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Contents 1 Comments by Howard C. Berkowitz 1.1 Different terminology innocently causing a problem 1.2 Breaking controversial topics into more manageable pieces 1.2.1 The structure used with CIA 1.2.2 Iran-Iraq War and support for different sides by different nations 1.3 Infoboxes 1.4 POV 2 Moreschi's comments 3 "Travelling circuses" 4 "Presentism" 5 Solutions? 5.1 And who shall bell the cat? 5.2 Perhaps an example 5.3 What about ideologues? 5.4 Motive: show that they are evil 5.5 Wondering how masochistic I feel... 6 My Thoughts 7 WP:TALK 8 An experiment 8.1 Another point in editing conflict avoidance 8.2 Enforcement again 9 Aki's Proposal 9.1 Proposal 9.2 Thanks, and comments, especially projects 9.3 Metadiscussion and projects 9.3.1 Multiple projects "govern" 9.3.2 agreement on scope 9.3.3 the means of discussion 9.3.4 the role of infoboxes 9.3.5 the role of both Project/subproject and Article discussion pages 10 Brief sketch of proposed solutions 10.1 A list of pages affected by warring 10.2 Define key concepts 10.3 Give admins more power 10.4 Enforce poorly enforced policies better 10.5 Create a noticeboard dedicated to issues of ethnic/cultural wars 10.6 Define and identify problematic editor 10.7 Have dedicated mediators and a set of guidelines for them 10.8 Support non-anonymous editors 10.8.1 Just discovered there is a verifiable pseudonym capability 11 Perhaps some writing/editing proposals 11.1 Calling an academic... 11.1.1 Getting useful information from a POV source 11.1.1.1 Serious example of an essay 11.1.1.1.1 Time for my mantra 11.1.1.1.2 So what's the answer for the essay? 11.2 Refining topic bans

[edit] Comments by Howard C. Berkowitz

Good idea. Let me offer some comments that are an update of comments and discussions with assorted articles, most recently at Talk:Neutral point of view.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Different terminology innocently causing a problem

I had given some national examples of where terrorism, and measures to prevent it, An unrelated article I was editing, counter-terror, had used, as an example along with several other countries, Sri Lanka as an example. One of the editors at the Sri Lanka project objected strenuously, for reasons that were not immediately apparent to me. Several exchanges on the project talk page indicated that we were, somehow, talking about different things.

Luckily, that Project has a very good culture of dispute resolution Before long, we realized that while I was using "terror" and "counter-terror" as specific military terms of art, the other editor was accustomed to hearing "terror" as a political and rhetorical, as in "Global War on Terror". That last is specifically relevant, since the other editor assumed that I was bringing the Sri Lanka civil war into the current US administration's definitions

With a little help, we realized we were using a word in two different ways, and, after several more increasingly pleasant encounters, both articles were improved, and I like to think I made some Wikifriends in the process. I really was surprised to find that quite a number of people believe "insurgency" is a Bush Administration term for the other side(s) in Iraq, and that "terrorism" was again only defined in the political context of the "Global War on Terror". I was able to clarify that while terrorism itself is harder to define, counterterror and antiterror have some fairly well-accepted meanings -- and there are at least some objective attempts to define terror.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

This also demonstrates an importance of assuming good faith. You were able to reach an understanding because both you and the other editor(s) were working constructively. Unfortunately, there are cases I am familiar with where both sides based on past experiences assume bad faith, and they are beyond talking to one another - any discussions they engage in is more directed towards the others, to prove to some third party their righteousness. Such discussions are quite stressful and rarely lead to anywhere but WP:DR.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 13:56, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Breaking controversial topics into more manageable pieces

A different approach seems to have helped at Central Intelligence Agency. Last October, the article was over 300K long, and had many accusations, counter-accusations, and arguments about sources. Purely for mechanical reasons, such as some browsers being unable to handle the page size, something needed to be done.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The structure used with CIA

The basic approach to reducing size was to create a series of linked sub-articles. With this specific topic, these sub-articles variously were divided geographically, or by transnational topic. Within the geographic articles, there was room for discussing the continental or multicontinental regional issues, then major sub-regions, then country, then date, and then type of event under date (e.g., clandestine intelligence collection, covert action, intelligence analysis, approval of covert action proposal).

With a reduced scope, it became easier to discuss controversies in detail. While I have no real explanation (although several guesses), there was much more tolerance to removing material unsourced after several months, and a generally more professional than conspiratorial style of discussion.

Incidentally, the most controversial subregions and countries are getting large enough that there are frequent edit conflicts, but the existing structure is very friendly to creating country-specific articles below the existing regional level.

Should this be called NPOV through "divide and conquer"? Is taking on too large a scope an invitation to POV fights?Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A problem with this approach, based on my experiences with the FA Polish-Soviet War (I could name others), is that subarticles often receive much less attention than the main article. Thus, subarticles - created either because concerns of length or undue coverage - can become POVed forks, as only one side puts effort into maintaining them (as the other side is content with fixing just the main article) - or as was the case in the PSW, nobody at all maintains the subarticles, resulting in them becoming rather obsolete. Thus an argument agaisnt splitting is that it leds to creation of poorer quality subarticles. If the text was to remain in main article, it would be cared for by more editors.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 13:58, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

That's a legitimate concern. Perhaps we have been lucky. While we don't have a formal structure of "reviewing" editors, several reasonably knowledgeable and fair people do check new contributions. At the moment, we have only one controversy -- one editor wants his summary of the CIA's specific 9/11 related antiterrorist plans on the main page, where I and others want that in the appropriate sub-articles on transnational terrorism and the geography-specific areas.

Still, what do you do when the main page reaches a size that some browsers can't handle, and has very frequent edit conflicts because it has so many topics? There's as much a technical justification for hiving off subarticles to keep the main article of manageable size. We got it down from well over 300K to 118K as of this morning, which is still a little large. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:07, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

What do I do? Keep waiting for more editors to come to wiki, as sooner or later we will have enough people interested in subarticles and tiny issues to ensure they have a neutral coverage representing all viewpoints. If you feel there are enough editors to manage the CIA subarticles, that's great. But in cases when I feel there is not enough editors, I do oppose splits - although if the choice is between a biased main article or a due weight main article and biased subarticle, I will probably chose the lasser evil (again, hoping that in time enough editors will show interest in the subarticle to fix it).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:48, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Iran-Iraq War and support for different sides by different nations

As you know from our current discussions, and the draft structure at User:Hcberkowitz#Iran and Iraq, I've been trying to use the "divide and conquer" approach there. As you have pointed out, different people define "support" in different ways. If I understand you, friendly diplomatic and economic overtures do not rise to the level of support, but supplying weapons and things to make weapons are. There's a gray area of whether supplying nonlethal equipment, such as trucks, is considered to fall into arms support, especially if the trucks are designed for off-road military use. Britain drew this line with regard to Iran-Iraq: complete trucks, and parts for British tanks were OK, but ammunition was not.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Infoboxes

Infoboxes, to the best of my understanding, are intended to be a quick summary of an article in fairly good shape, with general consensus. The conflict infobox developed by the Military History Project was not intended to scope the problem; it's most appropriately created toward the end of major editing.

With Iran-Iraq War, and other articles, the infobox has become a heated center of controversy, often trying to force a simplification of issues that might take considerable discussion to explain in the main or subordinate article(s). My strong recommendation is not to put in a infobox until there is broad consensus on issues such as belligerents, strengths, casualties, etc.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

• Yes, I agree with this. Infoboxes are means to an end, not an end in themselves. If they become detrimental to harmonious editing they should be got rid of. I've commented out contentious infoboxes myself, on occasion. Moreschi (talk) 14:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

• Neutrality and verifiability are core policies, having an infobox on every article is not. If they're incapable of NPOV and lead to endless talk page debates then the boxes should go. --Folantin (talk) 14:14, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, there are cases when we had to use notes to clarify simplifications that the infobox form forces upon us.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:37, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Infoboxes double the trouble on problem articles. Nuances and complexities are best dealt with by text rather than the limited number of categories the box offers. They make warring inevitable. The people who add infoboxes often have very little knowledge of the subject at hand too. They just like adding infoboxes. --Folantin (talk) 14:43, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I have not seen a major infobox-related problem; again - in my experience notes seem to solve the issues relatively well.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:49, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I only suggest this if you are feeling masochistic :-), but look through the history on Iran-Iraq War. There have been multiple infobox edit wars, including casualty counts, whether the US is a belligerent (and, if so, the only 3rd country that supported either side), order of battle, etc. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:57, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Country of birth 90.191.101.193 (talk) 07:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] POV

Clearly, one or more editors can have a POV that one side, in a conflict, was primarily responsible for the problems. Japan felt justified in moving into China, in the 1930s, to meet its resource needs, and, especially on the US oil and metal export embargo (which was conditional on the Japanese leaving the areas they had occcupied in then-French indochina), felt justified in starting large-scale hostilities in December 1941. Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, at the very least, have a different POV.

I have been accused not only of POV, but of civility violations because I spoke, in the Iran-Iraq War article, of a group of editors that have a strong POV that Iran was the injured party and the United States was the real cause, acting as an enabler of Saddam. Further, at least one editor charged that I was making personal attacks based on nationality or other personal factors by suggesting the existence of such a group.

In this case, it is really important to look at the message rather than the messenger. I do agree that I believe there are several editors with an essentially similar POV. By their own comments, however, they have assorted ethnicity and nationality, and, IIRC, not all have been or are Iranian citizens. I do not feel the message that a group, of whatever national or ethnic or religious constitution, has a POV is at all an attack, unless it is quite clear that people are grouped there only based on their identity and that all have the same identity.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A very good point. As the NPOV policy states, we all have a POV. Editors who refuse to acknowledge it and see themselves as neutral are the source of many problems I have encountered. Often, similar views are shared by editors of same or similar ethnicity/culture/nation. As long as this is not stated in an offensive way (ex. "you are a member of a Polish cabal"), it is a valid observation - although one that can lead to unfortunate generalizations (ex. if most Polish editors have a similar view on Z, it does not mean that all Polish editors have a similar view on that issue). But certainly, as a Pole, I am well aware that I have a Polish POV; I have no problem with admitting it or hearing this - as long as the other editor will admit he has his own POV. The problem, as I have noted above, arises when the other editor believes he (his nation, culture, ethnic group) has no POV and that they are truly neutral and right... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:43, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It is possible, I think, to have relatively little POV going into a subject. The ideal case may be the reader that literally selects "random article", finds some interesting topic, and decides to look into it. I've had consulting assignments that did that sort of thing; I was asked, as a communications engineer, to look into the telecommunications infrastructure of Sudan, but found myself becoming increasingly fascinated with the country; there are characters there that make the Medici look straightforward. It's the first country in East Africa that I studied in any depth.

