom has, for-better-or-for-worse, avoided getting involved in "content disputes". Now, I don't really like this way of phrasing it - many of our disputes are, ultimately, a dispute about content. We have already in several cases in which we sanctioned users for persistently editing with a particular bias, in violation of our NPOV policy. I think these are obvious examples of us getting involved in a content disputes. It would be more accurate to say that we have avoided dictating what an article should or should not say. Overall, I think this policy has been both good (in that it avoided concentrating too much power in one group of users) but it has also had a marked and demonstrable downside. Often times, POV disputes come down to two people (or groups of people) arguing that their version is better, and they are unable to come up with a compromise. Ideally, this where the mediation commitee would step in and help the disputants solve their problems. Unfortunately - at best - the mediation committee (which is currently dead and I don't see it coming back anytime in the near future) was only marginally effective in this regard. It became more of a stepping stone to the arbitration committee and then was ignored all together.
As a result of our no-content-dispute policy, the arbcom has not really had an effective means of solving these POV disputes (which is, as [arbitration committee member] alluded to earlier, why we have had so much trouble coming up with remedies). We have effectively hamstrung ourselves. More importantly, if the arbitration committee won't do it, who will?
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a quick or easy fix for this. I think the only way to remedy this would be to modify the whole dispute resolution process. It's been over a year since it was last changed, and it's about time we updated it to reflect the experience we have gained.
The solution I would pose is - we need someone (or a group of someones) to fill the vacuum we have created. For the purposes of this email, let's assume it's a group of people that I will refer to hereafter as the 'content committee' - no pun intended. This group would have the authority to decide that one particular version is better, and to impose a binding solution on the disputing parties. Ideally, they would be competent in the area of dispute or a related area. Nor do I think this job would even be particularly hard -- more often than not in a POV dispute, it is quite obvious even to a layman that one version is neutral (or mostly so) and the other is horribly POV.
This commitee would be subordinate to the arbitration committee. We would act as a sort of court-of-appeal, as well as reserving for ourselves the right to hear disputes about behavior. So to summarize -- in effect, I am proposing we replace the mediation committee with a committee (a) comptent in the subject area, and (b) capable of imposing a binding solution on the disputants, while (c) allowing users to bypass this step directly in favor of arbitration. In effect, we became a committee that looks at people behaving badly in general, while they look at specific articles that need a voice of authority to settle a disputes.
Now, just to get into a few other details that should be mentioned. Hypothetically, let's say we created this Content Committee (actually, if we want them to have comptence in a particular subject area, we would probably need to create multiple commitees or at least have ad-hoc ones handy) At first, there would no doubt be a tremendous rush to have them sort out hundreds upon hundreds of issues pertainting to every trivial dispute on Wikipedia. I think it needs to be made clear that the barriers to entry required for this group to take a particular case should be very high. Just because you have a disagreement with user:X on article Y doesn't mean you need to run to the Content Committee. I also think it's important that the people on this committee(s) be accountable to the community. Far be it for me to propose instruction creep (I coined the term, afterall), but if we were to have such a committee, it would probably be a good idea to have yearly elections alongside the arbitration commitee elections in December.
I'd appreciate hearing what all of you think of my idea.
I see no reason to replace the Mediation Committee. All that needs to happen there is for some folks who are skilled in mediation to take an interest. That will come as more people are aware of our problem. I will certainly do it after I leave the Arbitration Committee. Although I have only basic training in mediation and no actual experience.
The problems of POV pushers and content disputes are important but not necessarily linked with mediation. In fact, having some definite procedure is vital for making mediation work. If you can say to a POV pusher, "Ok, I can see that you are pushing a point of view and if you go on to further proceedings, others will see it too and you may end up with your editing restricted" then you can start bringing them around to a discussion of how they can ensure that that their point of view is included but not to the exclusion of other points of view. One reason mediation works in life is that litigation, and strikes, are ruinous. Our arbitration procedures are only onerous. Fred Bauder 21:25, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
If a POV pusher can see, by looking at previous cases, that other point of view pushers have not only succeeded in fighting off charges of point of view editing, but been complimented by the Arbitration Committee for their "good work", it is rather difficult to negotiate or mediate with them. Fred Bauder 22:05, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
I believe that the original scope of the arbcom allowed them to handle content disputes. Why not return to that original mandate? Snowspinner 23:16, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
Arbcom is a wasite of time just like mediation. Unlike mediation arbcom is active. Since no one helped me resolve my case (even though a few notable attempts were made) I am exterminated off of the picture. You need a degree of SOLID rules and HEAVY enforcement. No maybes no BUTs. NO POV whatsoever policy probably is best otherwise its always a failing system as raises the "who determines whats NPOV and what isnt?" question. While sounding like martial law its actualy fair. There are different levels of pov pushing. Destroying a user is one of them. There should be a structure that "cures" the {{POV}}, {{disputed}}, {{totallydisputed}} articles. Since any idea I thought could improve wikipedia via a few wikiprojects were either "vandalised" to death by even admins or was overwhelingly rejected I no longer suggest ideas. Cat chi? 01:59, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
