From: "Larry Sanger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Citizendium-l] Editorial dispute resolution
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:53:55 -0700
David Goodman gives us a typology of debates, which I found very
interesting. He's right that we should bear in mind that these different
types of dispute might require different types of resolution, and that any
approach to dispute resolution should potentially be able to deal with all
of them as effectively as possible.
He also suggests that we should have what we called in Nupedia days
"articles in disagreement." In other words, when there are different
approaches to the same issue, then we have "one or more scholarly articles
or books presenting their respective contentions." We hashed this issue to
death in the early days of both Nupedia and Wikipedia, and I'm willing to
do
it again. (In fact, I can put my hands on some extended argumentation
about
this pretty quickly, written last year, if you're interested.) I will say
only this for now, that it's arbitrary which positions are to receive their
own articles, and it's arbitrary which *topics* receive biased treatment in
this way (should Republicans and Democrats, and the French ;-), have their
own articles about George W. Bush?). And most importantly, this won't
result in an *encyclopedia* but instead a *partisan catalog of opinion*,
which is not what an encyclopedia is.
The neutrality policy, outlined here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neutral_point_of_view--draft&old
id=756
is inconsistent with your proposed policy, by the way. And I've made this
a
"Fundamental Policy"; see:
http://www.citizendium.org/fundamentals.html
I will explain this at length, but there is little chance that we will
abandon it as a policy.
======
Sarah Tuttle says the voting idea (which I didn't mean to say I supported,
by the way) is "an awful idea" or "in need of fairly strong refinement."
Speaking candidly, I agree, and Sarah's vivid example (of the meeting of
the
IAU that decided on the definition of "planet") illustrates one main
problem
with it. Even with a roomful of genius-level scientists you're still going
to be dealing with well-known socio-political dynamics of groups trying to
decide stuff by vote, you know, the stuff that got Socrates killed (right,
Nicolas?--inside joke). So I have to say she's got an excellent point
there, Andy.
Sarah then suggests we use talk pages to give feedback. It's not top-down
in the least, at least not if people share equal rights to edit the
article.
But the problem is that the talk pages are where editorial disputes will
arise.
======
Sarah then raises a separate problem: "There are a limited number of
experts, and a relatively unlimited number of enthusiasts, many who are
exhausting. And many who contribute brilliantly. If what the experts must
do
is constantly sort these piles while not alienating the exhausting ones?
ha.
It will be over." I'm not sure of that. We need to try it out and quickly
adopt some sensible guidelines for editor-author interaction. We have
*declared* as fundamental project policy that editors will have the
authority to make content decisions--not to be exercised in a totally
peremptory way, but they *will* have that authority. If you set down the
game rules in this way, I think a lot of people will be only too happy to
defer to people who understand fields better than they do.
I know this is certainly true in my case. For example, as a fiddle
teacher,
I know I can say a lot about Irish traditional music that might be usable,
but I would be perfectly happy to defer to the likes of, say, Mick Moloney,
who is a true expert in the field. And I don't think I'm at all unusual in
this willingness, either. In fact, I much suspect that the shrill people
who demand total epistemic parity, so to speak, like Clay Shirky's
supporters, are actually in a minority online. It's only the fact that
they
are so, er, talkative that makes them seem so common online. I think we'll
discover that there are many, many more of another sort of person, who is
rather more modest, who really wants to make a positive contribution to a
collectively-created resource, and who would not be put out too much if
someone who understands a topic much better takes the trouble to correct
him
or her. That's how I'd feel, even if it meant that my work were completely
transformed--as long as I got some feedback explaining why, and as long as
it appeared the expert was open to true collaboration and dialogue. I
mean,
then I could regard it as a learning experience.
If the doubt is that *experts* will be willing to collaborate with
*non-experts*, because it will be too exhausting to do that and not
alienate
the non-experts, that's another thing. I think we will attract the sort of
author who will not be as quickly alienated by editorial decisions as they
might on Wikipedia. I mean, the Wikipedia community has a sense of
entitlement about their equal share of decisionmaking authority. So if an
expert comes in and starts throwing his weight around, so to speak, they
often get upset. Well, we can expect the dynamic here to be different
precisely because our members will have to endorse some fundamental
principles that require deference to expertise.
I also think that editors who would be inclined to be too peremptory with
authors will find the very idea of the Citizendium, in which editors and
authors are expected to work "shoulder-to-shoulder," ridiculous. And if
they are abusive, or fail to explain why they revert the work of authors
(i.e., non-experts), they'll receive a warning; and if they don't change
their ways, they'll be excluded from the project.
===========
Anyway, none of this is to solve the problem of editorial disputes, but
I've
gone on too long for this evening anyway. I'll try to catch up more
tomorrow. I am intrigued by Göran Wallin's actual (if complicated)
proposal
for solving the problem. Seems like most of the rest of you are
strenuously
denying that there is a problem to solve, or that the system shouldn't be
set up in such a way that this problem can occur. But if the system is set
up according to the current plan, not only can it occur, it most certainly
will occur. And then, as I said, when two people who are both editors of
the same article disagree irremediably about some question regarding the
article--and that can happen, David G., for two Communists working on the
"Communists on Communism" article, as everybody knows, and by golly, it's
*more* likely to happen among people in the same camp, isn't it--we *do*
need some procedure for solving it.
OK, I do want to respond to one suggestion, made by Paul Tanner. It is
that
it's actually not so bad if it's the most stubborn of the Ph.D.s who end up
in charge of CZ, in the same way that it's the most stubborn of Wikipedians
who have ended up in charge of WP. But I disagree. The most stubborn are
the most motivated, and the most motivated are the most ideological, and
the
most ideological are not the best sources for an encyclopedia. I think
this
is why people (on both Left and Right) find so much to complain about,
regarding the ideology of Wikipedia and its failure to follow its own
neutrality policy. And I know I am not alone in this analysis, many others
have made it before.
--Larry
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