Fully recognizing that few Wikipedia editors have training in intelligence analysis, look at cognitive traps for intelligence analysis as an example of how that training can lead, with good analysts constantly testing their own conclusions to see if emotional bias has become involved. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:24, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Having just discovered and waded in to this discussion, I wanted to point out two resources I found fascinating about Wikipedia's NPOV policy and the unintended effects it can have on article quality. The first is a comprehensive essay on Wikipedia by a noted professional historian:[1] and the other is just an interesting item I found online:[2]. No particular additional insights to offer, except that a Jack Webb-style "Just the facts, ma'm" presentation is not always that illuminating. In journalism, despite being quite successful and being more deeply "sourced" than any of his peers, Bob Woodward's reportage is often criticized for failing to provide "context and insight" into his subjects. On controversial topics, Wikipedia articles can sometimes do the same thing, as the delicate NPOV balancing of contrary assertions by different editors of differing perspectives and levels of knowledge about a subject leads to a dry recitation of facts, dates and numbers that are irrefutable, but not always that informative. Just my own POV, of course. Plausible to deny (talk)

[edit] Moreschi's comments

• Possibly it comes down to nothing more than enforcing existing policies more strictly. We have some reasonably good policies (no personal attacks), and some very sensible policies (no edit warring and neutral point of view). No soapboxing is another good idea that's virtually never enforced - you see an astounding amount of soapboxing on talk pages of nationalism-related articles, and all it does is create more bad blood and a poor editing atmosphere (common with Greek-Macedonian articles, amongst others). Users who are completely incapable of compromise and rational debate - the clueless adolescent nationalist-type - need to be banned a lot quicker with a lot fewer second chances: users capable of compromise, and even "writing for the enemy", need to be retained and encouraged. "Patriotic editing" isn't really a problem: a Irish (I have no one particular in mind here) patriot who writes superb articles about Irish culture and history, even if there is a minor bias to his writing, is a welcome editor. The Irish ultra-nationalist POV-pusher who, when it comes to Irish-British articles, is a zealot incapable of compromise. Of course, often the FA-writing "patriotic" editor becomes the crazed POV-pusher when it comes to articles relating to his nation's relations with other countries.
• But the real problem is with editors who do nothing but push a single point of view with all their edits, blind to rationality and compromise, but do so while staying just inside policies such as NPA and 3RR. They are allowed to go on for years on end, and nothing is done. They become, through a crazy twist of logic, self-justified editors via long tenure. Such editors are the real plague. They may even become admins: the Armenia-Azeri and Balkans conflicts are bad enough, but at least no side in any of these disputes has a biased admin to back them up. This makes life a lot easier. This is not true, I believe, for India nor for Eastern Europe. ArbCom need to desysop such types a lot faster instead of upbraiding those who try to uphold neutrality. Thoughts? Moreschi (talk) 14:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Desysopping needs to be viewed as a smaller deal than it is, yes. (At any rate, the standards of misbehaviour/levels of proof that get you desysopped should be lower than what it takes to get you banned.) What is inexplicable is the endorsement of the continued presence in problem areas of admins using or threatening admin powers whom we know are not in the least neutral about the issues. If a random couple of observers were to exchange a list of the admins who have this problem, I dare say there would be a few obvious names right on top, whether in Israel/Palestine, or Eastern Europe, or Hindutva. This is absolutely unacceptable. --Relata refero (disp.) 09:35, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Admins with an obvious conflict of interest should recuse themselves from using their powers in these areas. If they can't do that, they should be topic-banned. If that still doesn't work, then they get desysopped. --Folantin (talk) 09:45, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This is interesting: User:Geogre/Demotion, an essay on why removal of admin tools should occur more often and be less of a big deal, as well practical suggestions as to how to accomplish this. 81.99.113.232 (talk) 13:05, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

In my moderate experience with edit wars, I've had problems more on the other side: there were no admins that followed some of the topics. With CIA, there were enough that looked in occasionally, although were not major editors of the article, such that they quickly could see who was doing what. My one attempt with semi-formal mediation failed because the other editor refused to continue the mediation process, but the courtesy was enough that no blocks were needed -- and frankly, I gave up on active editing there.

At Iran-Iraq, there has been a singular lack of admin help. I can think of one 31-hour block for 3RR. That involved the infobox, which has been a ridiculous problem. To be honest, after a while, I gave up on personally dealing with the infobox and focusing more on main (and sub)article content. Neverthleless, this one case involved putting the US flag in as a belligerent, and there were perhaps four editors that wanted it under Iran, several who tried to discuss the matter, and one that kept taking it out. Several people were sympathetic to the infobox wars, but didn't want to involve themselves.

I don't know if it's possible to block/protect just the infobox. I don't know if it's possible for an admin to enforce that alone.

There are a number of issues of WP:WEIGHT, WP:CIVIL, etc., there, but no admin has stayed involved. It's a good question, to which I have no answer: should there be an admin, or group of admins, that monitor a conflict of this type? Sri Lanka managed to come up with a set of consensus rules, including 1RR and a very strong tradition, not there at first, of discussing things thoroughly on the talk page.

This comes back to Folantin's comment about more admins. That led me to some soul-searching: I probably have the political and technical skills to be an admin, but I haven't had any desire to do so. Part of my reason is that I honestly doubt if some of Wikipedia's policies are viable in the long term These questions include IP editors, and even editing principally by pseudonyms, with no additional safeguards. Safeguards of this type, used elsewhere, include at least a wait of several days before one can edit. I have other issues with the emphasis on secondary sources; let me merely say that there is no good way for subject matter experts to apply expertise -- in many technical fields, there really isn't what Wikipedia terms a secondary source; the Internet Engineering Task Force, for example, does consensus-based development of technical standards, which is a "full-contact" peer review process. Once that's out, however, there are relatively few secondary sources that discuss why the particular design was done, but instead discuss exactly how to use it. I've published four books that could qualify as secondary sources (in many cases my personal experience, but with review). Especially after the dot-com crash, the "why" of internet books have been commercial failures. This isn't just my experience; John Wiley & Sons, a very reputable publisher that did two of my books, dissolved their "Networking Council" line of books, with a very distinguished and active advisory board.

Apologies for wandering, but I hope I've illustrated a problem that I doubt is unique. What would motivate qualified people so there could be 5000 admins? What would help get some software developed that made the speedy delete process more thoughtful -- I've had private discussions with some people that say there have been some reasonable proposals, but never the resources to implement them. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:17, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

• • Nationalist consensus-blocks also make life very difficult, though for this I don't have a solution. Again, for both India-related articles and for Eastern-Europe-related ones, there exist FA voting blocks who attempt to railroad through completely substandard articles. You also get ANI consensus-blocks. The only reason I think of as to why M.V.E.i. (talk · contribs), who loathed the Baltic peoples and Arabs with a passion,, remained unbanned for so long was because he was backed up by the Russian nationalist consensus block - a block formed by editors who really should know better. Moreschi (talk) 14:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment "Possibly it comes down to nothing more than enforcing existing policies more strictly". I think that's the basic problem. We have the policies but we don't enforce them. Has anyone ever seriously enforced WP:BATTLEGROUND the same way WP:CIVILITY has been enforced? The other day, ArbCom ruled that "Use of the site for other purposes, such as advocacy or propaganda, furtherance of outside conflicts, publishing or promoting original research, and political or ideological struggle, is prohibited". Yet we all know that in reality it isn't. For instance, it's blatantly obvious to outsiders that Wikipedia is being used by Armenian and Azeri editors to continue fighting the Nagorno-Karabakh War. --Folantin (talk) 14:27, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment Good to meet you, Moreschi. Have you had the experience of being accused of personal attacks, racial or ethnic bias, etc., by saying blocks exist, and talking about the block position, as opposed to responding individually to every editor in the block? An example of such is at User talk:Hcberkowitz#An example of WP:CIVIL. I am open to ways to deal with such issues, especially if others have encountered it. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Have indeed, as has Dbachmann, who's been accused of racism Christ knows how many times (particularly by our Hindutva friends). In general, mud gets thrown an awful lot if you try to deal, as an admin, with tricky disputes, and some of it will eventually stick, even if the logical contradiction in me being, apparently, both pro-Armenian and pro-Turk is obvious. Of course, you're not supposed to talk about the "block" at all - so it's good to find that we are actually doing so. Being able to call a spade a spade is important. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 18:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

• yes, this boils down to the question of "why is it so difficult to enforce basic policy in these cases". And in particular, why does the arbcom find it so difficult to recognize this type of conflict and clamp down on the disrputive parties? To answer this, one would need to look for patterns in old arbitration cases. Generally, the strategy of the nationalists is to create a smoke screen in order so that an outside observer will just see a lot of generic "conflict" without being able to distinguish bona fide or constructive contributions from mere noise and WP:POINT. Another problem may be the traditional fear that US Americans have of "ethnic" issues. If you are a white USian, you grow up knowing that you can only ever lose if you venture to comment on any "ethnic" topic. Since we have a lot of USian editors/admins here, I think I observe the effect that playing of the "ethnicity card" ("don't you dare chastising me, I'm a member of an ethnic/racial minority!") often does work for the pov pusher. After all, in the words of Samuel Vimes, "Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk". Wikipedia somehow isn't able to deal with this basic piece of social wisdom. dab (𒁳) 15:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Very true. From my point of view this has rarely been an issue, though, on a related issue, I do try to stay clear of Troubles enforcement. Although I am confident in my ability to be neutral in this area, my English background means that I am afraid of being accused of bias. If you don't like the message, trying to wiki-assassinate the messenger is fairly common. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 18:27, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I've never really looked into any of the potential flashpoints (such as The Troubles) within the English-speaking world (though I suppose you could put India into this category). I've always assumed the level of expertise on those articles would be higher (more editors with degrees in their own history, easier access to books on the subject) and so the extremist POV-pushers would face more opposition from level-headed and knowledgeable users. But maybe that's wildly optimistic. --Folantin (talk) 18:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The Troubles is problematic, I think, because it's all fairly recent, and so writing encyclopaedia articles on The Troubles is less a matter of establishing what academic consensus is than comparing newspaper articles. For all the Albanian nationalist nonsense at Illyrians and Pelasgians and God knows where else, we at least have genuine academic consensus to refer back to in order to combat the POV-pushing. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 19:16, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I offer something only slightly tongue-in-cheek, which has actually worked, more in physical world situations. If I am told "You are white; you can't understand/you have no right to comment due to centuries of exploitation"), I may respond with "White? I'm sort of pinkish with brown spots." If it's religious, I may respond with the sect du jour, such as Dionyseian Jansenism, or, accurately, eclectic neopagan with Celtic and Jungian archetypes.

This occasionally so shocks someone that the tone of the discussion changes. In real life, it also has been useful when I could speak a dialect fluently, one that one of my presumed background would not know. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:02, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we have good policies. And yes, we seem to be unable to enforce some of them. Edit warring we can manage, but incivility and bad faith - hardly. Soapboxing is a problem - if editors fail to engage in the debate, their opponents will often force their change in the article with the argument "the other side is not willing to discuss the issue". Hence enormous talk pages for usually much shorter articles.

POV pushers are a plague, and there is little that can be done about it; as I've noted - we are all entitled to our POV per NPOV, it is all about being civil and constructive in editing (or not) where the problems arise. I don't have to agree with some POVs but I agree they are notable and should be represented - but I do not agree that editors representing those POV have the right to insult me or other editors. Yes, mud flies a lot and sticks. I have seen many good editors, including academics, leave Wikipedia because they cannot stand the flames. This is the main problem that needs to be dealt with, I believe - to ensure we have a nice atmosphere, and to tell flamers they are not welcomed here.

I don't see POVed admins as a problem. As noted, we all are POVed - to expect admins to suddenly be neutral is irrealistic. That said, admins who use their admin powers to push their POV in any way or form should be desysoped immediately.