This is an excellent point/issue to raise. It is true that for a long time, conflicts over content could not be resolved unless re-packaged as conflicts over personal behavior and submitted as such to the ArbCom. Now, the ArbCom fills a crucial role. But remember, we are an encyclopedia first, and a wiki-community second. Contenat must be a priority here. I still believe in the wiki-idea, and do not want to refashion ourselves as something more like Nupedia. Be that as it may, we need a meachnism for handling content-related disputes. Obviously such a mechanism would not apply to all content-disputes. Most of us have been involved in content-disputes that were either resolved immediately or after a few days' discussion on the article talk page. But when a dispute goes on for weeks, we need a mechanism. I've been here a long time and although I have no objection to people seeking mediation under such circumstances, the Mediation Committee is not a solution; it is ill-equiped to deal with issues of content. We have two kinds of guidelines: guidelines and guidelines. The ArbCom is really the only body that can enforce behavioral guidelines. It only makes sense that we have another committee to enforce content guidelines. This committee can be independent with a narrow brief (Jguk's proposal) or it can be given a broader brief, but supervised by the ArbCom (Mav's proposal), but we need one of these two proposals to be developed, run by Jimbo, and, if he agrees, institutionalized. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:19, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I find any kind of idea of having a 'content committee' or similar abhorrent, and a reversal of everything wiki. Dan100 22:32, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
ArbCom should stay behavoiraly focused. Let the content disputes work themselves out. If you eliminate two persons causing edit wars, if the content is all that important, the rest of the community will sort it out, or maybe it simply isn't all that important.-- Tznkai 14:20, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
As phrased, the content committee has to be competent (across a vast range of subject areas) and yet elected once a year (so can't be flexible about recruiting new members to deal with disputes outside its competence). I feel this is likely to cause problems with disputes in specialist areas (yes, I'm thinking of global warming and related...) William M. Connolley 22:45, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC).
I believe that ArbCom should remain focused on behavoir issues. The solution to this problem is to revive the mediation committee. In any type of anarchist social system (such as Wikipedia), mediation methods are crucial. Content disputes cannot be settled by arbitrary committees. Kaldari 19:14, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
While, I truly believe that Wikipedia needs to improve its mechanisms for dealing with content disputes, it occurs to me to wonder something... Why does the Arbcom need our permission to consult with experts inside or outside of Wikipedia, if that would be useful to you in forming opinions about what is reasonable? Looking at histories and talk pages, it is not difficult to work out which editors are working in which categories of material. Is there any reason under the current system why you couldn't go ask them what they think? It's not the same as annoiting a content committee, and you would have to use your own judgment about who to ask and how to weight their opinions, etc., but I can't imagine its worse than getting buried in areas outside your expertise. Also, it might be useful to try this kind of informal process of consulation and solicited opinions, before trying to create a panel of official experts. Dragons flight 05:55, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
A "content arbitration committee" which merely decides whether a given fact is adequately sourced should be set up - ideally in a way that enables it to give quick binding answers. Anyone ignoring binding answers could be taken immediately before the existing behavioural arbitration committee.
Users will be able to approach the content arbitration with new information/sources even once a decision has been made - but the old decision would remain until explicitly overturned.
For instance: Suppose User 1 adds the following statement to the Bill Clinton article: "Bill Clinton was the best president America has ever had". User 2 removes this as POV. A content arbitration committee would find that the statement isn't adequately sourced. It may be then that User 1 adds the statement "According to the organisation XYZ, Bill Clinton was the best president America has ever had". User 2 removes this as POV, but in this instance User 1 provides a source, so the content arbitration committee would accept this statement as sourced.
What the content arbitration committee would not do is say whether a given statement should actually appear in any given article.
Revive the Mediation Committee. - Mgm| (talk) 19:37, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)
Overhaul the mediation committee into something huge, w lots of members and a carefully crafted ability to facilitate binding decisions. These decisions would need to be able to be reviewed, as often as necessary. The current committee is failing due to its smallness in size, and its lack of power. I suggest basic changes like:
For the most part, do nothing. POV editors often cause an improvement in an article because they draw attention and cause refactoring. If all parties are behaving civilly and attempting to be constructive, then the end result should be an improvement. If they are not, then ArbCom can act without considering the POV edits directly. A related idea is that myopic editing should be discouraged, in that we should be more liberal in asking people to take a break from a specific article or set of articles if that is all they are editing, especially where the subject is controversial. We can do this because our community is large enough that it should never cause an article to go without an editor. Wikipedia is not a open pulpit, and we should discourage editors from only working on a small number of articles so that all our articles can be a community project. The discouragement should apply to all users, not just ones we judge to be POV pushers, but we should look the other way for articles where there is no controversy since there is no evidence that there are other editors who wish to contribute.-- Gmaxwell 21:25, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I support this. Indeed, being able to persuade a user to take a break from an article and especially to also edit more than just one article would give that user an opportunity to gain perspective. To see how Wikipedia works well elsewhere, away from that user's narrow area of interest or, and this is the issue which it is said is trying to be addressed, away from their own POV pushing. Paul Beardsell 09:14, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So far this is the best idea on the page. Hierarchical content creation will drive a lot of editors away from Wikipedia, and especially from controversial topics (because now the fight is "not their job;" and further, their contributions will be seen as mattering less in light of the content committee's overrule); yet the cure for controversial topics is more editors, not less. This is one idea to "spread things around more," I'd like to hear others. Demi T/ C 22:34, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)
Agree totally. No way should Raul decide which POV prevails in articles. There's already far too much of that. Let the arbcom enjoy witchhunting dissidents and leave the content to the rest of us. Letting the general idea be current that editors are discouraged from focusing on "issue" articles is reasonable -- it shouldn't be yet another policy though. Grace Note 04:25, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hold tight and wait for Mediawiki 1.5, and hope that the m:Article validation feature can save us.
Or to phrase this more appropriately, look for formalised, structured ways of bringing outside editors into contentious articles. The ideological basis for not having a content committee from day one was sound - the aim was not to concentrate editorial powers into the hands of a small number of users. And feel free to criticise me for being too postmodernist here, but surely all Wikipedians edit with bias, whether conscious or not. A better way might perhaps be to allow either MedCom or ArbCom to enforce policies like WP:V, which are long-standing and well understood, rather than grant them sweeping new powers. WP:RFC is my preferred option for now, although it could be expanded. At least with a well-formed RfC to start from, ArbCom can act without being seen to be editorialising. -- bainer ( talk) 00:05, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I really like these ideas. All hail m:Article validation feature! Sam Spade 00:37, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree with the preference for RfC's, but it seems an unreliable mechanism right now. Some RfC's bring a crowd of additional editors to look over a specific dispute and give their opinions, but other RfC's are virtually ignored. How could we increase participation in RfC's? Every time you respond to an RfC, you're allowed one extra revert for that 24-hour period? :) The point of that joke is that we don't have any immediately obvious way to increase participation. Furthermore, in some cases, the new people commenting will be divided along the old lines, so we're right back in the situation that Raul is addressing. Still, I see more promise in having many people spend a little time on these disputes than in having a few people on a committee or board that has to spend a lot of time on the problem. JamesMLane 11:40, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree Wikipedia needs a body of people who are willing to volunteer their time to help resolve content disputes, but I think that the methods of such a group should be cast in a less confrontational way than Arbitration. I would suggest we form a fairly large group of experienced, trusted editors who can be called upon to help forge a consensus for the purpose resolving content disputes. Their role should be to take a serious look at the issues in dispute and work with the parties involved to decide how the article should be written. For the sake of a name, maybe call it a "content advisory board" or something similar. Once a consensus has been reached among the parties and their advisors (primarily through discussion, rather than voting), it should be considered binding in the same way as any other consensus, meaning that while other approaches can be discussed, blatant disregard for the consensus would be a behavioral issue subject to Arbitration if neccesary. Dragons flight 00:10, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Note: I have made a somewhat different suggestion below, #12, which reflects a reinement in my thinking after some time for reflection. Dragons flight 15:26, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)
Really interesting idea - I was about to write roughly the same. There could be some overlap with the group of admins (who, as I would understand it, would represent trustworthy editors); however, I would recommend for an admin who is somehow involved in the topic to not use his position for exactly this group of articles in order to avoid a conflict of interest (as happened a bit with Cyprus_dispute, Hellenic_Genocide, Turkish_Cypriot_Genocide (now moved) et al). This outside experienced editor - the "advisor" - should know basically about the topic and read up a bit more about it. He should try to remain as neutral as possible, but has to have some executive power as well. As mentioned above, he must be in a position to enforce a reached consensus on users who have a blatant disregard for wikipedia behavioral standards. He should also be able to enforce consensus building and to prevent editing wars, like for instance locking/unlocking the article (in this case, a special notice should be placed on the relevant page - "Temporary Lock") and blocking users for a short period of time. All in all, he should be Superman w/o the laser view ;) - Snchduer 01:22, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A "content advisory board" is an idea that would utterly doom Wikipedia, in my opinion. Do we write what is demonstrably neutral and verifiable, or what the content advisory board tells us we can write? Arbcom can already decide when an editor is writing neutral and verifiable information and when he is not, simply by checking for references, so what purpose would the board serve? -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 01:48, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
If people are unable to come to agreement on content in Wikipedia, this is no business of arbcom's, or anybody else's.
If editors misbehave, Arbcom should bash their heads together, something it does very effectively and is deservedly proud of.
If editors don't misbehave, I don't think that it can be legitimately stated that a problem exists.
Wikipedia cannot write stable articles on subjects about which there is significant disagreement that cannot be expressed in a manner neutral enough to satisfy all major parties.