PS. dab's observations of the US POV are interesting. While we still have no reliable data on who are the editors (meta:GUS... sigh), it is a safe assumption that citizens of English-speaking countries are a majority. Thus their culture is certainly a major influence on our policies and actions. Coming from not-so-distant Central/Eastern Europe, I strongly believe that Western culture is can be and is a major positive influence - but indeed, political correctness and well meant but not so helpful desire not to thread over other cultural norms and such can prevent some editors from exerting more moderating influence. In the end, only strong force of moderators can combat flamers - banning them when necessary - and Western culture of limited police powers and freedom of speech is a bit of a hindrance. Of course, without it a project such as Wikipedia would not arise - but unfortunately, when flamers are not checked, disaster follows (just consider the rise and fall of the Usenet). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:58, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Travelling circuses"

Everybody's seen this. Editors of various nationalities tour round trying to "get one over" on their hated rivals. For instance, an editor from Country X starts working on an article about an X-ian composer. Editors from Countries Y and Z, which have some historical beefs with Country X, suddenly take an interest in classical music and magically appear on the talk page to make life difficult for the X-ian editor. A huge and pointless edit war erupts to the frustration of editors who have more interest in music than ethnicity and to the detriment of the article's content. Eventually, after days of feuding about some minor issue, the circus moves on to wreck another article. This is a classic case of disrupting Wikipedia to make a point but little has been done to curb this phenomenon. --Folantin (talk) 14:49, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

One example here. Again, this policy is simply not enforced. Community norms need to change so that it is. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 19:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Certainly this is a phenomena I have seen, in various variants. Defending articles against the circus is possible - I have done so - but it does take a considerable amount of time, effort and stress :( --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 13:41, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

What type of techniques have been effective against this "team" approach? --Elonka 21:16, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Ask neutral parties for input, and hope to outlast the circus. Of course this too often just means that they simply move to another article, and the circus starts all over. And after a few months the circus may well be back... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 21:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

If they do that, start blocking per WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND. When I first became an admin I thought not enough people were being blocked. After nearly a year of adminship I am sure I was right. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 21:48, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Very true, but consider this system failure I outlined already in my post on this page (from 14:44, 11 April 2008). As an admin involved in discussions in those topics, I cannot block or I will be accused of abusing my admin powers. I am even accused of harassment when I issue warnings. I find I have to treat anybody disrupting Poland-related articles with kids gloves or otherwise I am accused of pro-Polish bias. In the end, being an admin is a handicap, as it gives others the ammo to throw at you - i.e accusations of 'admin abuse' (even when no admin powers are involved). When I report problematic users (members of circuses) on a more public, neutral foras to get random, presumably neutral admins to review the cvase - be it AN(I), admin's IRC, ArbEnf and so on - I am accused of block shopping to silence users who disagree with me (similarly when I contact users who are familiar with the issue, I will be accused of "cherry-picking" the editors or such). Further, when a neutral admin does review the case - which is usually already full of circus members and their friends defending them, often giving the impression of no consensus (as the random, neutral admin will not realize that the group of several editors who descent to defend the problematic user are either his POV buddies - members of the circus - or member of the allied circus "helping against a common enemy") - and issues a block, they will often be targeted by the circus & co. which will harass them so much (accusing them of bad judgment, making a mistake, and complaining about their error and inexperience on the public fora, damaging their reputation) that they will refuse to approach such cases again in the future. So in the end - yes, several blocks would be a great and instantaneous solution, but the system is apparently impossible of issuing them. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:05, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I am still gathering data on the "tag team" situation. I have read User:Moreschi/The Plague and seen the helpful list at User:Dbachmann/Wikipedia and nationalism. Does that list seem fairly comprehensive, or are there other areas that are being targeted by teams? How many editors are usually the disruptive ones on these teams? Sometimes it's hard to tell whether the same editors go from page to page simply because they have a common area of interest (as with a WikiProject), and when there is something unethical going on. And of course, sometimes it's both! What do other editors think? Which areas do you think are most often targeted by "bad" teams, and how many editors do you normally see as being the disruptive ones within those teams? Thanks, Elonka 01:17, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Would you like us to name names? Obviously there are the regular editors that legitimately concern themselves with their respective WikiProjects, and thus are well aware of what is happening and the state of play of evolving content discussions. But I can think of a handful roving editors that in the past would pop up out of thin air across a range of Wikiproject areas to restore a NPOV tag or undo some edit or vote on some issue, up to brow beating blocking admins to reverse blocks on their friends and even acting as a proxy to initiate ANI and ArbCom cases on behalf of others in disputes that they themselve were not previously involved in. Martintg (talk) 04:06, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I wonder why there is one editor I know which seems to me fits the above description perfectly. I also wonder if usage of any names here wouldn't be a violation of CIV/AGF and such? I certainly have seen that when I or other editors tried to complain about that editor (or others) with relation to specific complains, we were accused of harassment/block shopping/slander and so on... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 04:22, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I think naming names could be useful, if it was done in a very neutral way. For example: "The following editors tend to edit in areas involving disputes in the (topic) area, usually presenting the (country) viewpoint." That wouldn't be anything different than what might be presented at a mediation or ArbCom anyway. Another possibility, is that of Reconciliation projects. For example, if there are a multitude of disputes between the Nigerians and the Syrians (just to pick an unlikely example), then rather have discussions on multiple pages all over Wikipedia, pick one center "Nigerian-Syrian dispute reconcilation" page, and then point all discussions there. Are there already pages like that for any of the "Plague" articles? And if so, could someone provide links? --Elonka 06:01, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Presentism"

Another major problem of Wikipedia: we have editors who see everything from the perspective of the present and distort articles accordingly (the most ridiculous one is the huge debate whether Alexander the Great would be entitled to a passport from the modern Republic of Macedonia). Contemporary - and often ephemeral - "hot" political controversies are projected into the past and skew our history pages.

Some of my favourite comments about this issue:

"The banality of some of the discussions and the ethnocentrism of the discussants who try to uselessly connect historic people to this or that modern "ethnicity" is really what drags the quality of Wikipedia down". (User:Khodadad on Saka)

"The question of precisely what ethnicity the Hephthalites were is unlikely ever to be definitively resolved (it beats me why anyone should care, but for some people even the most distant link helps massage the nationalist ego)" (User:Sikandarji). --Folantin (talk) 16:21, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

While I admit that some of my favorite science fiction is "go back in time and see if you could build an XXX", and I've even experimented on such things. Presentism is awkward as a piece of academic jargon, but it really is useful in reminding people to judge by the standards of the time. I first encountered it in an article discussing Thomas Jefferson's relations to his slaves, by the morality of the time. Just yesterday, I was pointing out that some standards for current intelligence agencies would have been laughed at just after WWII, or in the colder parts of the Cold War.

Is there an organized way to introduce this into squabbles? Is it conceivable there should be WP:PRESENTISM? Alternatively, a totally hypothetical example, such as Alexander the Great applying for a Macedonia passport, requires WP:OR to answer, and thus is not acceptable. Mind you, I rather enjoy the thought of Alexander, armed and armored, facing Homo bureaucraticus. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I was slightly exaggerating for comic effect when I said there's a "huge debate whether Alexander the Great would be entitled to a passport from the modern Republic of Macedonia" - slightly, but not much. There's a fight between modern Greek and Macedonian Slav editors over Alexander the Great's ethnicity, ie. how Greek were the ancient Macedonians? Likewise, many of the editors of our articles on the Illyrians (an ancient people from the Balkans about whom very little is known) are obsessed with proving or disproving their links to modern Albanians. Plus, virtually every people who ever lived on the Eurasian land mass has been claimed as their own by pan-Turkic or pan-Iranian editors. That's only a few examples. --Folantin (talk) 16:47, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

With due regard that Wikipedia often needs more deliberate comedy, thinking about it, that the answer would have to be WP:OR should end it -- unless the editors are irrational. Oh well... Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:57, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Things got really confusing in the Pentagon sometime in the seventies, where the commander of the Joint War Gaming Agency was COL Ray Macedonia, and it happened the limited war scenario they were running was in the Balkans...it could get worthy of Abbott & Costello doing "Who's on First", which is much better than George W. Bush trying to understand Chinese politics and why the Secretary of State kept saying "Hu's on First." Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:12, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, yes. From my wiki corner the case of Nicholaus Copernicus and his nationality/ethnicity is probably a great example. Another case would be the difference of adjective "Polish" when applied to modern Poland and historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Scholars and well-read amateurs understand the difference, but most of the public is not so clear. This leads to much confusion and soapboxing. I wonder how to deal with that - perhaps some note in the articles directing editors to a discussion of presentism and such is needed, and we should design a standard MOS way of dealing with that? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 15:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, we can all think of fine examples of moronically petty struggles over national identity. Was Chopin, as in accordance with all reliable sources, Polish? Or was he, as one nationalist POV-pusher insisted, French? Happy times. It's stuff like this that makes you wonder whether it's technically possible that an editor could be blocked from editing just one article (so he could edit all the others), or whether an article could be protected from an editor. 81.99.113.232 (talk) 18:35, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Solutions?

• Per User:Moreschi: "Possibly it comes down to nothing more than enforcing existing policies more strictly. We have some reasonably good policies (no personal attacks), and some very sensible policies (no edit warring and neutral point of view). No soapboxing is another good idea that's virtually never enforced - you see an astounding amount of soapboxing on talk pages of nationalism-related articles, and all it does is create more bad blood and a poor editing atmosphere (common with Greek-Macedonian articles, amongst others). Users who are completely incapable of compromise and rational debate - the clueless adolescent nationalist-type - need to be banned a lot quicker with a lot fewer second chances".
  • Sorry for interpolating, but at the very least we should start enforcing this strictly on talkpages. They tried it on Homoeopathy or somewhere and it increased productivity. --Relata refero (disp.) 05:02, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
• Other policies we should enforce more strongly: WP:POINT to stop "travelling circuses"; WP:UNDUE to stop articles being skewed by undue weight given to topics which fascinate POV-pushers (such as ethnicity or contemporary political controversies).
• Insist on the enforcement of Wikipedia's policies on verifiability and reliable sources. Priority must be given to up-to-date sources which have been peer-reviewed and/or issued by respected publishing houses. Ideally, sources should be in English. This is an English-language encyclopaedia and the only language we can rely on all editors having in common is English. References in articles on controversial topics to sources in foreign languages (especially if they are not widely spoken) should be avoided if at all possible. Improving the quality of sourcing will inevitably improve the article. Intelligent general readers are not mugs and they can tell when POV-pushers have tried to hijack a page. Up-to-date referencing from books in English produced by well-known publishers (especially the presses of major universities) is more likely to persuade the intelligent passerby of its accuracy. (Another irony: over-referencing is likely to decrease readers' confidence in an article. It merely alerts them to the fact that POV-warring is going on and that someone is desperate to sell them their version of The Truth. This is one particularly ludicrous example: [3]).

• • Or perhaps make English-language sources compulsory unless a definite need for non-English sources is proven? After all, the whole point of citing our sources is so that our readers can trust our articles despite them not being written by experts. Our readers speak lots of different languages but they all must have English in common. Ergo, they can all check English-language sources. This is not true for the sources of any other language. Moreschi (talk)(debate) 20:32, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Until the last couple of years, I lived in the Washington DC environment, including working for the Library of Congress. At least temporarily, I am on Cape Cod, which is a more resort and rural area, with about a 2 hour drive to the nearest decent academic library. While I love books, and have written them, perhaps even more than English language, I'd encourage use of online sources available to the maximum number of editors (i.e., not JSTOR).

This is a very difficult problem, as a great many academic and professional journals, to say nothing of books, may be available online, but often only to society members and at substantial cost. It was one thing to pay $100 per year for a medical library community membership, but it would cost thousands for equivalent online access.

At least in the Military History Project, there are a reasonable number of people with access to JSTOR, academic libraries, FBIS, etc., so I have a chance of getting some resources not otherwise available. As far as languages, other than a barely remembered smattering of German, I read, write and speak USAian at a native professional level, Canadian at nearly the same level, assorted skill level with variants of English, and adequate Australian. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:55, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Apologies for .sig splicing; Wikiflogging, I suppose, may be appropriate. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

• English is the world's most popular second language so English Wikipedia is a convenient venue for edit wars between users from countries with mutually unintelligible languages. It's also usually the first stop for any user who has been banned from their own version of Wikipedia. If such users disrupt English Wikipedia in the same way then their block log on their foreign Wikipedia account should be taken into consideration so we can ban them here earlier. --Folantin (talk) 19:26, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
  • It's always bewildered me how, so often, poor conduct on one WMF project is not taken into consideration when deciding on sanctions on another project. Inter-project cooperation is pretty poor. There should probably be a "troll blacklist" on metawiki, analogous to the useful "spam blacklist". Moreschi (talk) (debate) 19:44, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, we had some interwiki fun busting Dr B and Mr Smith with the help of our French counterparts. Maybe we need a WP version of Interpol. --Folantin (talk) 19:52, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

While I agree with most of Moreschi's points, I disagree with regards to discarding non-English sources. Yes, English are preferred - but it is a fact that many issues are simply not covered in English sources. There is much research going on in non-English world, and much of it is of good quality. Of course, standards should be maintained - but non-English works, if proven reliable, are as acceptable as English ones.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 15:49, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the subject. If it's a lesser known topic which has no extensive English-language coverage then obviously foreign-language sources might be OK there. But - to give just one example I've come across - I don't see why the central History of Russia article should be sourced from 19th-century Russian sources when there are plenty of up-to-date reliable English ones from university presses. --Folantin (talk) 16:04, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Certainly, your example is very good. I have proposed on RS several times that the policy should clearly advise against usage of old, outdated sources. Along the same lines, we should be careful of POV or even deliberate introduction of errors, inherent in, for example, Soviet historiography. That said, I am sure there are excellent more modern Russian-language works on history of Russia which can be cited.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:17, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, outdated sources. What else could I have done with all those hours spent cleaning out crap from Britannica 1911? Why was the use of that source ever permitted? Even today, people still think it's alright to use such hopelessly outdated and prejudiced sources as the Catholic Encyclopedia 1913 and the Jewish Encyclopedia of around the same date, just because these are public domain. What fun. The same mentality gives us 19th-century Russian sources for History of Russia. Argh!