"As a result of our no-content-dispute policy, the arbcom has not really had an effective means of solving these POV disputes." Well taking the hotheads out of the mix does help, and is all that arbcom can be expected to do. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 01:01, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Right on! The main proposal here is essentially a power grab by the ambitious and not yet quite powerful enough, in their own opinion. In my view there isn't so much wrong with Wikipedia that abolishment of the ArbCom or, failing which, its impeachment would not fix. Paul Beardsell 02:57, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
But the proposal is much more dangerous than it seems. Essentially it means that those unable to make their points in the editing process would be appealing to an editorial panel. It would be a move away from common authorship, a body of work created by its users, to one more like Brittanica. It would kill wikipedia. Paul Beardsell 02:57, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Tony. The wikiway works far more often then it fails. It would be nice if more people got involved in RfCs and 3rd Opinions and nipped problems in the bud. It's amazing what a little education in wikiways and some suggestions of compromises can do. Dan100 10:34, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Copied here from a message I sent to the mailing list →Raul654 18:42, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
Bad example. Religiousness and intelligence is just over a week old and has had ten editors. Not enough time for anybody to burn out and certainly not an example of an article becoming a "mess" because editors stay away. -- Tony Sidaway| Talk 07:20, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ignoring the back and forth between Raul and Paul, I think Tony Sidaway has got the right idea. This is optimistic eventualism, but I happen to think that is more responsible than irresponsible, and is not lazy at all. The conflict between two points of view is both natural and good. The wikipedia community does a surprisingly well job of policing itself, the ArbCom, by its nature, is going to deal only with the worst, the ugliest, and the most problematic.
The big picture is what is at stake here, and I think that is what we should be focused on. Ultimatly even if the ArbCom, or another comittee with the content disputes delegated to them is given the authority to arbitrate content disputes, what power do they have, that normal wikipedians do not? They can ban disruptive users, and they can order pages protected, just like any other administrator. However, choosing a point of NPOV, and then "locking it" through protection, to me is the last resort, used only to protect from vandalism and massive edit wars spanning several users.
Wikipedia is not ideal. ArbCom is not ideal. Dealing with content disputes is not ideal. I cannot see any reasonable alternative however, that is not inherently worse and against the spirit of the community.
ArbCom sounds like its starting to burn out, which is not surprising. The only alternate solution I can see is to expand the ArbCom, with the same (self imposed) mandate of policing the actions of errant community members. Delegate cases too diffrent subcomittees, the more complicated issues to the main ArbCom, the clearer ones to smaller ones. Or simply get fresh blood in frequently to lower the stress load. The more time you spend on the microscopic, the more time you see the sick, disgusting, and terrible. Zoom out, and you see the beauty. You need to spend time doing both, or you're gonna go nuts. To me, that is where the main issue lies. Everyone who cares enough to post on here, has seen some truly stupid stuff go down, but even POV pushing on several articles can lead to a better one, quickly. In the short time I've been an editor, I've watched from afar the greatest selling female artist article, as silly as I personally find it, go from onesided, to multi faceted and beautifully NPOV.
Wikipedia isn't broke. This is a free content anyone can edit encylopedia opened to the unwashed masses. A little dirt and grime is expected.-- Tznkai 14:43, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'd never really heard of eventualism, and reading the article on meta now I find the perspective described there (that something else called immediatism may eventually take hold and become the predominant paradigm) inexplicable and frankly incredible. To wiki is to eventualize, nothing is complete. From
this to
this took eighteen months and a score of editors. Wikipedia is the greatest vindication any eventualist could ask for. --
Tony Sidaway|
Talk 17:09, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It's been my experience that there are some common themes in NPOV disputes, typically:
I would propose that we designate individuals who take it upon themselves to facilitate a structured dialogue on what precisely the points of disagreement are, consider suggestions to bridge the gaps, and if necessary, submit a proposed new version to the arbcom, explaining how the proposed version was arrived at. The arbcom will then be able to evaluate the proposed version and decide what to accept.
The designated individuals would get this responsibility by:
-- Leifern 15:03, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
My idea is somewhat similar to Raul's except it does not go as far. Here is my email response to Raul on the ArbCom mailing list:
Interesting idea. I floated an idea very similar to this a while back on WikiEN-l when there was a move to force the ArbCom to make these type of decisions directly. My idea was to have a content specialist subcommittee to the ArbCom that we would consult when content issues arise. They would *not* have any power to enforce their decisions nor any authority of their own. But we could declare their decisions binding for issues we present to them by an up or down vote (although I imagine that voting down would be as rare as jury nullification is in the real world).
This would, IMO, set up proper checks and balances.
The big issue as I see it, is recruitment of non-involved parties and whether or not this would be a standing set of subcommittees (each with their own set of coverage) or if we would have to empanel them on a case-by-case basis (we would likely have to do this at first to build enough subcommittees, anyway).
....
Each branch of the subcommittee would cover a different broad area of knowledge, such as biology, chemistry, or history. As the Wikipedia community grows sub-branches will be formed as needed (history will likely be the first area to have this happen). Members of the subcommittee would be elected by the community for their knowledge in the area (as demonstrated on Wikipedia or through outside credentials) and for their good behavior and neutrality. They would, of course, recuse themselves if they are involved in any case before them.
The content subcommittee would not declare certain facts in the outside world to be true, but would instead judge whether or not a user in arbitration has followed Wikipedia policies that concern content (such as No original research and NPOV). Making this determination is something that requires knowledge in the area of the content dispute.
NOTE: This is just a tool to make it easier for the ArbCom to see just who is being NPOV, who is violating NOR, and who is presenting fringe views as if they were mainstream.
The reason why I think this would be a better plan than having a fully separate content committee is that cases are almost always an intertwined mix of behavioral issues and content issues. So having completely separate bodies looking at different aspects would be redundant and would very often result in a case being heard twice.
The potential danger of this plan that needs to be guarded against is the possibility of drifting from NPOV and toward an SPOV (specialist/sympathetic POV) where the view of so-called specialists dominates articles and outside views are marginalized more than is appropriate. So vigilance and oversight will be needed. -- mav 17:02, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I like this proposal, although it will take time to set up and there will be (of course) disputes over who should be eligible for any one committee. Also, I think this proposal needs to be formulated narrowly enough so that Wikipedia does not become nupedia (I am sure Mav has already thought of this). For the record, I also think Jguk's plan, above, is reasonable (as I see it, the difference is Mav's committees would push us in the direction of a higher quality encyclopedia; Jguk's would simply police violations of, and enforce, policies like NPOV, NOR, Cite Sources, and Verifiability). Perhaps the two are complementary. Perhaps at this time, we can only afford to enact one of these proposals, but I bet as the community continues to grow the other one will become important as well. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:45, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I can't really see this as workable. Do we have enough 'experts' in areas required? How would they be elected to these sub-committees? Dan100 22:14, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
This would really help clear up cases where one side is engaging in crackpottery. However, how would you define expertise for the purposes of the committee? I also think that while this would make what we're currently doing easier - I really want to get away from hearing content disputes in general. A dispute like the global warming one needs the dispute to be solved - not a swath of paroles on every single user involved - and under this, we'd still be dealing with the dispute by doing the latter. Ambi 04:07, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Mav is right that we won't know until we try. But the criticisms of Mav's proposals are very revealing. Wikipedia has been around for over 4 years, and has grown exponentially. If we still do not have as contributors people with a fair degree of expertise in the main areas we cover, then we are a failure. How can you write an encyclopedia without people who know what they are talking about, or, minimally, people who have the skills to adequately research new topics? If Dan100 (or anyone) thinks we don't have enough people like this for the committees Mav proposes, then Dan100 is saying that we simply do not have the capacity to write a good (let alone excellent) encyclopedia. That many editors seem to think this way is very disturbing. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:08, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am opposed to the subcommittee idea because I believe whatever processes/entities are created to deal with content disputes need to coexist with arbitration, not be dependant upon it. As a community, we need to find ways to improve our mechanisms for dealing with content disputes before they develop into bad behavior. Dragons flight 00:23, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
I think this idea is good only in theory. In practical terms, I think it raises more questions than it answers. (How many committees, how many people on a committee, how to keep them all current and running, how to vet the members, etc.) I think the effort would be more trouble than it is worth. (This comment added by Maurreen Demi T/ C 19:28, 2005 May 21 (UTC))
Mav, you've made fair points in response to me above. But just how would we select these people? As Ed Poor said on the mailing list, the only people who can judge experts are other experts.
Dan100 23:03, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
I rather like this one, too. James F. (talk) 20:44, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I completely agree with Mav's proposal. However, I would also propose forming a (small) oversight committee from current arbitrators/bureaucrats/admins to oversee the subject committees. This oversight committee would only be responsible for making sure everyone in the committees are acting fairly, are NPOV, and are qualified. This, I believe, would "check and balance" all the specialized committees and would also take the current strain off the ArbCom. Flcelloguy 13:29, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK, so Ed didn't quite say what I thought he did. But the fact remains - it's a nice idea, but I'd really like to some ideas as to how we could select people. Although Wikipedia has thousands of registered users, only a few hundred are active on a daily basis at any one time. Out of these people, would there be enough qualified in a specific area to form a committee? How would we find the people who are potentially qualified? How would we verify their qualifications? Would these people be willing to 'work' on such a committee, and be subjected to such scrutiny? Could all of this be done in a reasonable timeframe? Dan100 13:34, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for getting back to me Mav.
To be honest I'm seeing little appetite for taking any suggestions further, so the whole thing's moot really. Dan100 ( Talk) 21:51, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
What does it mean to establish consensus? Once established, what if one dissenting user continues to edit counter to that consensus--is that a disruption? It seems to me that some of what Raul654 is trying to address boils down to that. Let's not have an NPOV committee--we are all the NPOV committee, and the less we have to distinguish between "greater" and "lesser" users the better. But once we've "come to our decision," perhaps we need to make it clearer that editing in opposition to that consensus is disruptive; or that going on an editing crusade in the absence of a consensus to do so is also disruptive.