I'm not proposing a hard-and-fast rule against foreign-language sources, but am simply saying that it should be written into policy somewhere (if it's not already), that English-language sources are preferred and should be used, if at all possible, ahead of foreign-language sources. So, where English-language sources of an equivalent or better standard are available, these are used ahead of the foreign-language ones. Would that be acceptable? 81.99.113.232 (talk) 18:54, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Outdated sources can still serve to make a good start - although I feel that in such cases templates like {{Update-eb}} should be obligatory, not optional. But yes, I have seen such old sources, representing not only old ethnocentrism but often 19th century nationalism used to push fringe POV. This should be clearly addressed by RS.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

"Unfortunately, our problem is half the world's trolls speak English..." This quote by Folantin highlights the problem nicely. This problem will never be solved until we stop feeding the trolls and start shooting them. Admins are the ones with the guns, so to speak; they have, however, let the ball down. They will never solve this problem unless the rest of us (that's right, a non-admin is involved in this discussion!) start holding them to their job descriptions and demanding they do what they are supposed to. The very job title "Administrator" says they should be "administering" wikipedia (yes, it's a shocking thought, I know); any editor with a realistic amount of experience in Wikipedia policies and guidelines can delete tagged pages, protect edit-warred pages, close AFDs, and perform the other functions that the Admins call "adminning," but they are the only ones with power to block or ban users who do nothing but start and maintain conflicts just for the glory of being in the fight. Whatever happened to WP:POINT?! Until the Admins get tough, behavior like this will continue indefinitely, and the rest of us will be powerless to stop it. Fléêťflämẽ U-T-C 20:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

• Another suggested solution - User:Moreschi/Proposal, but perhaps only make this apply to ethnic/nationalist disputes? Moreschi (talk) (debate) 09:45, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

My experience is that it's not limited to what I'd call ethnic/nationalist. I might say it's ideological, as long as that can pick up fringe science and the like. I've recounted what made me give up in network engineering, even when I used a verifiable identity. I know of at least one other noted expert, who gave enough clues about his identity for me to recognize him, who also gave up. While I spoke of students insisting they were right because their (incorrect) textbook said so, I've seen the need to be right from the other extreme. In graduate school, the professor and department chairman spoke on a section of a document, and I suggested an explanation other than his. He went on, and I questioned him again. On the third occasion, he asked me why I thought the authors could possibly have meant XXX.

I looked him in the eye and said "Because that's not what I meant when I wrote it. Please look at the list of coauthors."

I've seen this sort of behavior with U.S. domestic politics, but I've also seen it, especially with the CIA work, with what I can only call conspiracy theorists. In some cases, it was possible to produce documentation that their theory simply didn't work -- such as the CIA not being in existence at the time of the allegation. With a domestic political situation, I tried mediation, and the other editor refused to continue in mediation. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:18, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

• Fleetflame raises a good point. The system is broken here, we are way too tolerant of flamers and trolls. I am an admin, I could name few users I consider trolls - and I would likely be dragged into some long DR because of 'bad faith' and badmouthing them. Of course it would not end in anything serious - thus experienced editors can pretty much disregard WP:CIV and related guidelines and harass their opponents till they quit. Of course, I could just ban them - but I'd probably lose my admin priviliges within a day, because there are wiki-savvy users who support the POV represented by those trolls and would fight tooth and nail to keep them here. After all, one side's terrorists (trolls) are another side's freedom fighters (wikiheroes).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Point well taken, Piotrus. Regardless of whether the admins have dropped the ball, We cannot expect them to do anything unless the rest of us back them. While one side wants the admins to ban or block users because of their editing habits, the other side cries "foul!" and rails against the system for allowing these people to have the tools. The problem may even lie with Wikipedia itself--anyone can edit, and half of us should not be allowed to.

The problem is mostly with the different ways you view admins. Everybody knows that technically they are "just regular editors with a few more tools," and yet the power those tools give them automatically puts them in a higher category than editors like me. I'm personally fine with that, and am willing to let the admins do what they feel necessary to do to keep Wikipedia running like it should. There are people, however, who only hold editors of, say, Arbcom as anything special and any time another admin does something they don't like, they beg for them to be de-sysopped. We've all seen it happen; it's nothing new to us, yet maybe we should take time to educate these editors on how the system works, and in the meantime back the admin's decisions ourselves. I'm not advocating rogue adminship, I'm just saying maybe if we got off the admin's backs, we could then expect them to do their jobs, and only then can we complain if they do not. Fléêťflämẽ U-T-C 19:45, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

"Give admins more powers". Perhaps this is a solution, but it would need to be clarified. And indeed, the issue of rogue admins would become more relevant then.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:13, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] And who shall bell the cat?

Not being fully experienced in the authority of admins vs. Wikilife higher in the food chain (e.g., ArbComm), are these enforceable if a reasonable number of admins (or equivalent) agree to the principles? If so, how would these be presented -- on some noticeboard?

Again not being terribly sure where admins are not intended to make content decisions, how do such things such as WP:UNDUE get enforced? If I may offer an example, there's an insistence, at Iran-Iraq War, at having a prominent photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, to establish the U.S. as the "puppetmaster". There's no picture of Saddam by himself. There's a picture of Ali Khamenei, but he wasn't the Supreme Leader of Iran at the time. There are no pictures of any Soviet or French figures that were associated with the primary arming of Iraq. Attempts to remove the Rumsfeld picture, however, invariably get reverted, as do attempts to get the U.S. flag out of the infobox as an equal belligerent with Iraq. Is this sort of thing where admins are willing to tread? To me, it's pretty clear WP:UNDUE as an example of foreign support to Iraq.

Please accept my assurances I am not asking anyone to decide on this, but am using it as an example at hand, and a question on what remedies would be available if administrator(s) decided it was WP:UNDUE. Would there need to be a formal procedure for such declaration, or could, if it is agreed this is UNDUE, admins block editors that restore the picture after it is deleted? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Quick answer: Admins are supposed to enforce these policies but not many of them actually bother. They obviously have better things to do. What those things are I have no idea. On the other hand, there was a particularly brilliant example of what can be achieved by some dynamic admins on the Liancourt Rocks problem article. I'll try to dig out the links. Update Try this for starters [4]. Unfortunately this only happened after years of futile warring over this page. --Folantin (talk) 19:52, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

As to why - read this. It all really boils down to irrational fear of the arbitration committee, in addition to good old ignorance. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 20:00, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Isn't Wikipedia:Working group on ethnic and cultural edit wars supposed to be taking the lead on this? Nanonic (talk) 20:12, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Are indeed, but I don't think they're actually doing anything. In fact, I know they're not.They have a private wiki for discussion but it's as quiet as the grave. Probably quieter, in fact. The worms must make some noise. Moreschi (talk) (debate) 20:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

they are not. I am knee-deep in hair-raising "ethnic and cultural edit wars" more often than not, and I've never seen a member of this "workgroup" as much as give a wave from safe distance. Hell, I didn't even know this page existed. dab (𒁳) 20:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The last on-wiki contact I had with one of them was worrisome, particularly the part about off-wiki discussion. --Relata refero (disp.) 05:16, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it was an ArbCom initiative. Make of that what you will. RIP Working Group - we hardly knew ye. --Folantin (talk) 21:36, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe we have a resurrection? [5] --Folantin (talk) 08:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I am a big fan of noticeboards, who allow recruitment of neutral editors (ex. Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard). Infusion of neutral editors who usually have enough sense to back up the reasonable, neutral proposal is helpful - although in the ideal world, instead of well-meaning but confusable amateurs we would be dealing with professional experts. It is interesting to note that when I occasionally mention certain POVs I witness on Wikipedia to academics they often are puzzled how such ridiculous, extremist views can be treated seriously. Unfortunately, Wikipedia tends to attract a high proportion of what for the lack of better term is described as "POV pushers", ones who would never be seriously treated in academia or in self-respecting newspaper. Wikipedia gives them a place they can air out their grievances, fight for their righteous cause, harass their opponents and most importantly, see their crank views reflected, for shorter or longer periods, in the mainspace articles, likely validating their efforts ("I did it, now all who read this article will see how evil X is!"). Dealing with them, I believe, is the root of our problem. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:30, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with this. The solution to such problems has always been to provide a flood of neutral editors-- with light shone on a bad article, those with WP:OWN issues simply cannot keep up and must either go with the flow or simply become irrelevant. Jtrainor (talk) 18:37, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Of course, the solution has been under attack from editors afraid of that influx of neutral editors, using arguments that advertising disputes equals to block/forum shopping... sigh.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Perhaps an example

Really, I'm not trying to vent here, as I can't stop giggling at the Freudian typo of an individual editor that, more objectively, I believe, is doing the equivalent of Wikistalking because I challenge his POV. I would ask for opinions on where to take this, as an example of what a POV battle can cause as an extreme.

This came to my attention with a recent post on my user talk page, where he complained (edit summary, but that's what I first saw in the watchlist) about my writing about the "Taker War" without consensus. After reading his complaint, and still being baffled for a moment when I found he was complaining about my writing about the "Tanker War", realized that he apparently had found a page in my userspace, marked highly experimental on my userpage, User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-Tanker War. I didn't announce it anywhere, put it in mainspace, link to it from the Iran-Iraq War article, or anything else that would bring it to the attention of a casual reader.

Folantin, as is certainly his right, supported a speedy delete of my mainspace article on Soviet support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Folantin and I messaged back and forth in an adult manner, and I think (please correct me if I misunderstand; I am your guest here) we have decided we have different definitions of "support" in this context, and it's best to let both our articles develop separately and see what feedback we get.

This other individual, however, took extremely strong exception to the article, wanted it deleted instantly, and also has accused me, on my talk page, of racial/ethnic discrimination, because I had said there was a group of editors with a pro-Iranian POV. Note the use of POV, and this is especially funny because at least three of them aren't Iranian -- it had come up, and, IIRC, they all identified as Kurds, Turks, Georgians, etc.

Am I missing some Wikirule that he knows, which requires me to gain consensus on what I do in a sandbox? Truly, I'm smiling and shaking my head in disbelief, but I tend to think this needs to be reported. Reality check, anyone?

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:31, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Update: he now says it's OK to have it in my userspace; he "didn't notice" that's where it was. Now, I do have a placeholder for Israeli support for Iran; he recommended I use a source with a link including "Treacherous-Alliance-Secret-Dealings-Israel". Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:36, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

In all fairness, I don't think C-Suit said you should label the link "Treacherous-Alliance-Secret-Dealings-Israel". That's the subtitle of the book, which you can peek inside here.

I happen to own this book. The title led me to believe that it would actually provide some counter-examples to C-Suits insistence that US provided no material support to Iran during Iran-Iraq War. I skimmed it a little but didn't get into it far enough to see if it goes to that level. It is more about the printed observable politics and less about the spooky stuff. Don't rule it out mentally as a good source because of a provocative subtitle, the subtitle is just there to sell the book. The book itself is published by Yale University Press and thus represents at least an Ivy League level of scholarship. It is by Trita Parsi.