This could be added to the existing WP:NPOV and Wikipedia:Consensus. I'm not suggesting vote counts or anything similar here, just some additional nudging so that people will feel freer to involve themselves in subjects which are "fought" over--the more editors for these, the better (and note my support for Gmaxwell's proposal above). If people feel like they have done something useful in participating in a consensus discussion, rather than buying themselves an endless fight, they will probably be more likely to do so. Demi T/ C 22:53, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)
I love it. Let me expand it a wee bit: honor consensus. This means two things: First, document very clearly what the consensus opinion is, how it has been reached, and what alternatives were considered. This is necessary because we have many situations where new users make changes against an established consensus without being aware of it. This is because the consensus is not clearly documented, or only documented in the history of one talk page while being relevant to more than one article, etc. We need a form of institutional memory that does not require digging through talk page histories. Second, once consensus has been reached, it should be enforceable. (This was what one of the Gdansk/Danzig polls was about.) I'm not sure how to do this, but what good is consensus if nobody is bound by it, in a real, actionable sense? This proposal would eliminate the need for designated "Content Committees". Everyone with expert knowledge on a given topic should have articles in their field of expertise on their watchlist, or monitor a public watchlist for a given topic. Those editors then are in fact the "content committee" in a sense, because they can help establish consensus, but they don't need to be given a special status. Finally, there should be a way to crack down on extremely blatant POV pushing. We need to establish guidelines on what counts as blatant POV pushing, but assuming we have those, persistent POV pushing, especially without debate, could be made a blockable offense. -- MarkSweep 04:55, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia's job is NOT to determine what the "consensus view" of anything is. If there so much disagreement about some topic that it requires effort to reach a consensus, I think this means that there are SIGNIFICANT differences of opinion about what's what.
Wikipedia's job in such a case is not to determine who is right but to describe:
Back in the second half of the 19th century, scientists (i.e., experts in the field of medicine) had no idea about germs spreading disease. There was only ONE PERSON in Vienna who had the slightest inkling - this was before Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur. As Ray said,
Recall what our purpose is: to spread knowledge. If we take even baby steps toward the idea of using "majority vote" or 95% majority or the like to determine the CONSENSUS about what is true, we will FAIL as an encyclopedia.
Committees that need to take action, require consensus. Politicians choosing whether to support or oppose a military campaign or an international treaty MUST come to some sort of consensus. But the scientists and librarians and journalists and "intelligence" analysts who advise them must not give up searching for the truth, even when that search takes them away from the agreed-upon, politically formed consensus.
(Think of DNA testing proving that an inmate on death row is really innocent, for example. The jury came to a consensus that he was guilty, but then it turned out they were wrong.)
We dare not take the risk that politically correct viewpoints can trump independent discoveries (see Lysenkoism).
Hey, maybe I'm completely wrong about global warming - along with PhD's like Richard Lindzen and Sallie Baliunas. Twenty or 30 years from now, when the earth is burnt to a crisp and you guys are all saying I-told-you-so, at least I'll be able to say that I did not hound out Dr. C. from Wikipedia. When it came down to (a) the article is a mess, vs. (b) William felt compelled to leave - I agonized over it, but I think I made the right choice.
And he's still here, and we still need to come to terms with this "consensus vs. minority" issue in regards to NPOV policy. It's an issue that just won't go away. -- Uncle Ed (talk) 17:36, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
Reading some of the above proposals, I agree with many of the principles mentioned.
I don't think "POV pushing" should be a wikicrime. People are perfectly welcome to try to make sure that a particular POV is represented in a set of articles, as long as they don't try to exclude others points of view. Sometimes people present their own POV as if it were fact. This is easy to do unintentionally, if you don't know what you assume is the truth is actually disputed. Plenty of people seem to get carried away when writing about a certain topic, and lose the encyclopedic tone and NPOV that we would ideally like to see in all articles. This leads to biased articles, but the best solution for this is for people with other points of view to read them, notice this, and do something about it.
The problem comes when people unreasonably insist on things being a certain way. Sometimes that's because they don't understand the NPOV policy or they aren't willing to abide by it. Sometimes that's because they have a "POV of one" which is incompatible with most everyone else's idea of what a neutral article needs to say.
If we leave people to their own devices to form consensus on articles, we seem to end up with a lot of unresolved disputes. This is not so bad as long as the articles are tagged for the benefit of readers, but to build a respectable encyclopedia, we need things like this to get resolved.
I don't support the idea of an elite NPOV hit-squad, no matter how trustworthy. There will be inevitable questions of and accusations of bias. Also, people appointed to volunteer committee posts have a way of wandering off and neglecting their responsibilities. Dispute resolution is not also not particularly pleasant, and lends itself to burnout quite easily.
We currently have the RFC process for article content disputes. Personally, I've both used it to request outside participation, and jumped into article disputes myself. It seems to have worked well in all the particular cases I've been involved in.
It sounds like it may not work so well in all cases. Well, it can be enhanced. Instead of appointing NPOV judges, why don't we create a sort of informal NPOV jury pool for each dispute? We could create a simple script to randomly generate the names of active Wikipedia editors with a certain minimum number of edits. Boilerplate notices could be posted on their user talk pages (either automatically or manually by one or more of the parties involved) that their participation is requested in a dispute on a particular talk page. If they decline to participate (or don't happen to in a certain amount of time), either alternates can be chosen, or the pool can be made big enough in the first place that enough opinions are likely to be gathered in one round.
Having half a dozen people say to a person, "No, it's not just your opponent. You really are in out in left field on this one," seems to be quite effective in resolving certain kinds of overly stubborn opposition.
The Arbitration Committee need only become involved if someone wants to file a behavioral complaint about how someone is not cooperating in this process. I think the Arbitration Committee should be able to look at a dispute and say, based on the factions involved and the outside opinions gathered, this particular person is being somehow unreasonable - for example, insisting on a POV statement and rejecting all reasonable alternatives or NPOV encapsulations, disrupting the discussion process, refusing to discuss reverts, removing the dispute tag, etc. They should be able to see through the everyday partisan accusations that one's opponents are POV pushers, and be free to say, "Your opponents are participating in the discussion within reasonable bounds. Keep talking to them; ask for more outside opinions until you get this resolved."
I think it's very important important not to come up with too many constraints on how an article should or should not be written. Many times, the dispute comes down to very minor things, like wording or how a particular thing should be spun. I have certainly seen situations where outside parties come in and make substantial re-writes that make the initial argument moot. The Arbitration Committee should only say, "User X is being unreasonable; they need to be removed from this discussion", or declare a demand for an article to be a certain way to be either POV or otherwise unreasonable (based on "jury" input). They should not mandate that certain things be included, or expressed in a certain way. Those decisions should be left up to community opinion. This includes standardization and usage questions, which often require site-wide voting to settle (or not settle). But the community also should not, after a few days of deliberation, say, this version is how this article is going to be written, and anyone who comes along any makes any substantial change to it is Violating Consensus. That will stifle growth and improvement. This is not to say that controversial points, and previous agreements accomodating differences shouldn't be well-documented so that future editors don't re-create problems that have already been fixed in at least one mutually acceptable way. Just that there may be more than one way to avoid a certain problem than what the warring factions happen to have come up with sometime last month or last year.
I would also note that in some cases, opposing factions are arguing in ignorance, and that instead of a random selection of equally ignorant people to come along and get them to play nice, what is actually needed is a subject expert or more research to shed some light on the subject. This can sometimes reveal that both sides have made incorrect factual assumptions, which will both resolve the dispute, and correct errors which readers would otherwise have been exposed to (whether the article was considered neutral or disputed). I hope that the "Wikipedians on the street" and the Arbitration Committee will be wise enough to identify these situations and act accordingly.
-- Beland 08:06, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Mav asked me to comment on his proposal, and I've read most of the rest of the page.
I don't follow the Arbitration Committee, so I don't know much about the situation, or the problem under discussion. It's not clear to me, for example, whether the issue is more a matter of pages that do not find consensus, or people who do not follow consensus; or how much knowledge of a given article subject would be called for to properly address such disagreements.
I think a lot of the comments above have merit. Some would be impractical, and some would need refinement.
Acknowledging all that, here a couple of my ideas:
The RFC Patrol might be able to address disagreements before they get too frustrating. I had an article RFC that brought no one to the article, as far as I could tell.
The volunteer subject consultants could be used by regular users or the arbitration committee. They could just list themselves somewhere, and possibly their qualifications. Any vetting needed or desired could be handled on a case-by-case basis. Maurreen 06:17, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You know, I've noticed that when disputes are posted on topical or regional noticeboards, they tend to get a reasonable response. There are a few under Category:WikiProjects, including the regional ones and a successful LGBT one that just started up recently. Active WikiProjects are also a good place for that sort of thing. Maybe we should encourage people who come to RFC to post to the appropriate special interest page, and encourage people to bookmark, watchlist, or affiliate themselves with noticeboards that align with their interests. People do add themselves as participants in these pages; if you are looking for a subject expert, this is not a bad place to start. (There's also the ability to look at who's editing articles on the topic, and leave them personal messages, but that seems more hit-or-miss.) -- Beland 04:54, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
When this issue was first described, I made some suggestions (Alternative Solution #6) based on my initial reactions; however, based on all that has been written here and some additional time for reflection, I've come to somewhat different conclusions about what should be done, and will outline my current thinking here.
I would propose creating a formal process that I would dub the "Content Dispute Forum" as a mechanism for addressing how Wikipedia's content policies (e.g. WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:NOR, etc) should be addressed to contentious issues. The goal of this forum would be bring ongoing content disputes to the attention of the community and arrive at community consensus for binding principles that would explain in detail how Wikipedia policy should be applied to the content issues at hand.
I would propose that the process for accomplishing this look something like this:
I see the process I have outlined above, or something like it, as having a number of advantages.
There are also a least a few disadvantages (and probably more that I can’t see).