Thanks,

Erxnmedia (talk) 22:07, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

That string appeared in the URL, and, in general, I find titles or subtitles like that rarely worth my pursuing further. You know me well enough that I prefer drawing inferences from thrillers like the operations and maintenance manual for the AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder counter-artillery radar. Was it Talleyrand that gave good advice to junior diplomats, "above all, no zeal?"

This is getting a little far afield for this discussion, and I don't want to infringe on Folantin's gracious hosting of the broader discussions of turning down the heat on certain discussions. His has my respect for the way he disagrees with me on the Soviet-Iran issue, and how we both may have better articles as a result. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:15, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] What about ideologues?

This is an interesting debate. How do you guys categorize ideologues? People who are not motivated by "love of motherland", but rather a strong antagonism toward another nationality or religion for political and ideological reasons. I've seen such editors on Islam or Middle East topics. Ironically, some of them categorize themselves as "anti-nationalist", but I have seen at least one such editor go as far as using racial slurs against an editor who he saw as a "nationalist". After all, isn't all these designations reality a subjective matter? Couldn't a problematic editor motivated by ideology, hide behind "I am fighting nationalists" defense to to acquire sympathy from unsuspecting editors who are genuinely concerned with ultra-nationalism on Wikipedia and to further his own not-so-noble agenda? --CreazySuit (talk) 21:28, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

the problem is, there are literally millions of people with confused worldviews and poor education. These people are not evil, and if you slowly and kindly explain things to them, they will certainly see reason. But we cannot simply take these editors by the hand one by one and talk to them slowly and friendly. This takes hours of somebody's time, and once you're finished with one, there will be half a dozen new ones fresh from the wild. We simply cannot make it our task to educate humanity one individual at a time. Because of this we need to be strict and ask that people pull their own weight, make a good faith effort to read past discussions and understand the topic. If they are unwilling to do that, we need to exclude them, because we simply don't have the resources to babysit them individually. dab (𒁳) 07:30, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I am sure there is a wealth of academic literature that has sufficient definitions of "ideologue" for us to draw on if we need it. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:54, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure there is a better proverb than "all is jaundiced to the jaundiced eye" -- I'd be fascinated if Farsi has one that would translate -- but there is a problem with non-evil people that lack worldview or specialized knowledge. There are friends I love dearly, but with whom I refuse to discuss politics, or engage in debates when I cite specific data and they respond with "Everybody knows" or "I saw on TV".

Not everyone who disagrees with an ideology or worldview is doing so because they are evil, or in any way discriminsting against people of an ethnicity or national identification. Believe it or not, sometimes people have no particular involvement with anything for or against an ideology, country, etc. Their reaction may be closer to hating some act, without hating the person that performed the act. Being critical of a POV that is frequently, but not exclusively, held by people of some identity doesn't mean that the critic is opposed to the identity -- just the position. As Piotrus points out, there is a limit to how much one-by-one education time is available. That's one of the reasons I like quite specific sub-articles; it gives someone the opportunity to think about a single point without confusing it with other points. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:39, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

CreazySuit has a valid point. The conflicts of Eastern Europe are in essence a case of the ideologues defending a particular interpretation of the role of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Their opponents, whether they be Russian, Pole or Balt, are disingenuously branded as "nationalist". The original ideological dispute then gets obscured and the conflicts in EE get lumped in with the rest of the "nationalist plague" in Wikipedia. The banned user Anonimu in the case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Anonimu was an extreme example of an ideological warrior who frequently used the "nationalist" epithet against his opponents. Martintg (talk) 21:02, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Some of those conflicts are much less related to Soviets: consider, for example, Lithuanian-Polish, Lithuanian-Belorusian or Ukrainian-Polish disputes. From my experience, half if not more of the EE conflicts are indeed little but part of the "nationalist plague" - they are less along the lines of "Soviet Union was great/evil" but along the lines of "my nation was great and your nation hurt mine so you are an evil nationalist and Wikipedia has to condemn your nation and glorify mine."--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 00:31, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

We probably lack a good word to cover all these types of POV-pushing. It's certainly not limited to nationalism. I'd suggest "chauvinism" is nearer the mark and that includes chauvinists for political ideologies and former empires. As I've said elsewhere: "In the real world, nationalism is a political concept which covers a wide variety of territory. For instance, most people would accept that there is an immense difference between Garibaldi and Mussolini. It is not Wikipedia's job to decide on the virtues (or vices) of real-world nationalism or to be either nationalist or anti-nationalist. We merely report the facts and notable opinions about the facts.

"Real-world nationalists are quite free to edit Wikipedia so long as they abide by the same policies as everyone else, especially WP:NPOV, WP:V and WP:RS. In fact, the Czech nationalist leader Tomáš Masaryk would probably have made a model editor here. Although he was a passionate Czech patriot, Masaryk was also an honest and objective scholar. As his Wikipedia article says:

'He challenged the validity of the epic poems Rukopisy královedvorský a zelenohorský, supposedly dating from the early Middle Ages, and providing a false nationalistic basis of Czech chauvinism to which he was continuously opposed. Further enraging Czech sentiment, he fought against the old superstition of Jewish blood libel during the Hilsner Trial of 1899'.

"Were all our "nationalist" editors like Masaryk, Wikipedia's historical articles would be superb". --Folantin (talk) 13:04, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Being a nationalist is not bad as long as one can moderate oneself. That said, the word nationalist has been commonly used as an insult on Wikipedia - something that we should remember.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 19:28, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

"Nationalist" is very much a dirty word in Wikipedia, as User: Biruitorul's failed request for adminship testifies. Masaryk would never be permitted adminship in Wikipedia either, yet we have many admins who are openly sympathetic to communism. The phase "nationalist plague" should really be replaced by "chauvinist plague", as that term more succinctly describes the problems in Wikipedia. Nationalism covers a whole spectrum of political doctrine. It forms the basis of the dominant form of societal organisation today, i.e. the nation-state. In essence it is the doctrine that the nation, however it is defined, has the right to constitute an independent or autonomous political community based on a shared history and common destiny. The USA is a nation state, and the United States Declaration of Independence is in essence an embodiment of nationalist sentiment. It was the elevation of national sentiment that brought an end to WW1 and the emergence of a number of East European nations in the wake of the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. That war was mainly fought between multi-national and colonial empires, whose partial destruction through the victory of nationalism in Eastern Europe was universally celebrated in 1918, and was endorsed by America as a "new world order". This kind of nationalism is still supported by the USA today with its recognition of Kosovan independence. So let's not confuse nationalism with chauvinism. Martintg (talk) 20:11, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

"chauvinist plague" then. It really doesn't matter what your personal views are, as long as you can abstract from them. A nationalist who can "write for the enemy" will be just as useful as a communist who can do the same. It just turns out that nationalists are a recurring group of editors who are unable to abstract from their personal ideology. The ideal Wikipedian is one whose personal opinion isn't even apparent from their edits. I pride myself that while it is certainly possible to get the gist of my interests, it would be very difficult to second-guess my RL personal biases from my on-wiki activity. Indeed, I often find myself combating editors who take a position a can sympathize with, but cannot muster the intelligence to present it in an unbiased manner. On Wikipedia, the what doesn't matter, while the how is all-important. dab (𒁳) 15:37, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

In my experience people cannot distinguish what someone's personal ideology is, but they brand someone as a "nationalist" simply because of the country they originate from. This is quite apalling. If I am in a content dispute regarding some Estonian article, it's okay because I'm from Australia, but if the exact same arguments are presented in an identical dispute by someone from Estonia, then it is a manifestation of the nationalist plague. Martintg (talk) 00:25, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Well said about being able to separate personal views from writing. There can be inconvenient facts that remain facts. For example, if Country X is officially hostile to country Z in the Y-Z war, if it can be documented that, for whatever reason of state or even crime, country X gave war materials to country Z, arguing generically that such an action is politically incorrect just is not responsive. Groups may hate one another, but still have reasons to cooperate for some common objective, and it can be hard to recognize the limited cooperation within an overall framework of hostility.

This isn't limited to nationalism, but includes a wide range of domestic politics. I've had the experience of writing on one fringe political group, and, via some equally fringe groups at the other end of the spectrum, found my way to objective financial data on the first. There are those editors that claim the legal theory of "fruit of the poisoned tree" contaminating any objective data that was found by going through hostile websites. They may agree fact A is true, but claim WP:POV, WP:OR, or WP:SYNTH was violated in finding it. I reject the argument that a diamond found in a swamp cannot have value. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:32, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I would strongly suggest creating an essay here, something accessible form WP:CHAUVINISM, that would explain what we mean by chauvinism (and what should be meant by nationalism, with a link from WP:NATIONALISM). That would be useful in future discussions (and would also mean that our conversation here is having some useful results).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:44, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Motive: show that they are evil

A common pattern I have noticed involves violations of WP:UNDUE in particular and NPOV in general by certain editors - perhaps similar to the traveling circus phenomena described above - whose main (or significant) activity is going to various articles related to country X (sharing history with their country Y) and stressing how evil/wrong/etc. country X was. An opposite but as disruptive type of an editor will concentrate on whitewashing issues. Often those two will be combined - after all, a good defense strategy is to attack. I find those type of edits to be the most disruptive and hard to deal with. Compared to problems with definitions, they cannot be easily resolved, because at least one side is not assuming any good faith, but 'out to score a point'. Even naming and 'what nationality is mr x' or such disputes are less disruptive, as they often involve well meaning editors - although they can be infected by the above 'I hate country X so I will make sure their language and references to are removed from this project' circus. The editors which form part of this circus can be to a certain extent defined and identified, as they share certain similar attributes:

• they will start their wiki adventure with editing (at some point) more or less controversial articles related to countries X and Y. Their intentions may not be from the start to become engaged in those controversies and prove their point, but they will become aware of it, and due to what for the lack of a better term can be described as their nationalist indoctrination, they will step up to defend their country Y and tell everyone about the evils coming from the country X
• if they haven't before, they will eventually focus on more and more controversial issues, becoming to a certain extent "experts" on the issue of controversies between countries X and Y. Whenever a controversial issue regarding countries X and Y is discussed, those editors will appear
• they will refuse to compromise, believing - or putting up the front of belief - in their righteousness (they are right, and their opponents are wrong, it's as simple as that). If they had good faith before, the failure to convert the other side will result in loss of that good faith, and increasing assumption of bad faith
• even if there is a large consensus they are wrong, they will never admit it; at best they will just give up on this article/issue and move on with their crusade elsewhere
• occasionally they will accuse the other side of being part of a cabal (which may incidentally become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and lead the previously unorganized other side to organize; this will lead to organization, radicalization and crystallization of bad faith and opposing fronts, slowly (years...!) but surely escalating the problem)
• bad faith due to past experiences/nationality of their opponents will become common; this will lead up to violations of civility, personal attacks and flaming as both sides will increasingly assume that the other side are trolls (the assumption may be quite justified for one side, but with increasing radicalization, it may become increasingly true for both sides)
• at some point they will start popping up in discussions not involving their country Y, but involving controversial issues related to country X, reverting/voting/voicing their opinion wherever they can to damage the country X (that, I believe, is one of their most defining qualities, and one that perhaps could be a target of some solution policy, based on a combination of WP:AGF and WP:HARASS, perhaps?)
• at some point those editors will become involved in some form of dispute resolution
• the following wiki activities are commonly associated with those editors: 1) edit/revert warring 2) tagging/tag warring 3) lengthy and pointless discussions at talk, full of bad faith and aimed not at reaching a consensus, not at convincing the other side (which is near impossible) but at convincing the neutral editors of their righteousness 4) complaining about the other editors (more or less related to DR)
• while some inexperienced editors may violate 3RR or CIV so much they will get themselves blocked, many others will learn enough about wiki to be able to achieve the best "compromise" between edit warring/harassing the other side and not getting warned/blocked. * utilizing their skills, they will do their best to (more or less intentionally): 1) create an unpleasant atmosphere for the editors from the other side to give up and leave or "lose it" and get blocked, all of which is the method to 2) get rid of the editors of opposing side (since they cannot be compromised with, they are evil and they need to be silenced) and thus get a free hand to edit mainspace articles to prove "the country X was evil and country Y great").
• sooner or later, the bad atmosphere created by those few users will become a serious reality. With the ongoing radicalization in the background, many good editors will chose to either leave the project, hating the battlefield, or completely stop editing articles related to those subjects. It would be interesting to try to measure via some survey how many editors were affected by it
• this directly translates into lowering of the quality of Wikipedia and hence should be a major concern of ours
• the bad atmosphere will also give bad reputation to all side (mud sticks). Anonymous editors have an unfair advantage here; the few editors who chose to use real name are much more vulnerable - yet are not treated differently with regard to our policies (despite WP:LIVING and growing concern regarding such issues, it does not seem to apply to editors themselves). This, of course, means that real life experts will that more quickly leave the project, and even if they return under a nickname, they cannot use their real reputation to back up their arguments. Thus, a great scholar = a teenage troll, and all the talk about getting experts to contribute stops right here (most academics have better things to do that to get harassed by anonymous flamers).
• the longer this goes, the more lengthy the talk pages and dispute histories, the more difficult the job of any neutral editors willing to help and the fewer will want to (and the more often they will opt out for some easy solution, when they realize the mess they got themselves into).

What do you think about this attempt at definition of a problematic editor responsible for the cultural/ethnic wars on wikipedia and the problem they create? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 01:16, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Good observations. Slight vent here, since it's something I can't change about Wikipedia. Starting with the second to the last, I should mention that I've been doing electronic collaboration, starting with rather basic tools, for around 40 years. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its predecessors have used non-anonymous mailing lists as their basic mode of collaboration for around that long, and rarely had problems. Even in USENET, before AOL opened it wide (including anonymous users) in ?1987, there was civility even in issue groups. We all know what it's become. I'm afraid, Jimbo Wales liking it or not, that anonymous, or pseudonymous without verification, collaboration doesn't scale any more than direct democracy, with everyone with a grudge who can speak as long as they can, doesn't scale much larger than a small village.

I've taken a break from from the Computer Networking Project, after again and again correcting errors, mostly from one textbook, that I've been correcting for 20 years or so. The last straw was when I referred to a peer-reviewed article, of which I was lead author, and was told that the material already in Wikipedia couldn't change, and some student's textbook said it was wrong. The four engineering books I've published, from major publishers, apparently didn't count.

Ok, end rant. I may follow it up with what may be the antithesis of such, with editors who variously are reasonably diplomatic, can tolerate multiple views as long as some aren't suppressed, and might even be experts in a field. Returning to the circus, though, I can speak to the perception when I wandered into a subject area where there was already a group of such performers. Righteousness is very basic, and a slight question about their view quickly brings out charges of discriminating against people of ethnicity X, or, in a political forum, if it's a liberal issue, one is accused of being a right-wing troll, and if it's a conservative issue, one is accused of being a left-wing troll.

If the new and relatively unbiased author is not part of a consensus group, the problem of 3RR gets much worse. If a lesser number of editors inserts politically incorrect text, there are enough group members to revert without any single member hitting 3RR or often 2RR. I'd note that the Wikiproject Sri Lanka Reconciliation, which, even with problems, is my shining example of people with strongly different views committed to consensus and quality, uses 1RR, and has a very strong tradition of talk page discussion, with informal mediation readily available. Perhaps we need to concentrate more on topics that do work, and try to understand their social dynamics and get those spread to admins and the like.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:53, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I strongly believe that anonymity is indeed not helpful to the project. Perhaps there should be a requirement that certain controversial articles can be edited only by non-anonymous users? We could have a noticeboard and some review committee for that. A new user level could be created - after ip and anonymous registered, real name registered. Civility violations against the editors using real name should be dealt with more seriously - per WP:LIVING. This could very significantly cut down on percentage of trolls in that area.

Regarding the Sri Lanka example, I applaud the editors in that area - they managed to kept enough good faith to work out rules and stick to them. But what to do in areas that failed to do so? I have tried to create such a rules for Polish-Lithuanian conflict areas and failed (see here). Since then, the situation has not improved, and only gotten worse.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wondering how masochistic I feel...

A little voice is asking me if I should volunteer to help out in the Polish-Lithuanian matter, since, beyond knowing their capitals and being able to find them on a map (really, I know a little more than that, but my favorite Polish stories are 12th century time travel), I have no particular opinions in the argument.

Thinking further, that reminds me of a time that I held press passes from two opposing organizations, which let me stand between them when they threw rocks, bottles, and tear gas grenades at each other. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:29, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

We are certainly in much need of more neutral moderators. Honestly, though, this is a major problem with much discussion (of course, what isn't?). Currently specific articles that are being discussed and contested include Armia Krajowa and Dubingiai massacre, if you want to take the look. The latter seems to have obtained a neutral mediator who is trying to prepare a sandbox version, but input from more neutral editors would not go amiss. The first one is much more complex (as the article is also much larger), and the need for input from neutral editors is much larger.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 21:37, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please participate. PL-LT needs you (shameless recruiting). A fair number of the disputes involve military actions, which you seem to have a lot of experience in. As WP battlegrounds go, it's not so bad - a block or warning every month or so. And the scope is relatively narrow. Hope you'll consider it. Novickas (talk) 12:56, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] My Thoughts

Perhaps I'm over simplifying, but I see the solution in fairly simple terms - it all comes down to both rational consensus and adherence to fairly strict definitions.

Take, well, any war, any source of antagonism, and define it. Terrorism is a great example - can one write a truly NPOV on Al Quaeda? We usually think in terms of "Al Quaeda is a terrorist organisation and so they are terrorists and so we are fighting a war against terror and terrorists." And in doing so we lock ourselves into that definition, that paradigm, and immediately we present and are accused of having a non NPOV. If you fight the factuality of the statement you are branded a terrorist supporter. If we took a step back and looked at our textbook definition of a state, terrorism and war, we'd likely end up defining Al-Quaeda as a virtual state (a state without territory, that seeks to establish and hold territory, multi national, has a leadership structure, financial structure, intelligence and military assets, propaganda/media outlets and members who swear allegiance to the state) which sanctions the use of terrorism in obtaining it's goals (state sanctioned terrorism) and it is in a state of conflict (war) against the "West" led by the United States. Both sides have used or attempted to use terror tactics, as well as conventional, NBC, cybernetic and media warfare to defeat the other. In short, stick to the provable facts. No more, no less. My brief reading of the Iran/Iraq War page points to it being an excellent example of how things should be dealt with, but I didn't read the talk page.

I guess its like the following statement: "Like them or hate them, the Nazis killed a lot of Jews". Now - if you are offended by that, or if you should happen to feel the opposite of offended by that comment, that's not NPOV. That statement is a pure statement of certifiable, provable fact - nothing more, nothing less. Now - if you had no idea or knowledge of World War II, the Jewish people or Germany and national socialism, you could happily accept that statement as an editor, with citations and sources, as fact, with little or no emotional attachment.

And perhaps that's all we need - some strict definitions of terms that cause ethnic and nationalist friction (and by organising things geographically rather than along ethnic or historical boundaries - eg: Ancient Japan or Ancient Britain, even Europe to a degree , are treated as a single topic without regard to the many hundreds of individual polities that existed in these areas)) and some real NPOV ie: those who can take the voices of both sides and arbitrarily edit without emotional investment in a topic. This excludes most experts, who over time will develop a firm opinion on topics.

That's my initial two cents worth... Akitora (talk) 11:16, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Reiterating earlier, but less detailed comments, let me respond to your question if someone can write a truly NPOV article about al-Qaeda, or the Holocaust. Perhaps that is difficult in the Wikipedia context, but it's exactly what is expected of a competent intelligence analyst (see cognitive traps for intelligence analysis). If, for example, I was writing an analysis of al-Qaeda, and had to try to predict their reactions, I'd probably start by steeping myself in the works of Sayyid Qutb and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, their spiritual models, if I didn't go back to some 12th century sources. I'd read the doctrinal manuals and listen to their messages. Then, I'd try to put myself in the mindset of an al-Qaeda leader, and think about how he (definitely not a he/she writing moment) would interpret the actions of opponents, and how he would respond to them, within his own belief system. I might personally think he is murderous slime, but to describe his thinking, I have to put that aside.

How to apply that sort of thing in Wikipedian terms, especially with WP:OR, is a challenge. I might try to understand the POV of the POV-pushing crowd, and try to reason with them based on their own assumptions. At least, it might help if they were aware that I was aware of their assumptions -- disagreed with them, but didn't ignore them.

I've worked with some very nasty disease bacteria, which demanded respect if I was to remain safe. One of the FBI profilers has commented that he personally liked, in discussion, a serial murderer, but both he and the murderer agreed that the murdered could not ever be set free. It can be hard to separate emotion from reason, but NPOV requires it.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:54, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe it is truly possible for anybody involved with the subject to write from the NPOV perspective alone. I believe that NPOV can be only reached when a user is completly objective or when the users from all POVs collaborate. But even scholars from countries uninvolved in a debate usually have some biases; thus even a scholar writing on a subject is not truly neutral (a good example is Norman Davies, a British historian an an author of one of the best histories of Poland in English language, who has been several times accused of pro-Polish bias). Bottom line is, that to get a NPOV articles you need many editors (and sources) representing all reliable and due POVs.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 19:26, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

One of the goals, perhaps, is to get someone who is not especially involved with the subject to act as a mediator. I don't think, however, that is especially practical in a system, such as Wikipedia, where there is anonymity of contributors. It may seem contradictory that anonymous review is the standard for academic peer review, but, again, there is a check-and-balance that the reviewers are selected by a non-anonymous editor, or perhaps review committee.

Here and there, it may be possible on Wikipedia. I see a few people at Sri Lanka Reconciliation that may indeed have POVs, but I can't tell what they are if they have them. Instead, they see their role as helping people at the moderate extremes of POV work out mutually acceptable language, come to consensus about source reliability, etc. For whatever reason, and apparently after major edit wars, that group did manage to build a culture of respect and consensus.

There is the "broken-window" school of urban decay, that suggests that if you tolerate slight problems in unfixed broken windows, things slide constantly until you have a lawless slum. Perhaps that means that the most important thing to be enforced is WP:CIVILITY, as it's far more difficult to reach consensus with someone that is attacking you. Mind, I have found it useful, on more than one occasion, to respond to someone saying that they thought I was a [censored], with "Yes."

With disbelief, they replied, "You mean you agree that you are a [censored]?"

"No. I agreed you thought I was one, and I assumed you told me the truth."

Without civility, without a core of people dedicated to mediation, I respectfully disagree that you can possibly get NPOV articles by having people with all possible POVs. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 19:43, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, you have pointed out a very important item. If a side has moderates who are willing to moderate their side's extremist, this allows the other side to realize that a compromise is possible. But if a side has no such people, and their voice is dominated by the extremists - the problem arises. The "broken window" argument is certainly relevant. When there is control, there is (relative) peace. Where there is none, all hell breaks lose.