Well, this is my current idea, hopefully people will find it interesting / useful. Dragons flight 08:49, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
I like this proposal a lot. IMO, the biggest problem would be attracting sufficient participation, however. It might need a strict word-limit on the statements, to ensure editors don't have to wade through megabytes of text. Meelar (talk) 17:46, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
I find that many of the solutions proposed above are either overreaching (putting general content disputes at issue, with designated experts, etc.) or insufficiently binding (NPOV "admins" with no particular authority to rule on disputes). Having been through a recent substantial (and unresolved) NPOV dispute over the prefixed use of styles in biographical articles (a dedicated minority of editors have blocked consensus and the ArbCom has declined to address the issue because of its content-centeredness) I believe that there needs to be some means to make a firm determination of the Wikipedia NPOV policy on such matters, without addressing larger questions of content, and without requiring a conduct dispute to be at issue. An NPOV subcommittee should be appointed and delegated authority by the ArbCom to hear such matters, to consider and make rulings when and if they choose to accept particular cases. These rulings should be binding but may be appealable to the ArbCom at its discretion. Whig 16:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The ArbCom can avoid being drawn directly into content disputes, while providing a mechanism for enforcement of the NPOV policy. Whig 16:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I don't see one. The ArbCom has authority which it can delegate in this fashion, and it seems essential that the NPOV policy be either enforced or allowed to wither on the vine. Whig 16:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Modern courts have a simple structure of: couts < higher courts < supreme court
We could use this model to be something like: RfCfUD (Requests for comment for user disputes) (any admin and regular user vote) < Admin Com (any and only admins vote) < ArbCom
A "one size fits all" content committee isn't going to work. There are simply too many content disputes going on, and some will take a quite disproportionate time to resolve. This is due to a combination of entrenched viewpoints and disputable facts (see Talk:Terri Schiavo/Mediation for a case in point). There's also the problem that, as we've seen in this discussion, there isn't yet widespread acceptance that a content committee would be reliable - would it simply substitute its own POV for someone else's?
I suggest that we should instead start small and concentrate on particular content issues that can be resolved by applying measurable criteria (i.e. resolving them mechanistically rather than having to make value judgments). Content disputes should not be resolved on the basis of POVs but on the basis of agreeing what is measurable and verifiable, rather than what is morally "right" or "wrong".
The issue of naming is, I think, a good place to start. Naming disputes can be extremely contentious (as in the case of Gdansk/ Danzig or, more recently, the Macedonian Slavs). Discussions very often degenerate into arguments about who has the most moral right to use a particular name or whose rights are being (supposedly) infringed in the process. Votes end up being the subject of campaigns by rival partisans seeking to put one over their rivals. The outcome of such votes can be determined simply by which side manages to get out more voters, not by the strength of their arguments; indeed, NPOV rules can end up being ignored entirely (see Talk:Macedonian Slavs/Poll for a prime example of this).
Naming disputes can be resolved mechanistically and in an NPOV fashion by applying objective criteria and disregarding subjective ones. For instance, the following are all objective factors:
and the following are all subjective:
A neutral panel could determine which of the objective factors are met while setting aside the subjective factors - something that partisans on both sides simply will not do. We can note the existence of the subjective factors but cannot allow them to dictate the outcome of naming disputes. This approach would facilitate transparency and consistency: if we have clear criteria for resolving content disputes, we can't be accused of making ad hoc decisions. Bear in mind that the process has to be seen to be fair in order to be accepted.
See my more detailed comments at User:ChrisO/Naming disputes. -- ChrisO 01:14, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am new to Wiki so this may all be tainted by my ignorance of local affairs, so with that apology made, I find this page is interesting because it seems to fail to grasp the nettle. If everyone is acting reasonably, then the implicit goodwill will always lead to a negotiated settlement without the need for outside intervention. But in Wiki, as in the real world, people sometimes care too much about their own POV and systems have to be put in place to keep the peace and resolve the disputes by force. Inevitably, this involves declaring winners and losers. What form this process of resolution takes is barely relevant. The only significant requirement is that the ultimate decisions have to be enforceable because, otherwise, the decisions will simply be ignored not only by the immediate parties, but also by future editors. Hence, the sequence of debate here should be: whether the current systems work — the extent of this discussion suggests problems; if not working, what are the specific problems and what strategies might resolve them? As it stands, this page is a rudderless ship because we are not asked to address particularities but are asked to suggest quasi-legal, binding/nonbinding, special referee/mediation/arbitration systems in a vacuum. If the major problem is behavioural (i.e. a failure to act reasonably in any given dispute), then the content of any page disputed is irrelevant. Whoever is going to make a decision, simply looks at what is said and done as editors, and decides whether this is behaviour up with which Wiki will put (or not). But, if the problem is defined as content based, then whatever system is proposed has to have some quality of fairness about it, which predicates some degree of subject expertise in the adjudication. But this is a dangerous door to open because it may be simply imposing the adjudicator's POV on the parties when what is really required is a compromise editing task to produce an agreed text that all the parties in dispute can live with. - David91 17:11, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So, if I understand your answer correctly, ArbCom's express remit or their consistent decision-making, excludes arbitration on content issues. Equally, although there is a NPOV committee, it has a discretion whether to accept content disputes. And mediation is voluntary so the immediate parties can refuse to resolve their dispute. There are also implicit assumptions that there are a significant number of disputes that are unresolved and that this "disturbance in the force" cannot be allowed to continue. At this point, my own ignorance takes over. Why is the jurisdiction of the NPOV committee discretionary? If it exists at all, it exists to resolve any dispute as to the neutrality of the content. Giving the committee a discretion seems irrational and a flaw that creating a further committee will do little to remedy. I repeat my simplistic view that the nature of the problem is conduct-based. What everyone on this page seems to be upset about is the failure of some editors to act reasonably. The answer, therefore, is to determine that narrow issue in each case and the consequence: a ban on those editors found to be unreasonable from contributing to the given pages, leaving the task of reaching a consensus version of the content to those editors willing to negotiate. Or am I missing something? - David91 08:42, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)