A related problem is that when one side shows not good faith, that good faith evaporates in the other, which may be tempted to "fight fire with fire" - i.e. the moderators, seeing no partners on the other side, will either leave the discussion/project, or become extremists themselves, in either case lessening their moderation of their own side's extremists.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 19:54, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WP:TALK

Another policy rarely applied but which needs enforcing. Frankly, I'm amazed at some of the junk allowed to remain undeleted on talk pages. We should crack down on people sparking off disruptive debates there too. Another thing: the endless, circular arguments that go on surrounding some subjects. I think every argument that can be made one way or another about Alexander the Great or Copernicus' ethnicity has already been made on Wikipedia. Time for a Liancourt Rocks solution. --Folantin (talk) 15:14, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

yes. we cannot get rid of all of this, much is inherent in what the wiki is, but we can streamline this a lot. Talk:Muhammad now has Talk:Muhammad/FAQ. If a talkpage gets much circular debate, such a FAQ page may help. Postings that just address a point already answered there can then be removed before they bloom into a full debate. Wikiprojects can also help (of course, the de facto Wikiprojects are mostly pissing contests plastering talkpages with futile templates. But the few Wikiprojects that actually work do wonders in focussing interested editors' attention on recurring problems). dab (𒁳) 15:29, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

A feature of the Armenia-Azeri disputes is that "talkpage discussion" is often 90 percent a rehash of past grievances and 10 percent meaningful discussion of the content in dispute. Similarly, the talk pages of Greek-Macedonian articles often spiral off into lengthy debates on the Greek-Macedonian dispute, and not a debate on what is supposed to be debated. I think you'll see more edits like this from me in the future. Of course, there's nothing with holding discussions on user conduct on article talkpages, within reason, but rehashes ad nauseam of old quarrels are never productive. Moreschi2 (talk) 16:09, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I have recently started deleting any complete post which nowhere features a reference to the particular article discussed. This doesn't help with posts that are 10% argument and 90% off-topic whine, but its a start. --Relata refero (disp.) 13:01, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] An experiment

Perhaps in an example of fools, but neutral fools, rushing in where angels fear to tread, I went to a Balkans-related article, Operation Storm, and suggested some neutral wording on the talk page Talk:Operation_Storm#The_biggest_European_land_offensive_since_World_War_II.2C.5B1.5D). This is the sort of thing that seems to happen at Sri Lanka.

Let's see what happens, and if such recommendations help. I really have no detailed knowledge or opinions about either side in that conflict, but I do think it's wise to avoid terms with a potential Nazi connotation -- especially when the term is obsolete in any professional military journal, not to suggest that mainstream media reporters are particularly concerned with accuracy, as Sir Henry Shrapnel might observe. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:05, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

A problem with not knowing much about a subject is that even with best intentions one can fall into the pit trap of WP:UNDUE - for example, suggest a neutral wording about something that shouldn't be mentioned in lead anyway (for example, imagine an editor who knows nothing about history and military, and would suggest, full of best intentions, a neutral prhasing for mentioning attrocities and war crimes in the lead of the US Army - because a fringe POV pusher would be rising a circus on US Army talk page, discussing in details Canicattì massacre or similar fringe occurrences. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 23:15, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Keep perspective on this. If there is a need for a greater number of neutral editors, is asking them to be non-POV and also knowledgeable about the subject reasonable?

In this case, "blitzkrieg" suffers from two problems: its Nazi associations, and its being an obsolete term. In dealing with POV about CIA and other covert actions, it became easier to discuss the subject, and issues such as WP:UNDUE, when more neutral, and historically accurate, terms were substituted for "regime change". I don't want to suggest that certain covert actions, such as the overthrow of Mossadegh, were not deliberate regime change. They were.

The historical record of a number of other covert actions, and the intelligence analysis surrounding them, may have simply said "subsidize a political faction." For example, there was subsidy to Indonesian political groups shortly before the exceptionally bloody purge of the Indonesian Communist Party. Intelligence estimates shortly before the event suggested the military would tend to stay neutral, although, in all fairness, no one expected locals to kill several generals.

It is my belief that avoiding trigger words is always a good idea. Whether the concept they describe belongs in the lead is a separate issue, one I suggest that will be easier to discuss with more neutral terminology. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:43, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

It would seem your experiment turned up some interesting results. I for one agree with you on the Blitzkrieg comment - given it was a strategy with definite parameters (a doctrine) used in one particular set of conflicts by one country, it should not be used elsewhere unless another military force specifically uses the original Blitzkrieg Doctrine fully, or as a basis for a new doctrine, and only if that fact can be proven... that said:

A suggestion. Perhaps Wikipedia needs a system like "jury duty" - 3 person juries for POV calls / mediation/ debates etc who are approved by the leading voices on each side of the debate - the very system of jury selection is in a sense a very good way to obtain a fairly neutral panel. Juror's themselves could a) volunteer to be on a duty list, b) exclude themselves from certain articles using an honour system and c) Be held as a condition of being on the list to actually following through with any jury they sit on, or exclude themselves based on RL commitments. The size of the list would determine how often any one juror would be called up. Thoughts?Akitora (talk) 10:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

You might or might not have noticed that it started a conversation, on our respective user pages, about editing in general, which was an unexpected positive result.

I need more coffee before I remember the site -- the Well, perhaps, but it might be a political one -- that does something very much like your "jury duty" approach. Let me preface this by saying that some blogging or other interactive community software, such as Scoop, has a system for numerically rating posts, with several safeguards I'll mentioned. Over a period of time, each user (no IP's allowed) gets a "karma" rating.

The articles, as well, are rated by users with karma above a certain level, making them "trusted" users. There is also a software feature to "hide low-rated posts", so the effect is that users that are perceived to be trolls or otherwise disruptive have their posts hidden from all except trusted users who can up-rate them. At one political site I used to frequent, when it still used Scoop, this worked fairly well, although users could still game the system with sock puppets and the like.

At the site I'm trying to remember, there was an additional feature. You developed a karma rating, but only a small number of users, at any given time, could rate. That small group was randomly selected, and had rating authority for a finite and short period of time, to prevent a biased yet trusted user from blocking for the wrong reasons.

Now, I recognize this model doesn't quite fit a (lower case) wiki, but the idea of "reputation" in network-enabled collaboration systems has quite a bit of research. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has specific policies that make a reputation system infeasible, such as allowing posting by anonymous IP's. Further, a reputation system needs safeguards, the most common being that one needs a certain number of acceptably rated posts to be able to rate (i.e., not in the small moderator model). One cannot simply sign up, perhaps as a sock, and start low-rating.

Those systems differ from wikis in that there is no article markup per se. Nevertheless, there are approaches, but, again, they absolutely require user accounts that are at least pseudonymous. Just thinking of approaches that might work on Wikipedia, it might be that a new user might be restricted to reading at the very beginning, then commenting on talk pages only, then actually editing. There would have to be some minimum activity level to help avoid creating legions of socks.

Such technical solutions, unfortunately, go into basic Wikipedia policy and could not be implemented without very high level agreements. Still, there is a limited capability to implement such simply by Administrators. For example, the Sri Lanka project has a 1RR rule, after which the discussion moves to a talk page until consensus is worked out. Admins can enforce 1RR, and there has to be enforcement of such things as WP:CIVILITY on the talk page.

Just some general thoughts, which could be Project-specific. Of course, we have individual article controversies that might be under a broad project like MILHIST, but would need a specific project as well. For example, Iran-Iraq War would need a project more specific than region, culture, or MILHIST. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:56, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I think the jury duty concept is great. It invokes long-standing traditions of service to the community. Someone with good rhetorical skills could tug on that. That tradition also, though, includes the concept that any reasonably intelligent person is qualified to serve on any case (but I sure felt sorry for the jurors in the Enron trial). Novickas (talk) 14:28, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Another point in editing conflict avoidance

It's not really my intent to draw from techniques that work in clinical mental health, but I can't help think about the possible relevance of a crisis counselor dealing with someone in an acute paranoid state. There is no way to talk them out of their beliefs, and challenging the beliefs will be more inflammatory. A good therapist, instead, acknowledges that the person in crisis believes something to be true, but shifts the discussion to the feelings about it. Acknowledging anger, whether it is rational or not, goes a long way in calming many situations.

In many of these problematic articles, the best that can be expected is for one side to recognize that the other side is furious about something, not try to prove them wrong, but at least to progress the discussion with the acknowledgement that all sides were angry and angry people don't always make the best choices.

For example, while I can intellectually understand the anger of Iranians at U.S. support of the Shah, I can't grasp the intensity on an emotional level. At the same time, I don't think some of the Iranians grasp the U.S. anger at both the embassy seizure and on the interference with freedom of navigation. While I can control it, I have an intense flash of anger when I read about releasing free-floating naval mines into international waters.

While I don't know the P-L or other situations we've been discussing well enough, especially given that the discussion is about historical events, is there any approach in which someone on side A can say to someone on B, "I accept you are furious about what we did. I'd appreciate that you acknowledge that our side is furious about something you did. Now, without trying to change minds that won't change, can we discuss what happened with the interactions of the attitudes?" The attitudes were real, even though some might have been whipped up by demagogues. That doesn't make the demagogue right, but it does give insight into how decisions were made.

I recommend Fred Ikle's book Every War Must End, which analyzes a great many conflicts, in which going to war for emotional reasons like Lebensraum, without clear definitions of victory or defeat, lead to disaster. A variant is "mission creep", such as expanding the original goal for the UN force in Somalia, without examining the feasibility of the new goal or whether the resources exist to carry it out. Another example of mission creep, unfortunately not understood until the war was over, was the immense psychological effect of the Doolittle Raid on the Empire of Japan. The U.S. mostly saw it as a morale-building measure, but it so shamed the Japanese officers defending the homeland that they attempted to push their eastward perimeter farther than it could be supported, leading to their defeat at the Battle of Midway. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:41, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Interesting observation. Wikipedia's dispute resolution processes can appear at times to be more punitive than supportive in its language and application, and may tip an otherwise good editor into mastodon mode. If we changed the language a bit, may go some way to make Wikipedia a friendlier place for people with the issues you note. Rather than "blocks" and "bans", perhaps we should call these measures "time-outs" and "wiki-break", for example. Certainly that kind of language is less confrontational and stigmatizing . Martintg (talk) 22:08, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

ahem, I don't think so. The obsession with euphemisms for editor behaviour (don't call a troll a troll, you might hurt their feelings and commit WP:CIVIL-violation) is a bane of Wikipedia. Admins get a mop and a truncheon, and the truncheon is for the slapping of the vandals and of the wrists of editors who lose it for a moment. Wikipedia isn't for everyone. If you cannot stand the sheer stupidity lurking in every corner, and if you cannot stand collaborating with people who may have tempers or standards of "civility" or humour different from yours, you'll spend half of your time online whining or wikilawyering. We want to be confrontational and stigmatizing, and what needs to be stigmatized is behaviour that hurts the project goal, which is encyclopedicity-cum-neutrality. dab (𒁳) 14:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with dab.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 00:16, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with this kick-ass approach is that it needlessly offends good editors who give up and leave the project. Wikipedia is a volunteer effort that people devote their spare time for free, the only return they expect is the enjoyment of collaborating and contributing to the body of knowledge that is Wikipedia. If you think the role of an admin is to be confrontational and stigmatizing, and this benefits the project goals, you are gravely mistaken. Policy can be upheld without needlessly offending people. When I grew up in Australia as a school kid, we stimatized immigrant kids from southern Europe as "wogs". Today it seems, in Wikipedia, east Europeans and others are being stigmatized as "nationalists", purely on the basis of their origin. This is damaging Wikipedia. For example, over zealous administrators weilding truncheons have chased off a group of very good Estonian editors for alleged "disruption" to Estonia related topics, an area they obviously have initmate knowledge in. They have been offended by groundless accusations of nationalism and heavy handed admin action. Now a whole topic area remains incomplete and unfinished. Who will step into the breach? Do you have the requiste Estonian language skills for accessing Estonian sources or interest in writing about Estonia related topics? How does that serve the project goal, of "encyclopedicity-cum-neutrality", when there is no one willing to write the material in the first place? Martintg (talk) 04:51, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I have to disagree, Martin. Good editors are offended not because admin call them trolls and ban them; they get offended (and leave) because admins are powerless to stop other editors from harassing them and creating a hellish environment for them. In the example of our Estoniam collegues - whom I hope you'll recall I tried to defend - it was my impression that while admin (ArbCom) actions were indeed to heavy handed, they were not the root of the problem. The root was the actions of much more experienced editors who knew how to maneuver around the wiki rules (wikilawyer) and who had the "political" clout to escape most punishment, and who tried their best (and succeeded) in the combination of harassing the Estonian editors and making them want to leave and baiting them into breaking the rules and paint them as the troublemakers. The system should have handed restrictions and blocks, just not to that particular group of editors... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 00:16, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the less stigmatizing language would help, but there are several ways to offend good editors, especially those that do have subject matter expertise. I experienced this to the greatest extent not so much with issues of nationalism, but in technical disciplines such as computer networking. Certain arguments, mostly associated with some incorrect textbooks and vendor tutorials, would come up in cycles every few weeks. It didn't matter how often there was a well-sourced reply, citing peer-reviewed technical standards and secondary, also peer-reviewed, documents explaining the proper interpretation of those standards. It didn't matter that the replies were coming from verifiable subject matter experts. There's a limit to how many times, for example, I was willing to point to specific, authoritative online references (see footnoted rant on my userpage) about the Internet reference model (i.e., the "TCP/IP model") not emphasizing layers, and, to the extent it uses layers, that it has four, not five (incorrect textbook), not seven (a different model commonly taught but that the Internet standards officially don't use).

Would it be unreasonable to expect, after the fourth or fifth time the same definitive sources were use to refute the same argument, that an admin might step in and say "there is consensus and sourcing on this point. See (talk pages). Either stop fighting the same battle against definitive sources, or be blocked?" Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 06:02, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I may as well continue on here - it's all related eh :) (btw Martintg - we didn't reeeeaally stigmatise the wogs in school mate - remember the basic tenets of our culture - we only insult the people we like... or that we think aren't complete wankers. And we gave em most of Melbourne, so they can't complain. ;) ) Anyway - back on topic. Re: Jury idea - I agree now that we've all chewed it a bit - would only be feasible on a project level unless we get together and whip up a white paper proposal for the Foundation guys to consider.

The emotional issues surrounding conflicts (and why they start etc) and thus how they relate to the articles that are written on them have gotten me thinking you know... (thanks for the pointer to the book Howard - I'll return the favour and recommend an oldy but goody - The Psychology of Military Incompetence by Dixon - why people in war make dumb decisions... like marching your men into german machine guns after it didn't work the first 20 times...)

It struck me that (and I am guessing here) that most people who get really really passionate about a topic (eg: Iran/Iraq) tend to be those who were not directly involved in them. Those who were involved are more likely to write of their experiences and leave it as that, realising that the situation affected everyone differently, and that one may never know the real reasons behind the conflict. (I do note that this tends to be the opposite with returning veterans of the War on Terror campaigns, much like returning veterans of Vietnam - but this I put down to a "younger" veteran group who are comfortable with chat rooms, media and the net and voicing their opinions there, or perhaps it it the lack of support/anti war sentiment on the homefront which embitters them and makes then so eager to show that their actions were not in vain). We know in Australia that we have inherited much of the conflict from the Balkans - there are sizable Croatian, Serb and Bosnian communities here, as well as Macedonians and Greeks - however the conflict and violence are perpetuated by the children of those who were there - kids raised in Australia, with no real first hand knowledge of what it was like or why it occurred. They are a lot angrier and vocal than the parents, and quite willing to use violence to prove it - almost as if they seek to show how really "Cro/Serb/Macca/Wog" they are or are trying to make up for a certain displacement they feel. In many cases their parents are refugees who want nothing more to do with the conflict that saw them leave their homelands. And their children are the perfect "insert nationality here" - willing to do anything for their country except live in it.

As the child of EE immigrants to the US, I have a rather different take, best described by a Langston Hughes poem - written by a parental figure to a child: "Should I turn my ugly pictures to the wall?" Parents want to shield their children, but as the children grow, they want to explore behind the shield. Novickas (talk) 14:38, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

That also holds true in my experience - I'm fairly open on the causes and just putting out there what I see. /shrugAkitora (talk) 10:48, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

So if that makes sense and holds true on any level, how does it translate into Wikipedia? I think that until we can at all know the people behind the account names, we cannot hope to stop endless conflict/edit wars that occur. And not just in military conflict topics, but any - no doubt there are Mac/PC edit wars, fans of one protocol over another, music fan edit wars... While it is one thing to look at a single edit war and try and mediate it through politically correct non stigmatising language, or even chasing off an entire group of Estonian editors because it's better to be safer than sorry, it doesn't solve our problem.

I think we need to accept that a) conflict is inevitable, b) wikipedia editors could be anyone with any knowledge and there is no way to prove that someone isn't who or what they say they are and c) this whole debate that we are having here is vitally important and needs to be addressed - Wikipedia is getting larger and far more in the public eye - schools are using it as a source for student assignments. It's being quoted. It's being used by professionals as a source of information.

The ultimate goal of course is to create a system that leaves us with the just the facts, even if there is one set of facts for one side, and another set for the other, without the conflict that, as dab so rightly points out, hurts the overall function of W'pedia. As a couple of suggestions: a) Admins need to be tailored to topics - perhaps the jury idea works well, or better, with Admins. Perhaps each topic/project/area should have a panel of Admins so that power is devolved away from a single admin who could abuse his power subtly or worse, take an easy out, such as seems to be the case with the Estonian editors. b) Admins need to be screened to prove they have knowledge of the areas they are administrating - while a general admin could enforce and oversee general W'pedia policy, Admin panels could oversee key areas of conflict that they have expert knowledge on. This would mean that Admins would actually have to reveal their real life identities to a degree, if only to the Foundation/W'pedia powers-that-be, to validate who they are and their qualifications on a topic (an extension in a sense of putting a crypto hash on your talk page?). c)There needs to be a real and effective appeals system - perhaps a special type of Admin who acts as an Ombudsman? - a completely neutral appeals mechanism that all sides must accept the guidance of? d) Topics need to be locked more - when a topic reaches a point where it really is fact that can't be disputed (eg: Howards IT debates - at the end of the day - TCP/IP, being a protocol and international ISO standard, can be absolutely proven to have a certain number of layers, even if alternate models might have more or less.) There really isn't any need to edit the article's section any more at that point - it's as good as it gets. Articles such as Iran/Iraq could be handled the same way, and probably should be: the lead sections, overviews etc - stuff that is pure fact, regardless of POV ("Iran and Iraq had a war." "It lasted this long." "These people were key players on either side" etc etc.) should be locked from general editing, and any new proposed edits to those areas need to be passed by the Admin panel for the appropriate project/portal/core topic. If they pass, the Admins do the edit, not the editor (who would still however, get credit). Such topics of course have POV, and articles could simply have separate sections for those POV's. Utilising a cache/delay system, rather than the current instant edit format, could cut down on vandalism on POV areas and also foster more debate by those who hold the same POV as to what actually constitutes that POV... ok - I've rambled enough. I'll go do some real wiki work now ;) Sorry for the stream of consciousness writing - since becoming involved in this little chat I've come to see it as something that needs to be addressed by someone, anyone, before W'pedia becomes as important and potentially pervading throughout society and education... I'll shut up now...Akitora (talk) 11:24, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Good points, with the minor observation that most of TCP/IP is deliberately not an ISO standard -- the informal model of the Internet Engineering Task Force, as opposed to the formal one of the International Organization for Standardization that it implicitly criticizes, is "We don't believe in kings, presidents, or voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." The IETF model is much like the Wikipedia model, until you get to the last two words. With IETF specifications that are intended to be standards (as opposed to informational or experimental), there is a process by which there need to be an increasing number of computer implementations, by different developers using the same specification, that can be demonstrated to work with one another. Wikipedia lacks that final test. (If anyone is interested in the layering references, they are on my userpage).

It's an interesting point about (assumed) admins having specific knowledge, although, perhaps, we need a broader definition of "specific knowledge". For example, I have been doing some edits on a Balkans article, Operation Storm, and I freely admit I know very little about the participants and views. What I do know, however, is how to describe a battle and a broader military balance such that it makes sense. Increasingly, when I ask for a citation or clarification, I'm explaining why in comments -- although it may be better to put numbers, etc., on them and explain in the talk page. So, for want of a better term, you might need both experts on the region/dispute and experts on methodology (e.g., what is an order of battle and why would I want one?), the latter being a proposal I made today.

All right - let's take the Balkan War articles. Each, starting with the defining articles (Balkan War, Yugoslavian History, Balkan politics, biography's of key players etc) goes through an editorial process for want of a better word. So for example - the Balkan War main article/portal. The first process would be the definition and lead in, basic timeline, forces involved, politics and international impact etc. Thus the panel of the first round dealing with causes, events and outcomes would be made up of a strategist like yourself, converse in military matters, someone from Political Science, knowledgeable in international politics, government and the legal side of things, and a Historian, converse in History. The panel would not necessarily need knowledge of the conflict specifically - by reading the article and checking the articles sources using libraries and online sources and evaluating them against the fundamentals of their fields (what type of war is it defined as for instance - civil war? regional conflict? invasion?) The article might then pass through a secondary panel dealing with issues arising from the conflict such as Sociology (humanitarian issues, culture), Economics (international trade ramifications, economic effects etc) and Biographers. Panels might also draw on information from Geographers and Geologists for geo-strategic locations and resources. At that point, with just the facts in hand, as you suggest, we could lock the article and the POV free for all could being, core and key information being protected - people aren't debating over whether the even occurred, or if it exists - both sides should accept certain inviolable facts - in our article - the war happened, it involved these states and people, there were key battles here here and here, this is how the international community responded and so on. They are debating over who's fault it was, or who is right or wrong, a debate that cannot be truly resolved here on WP.Akitora (talk) 10:19, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know enough about Wikipedia politics to know how likely it is to get even an experimental areas with such rules and actual enforcement. Most, if not all of you, share some of my frustrations, and probably the occasional urge to find a more congenial venue for writing. I have some discussion going regarding one of the more technical articles on intelligence, and an editor commented that some of the content was more tutorial and I should consider Wikiversity. In the particular case (HUMINT), I believe some of the techniques have direct bearing on current events, such as addressing the question of whether there are ways of interrogation that do not require torture.

Or signposts to key indicators such as how seriously a country takes international law and conventions when it comes to their own national security. The fact that methods have been used shows that politically and militarily, the end justified the means at the time, it was probably not even considered on a policy level as it was a logical extension of current policy surrounding the WoT and that the fact that there is a measure of transparency now, forced on them or not, and the fact they are looking at alternate methods shows a distinct shift in Bush Administration policy regarding the international community and the opinions of their own population. (Just putting in out there. Gives you more ammo in your discussion :) ))Akitora (talk) 10:19, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

As far as Wikiversity, however, if I understand the model, I have zero interest in participating. Please correct me if I don't understand, but my impression is that Wikiversity is not as insistent on sourcing, so that a subject matter expert can write from direct knowledge. If the model were that the "expert" could lock the main article but have a free discussion on the talk page, that would be fine, but I am simply not willing to deal with anonymous changes to areas where I have expertise, but I have no idea of the background of the would-be editor. The latter is important in some areas, if the explanation of why I wrote something presupposes a certain level of knowledge. Apropos chauvinism -- are the same social mechanisms involved in Mac vs. Windows as Poland vs. Lithuania? While one involves massive human tragedy and the other does not, when the medium is anonymous, the discussions seem to get more heated.

(Has to sit and think for a second - which one was the massive human tragedy again?) Good point - a change to the anonymous IP policy would alter many discussions and problems I think. Easily enforced if we do a test run on any system we come up with here - any anon edits will be deleted - make an account.Akitora (talk) 10:19, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

The less-than-knowledgeable changes burned me out in the Computer Networking project, where, again and again, there were arguments with primary sources that were written as specifications. In my ideal model there, the "author" would be wise to edit in changes resulting from discussion, and the role of an admin might be to intervene when the author is getting, but ignoring, well-reasoned and sourced criticism.

So, does anyone have a sense if anything like this could be done as an experiment, or is it too much at odds with Wikipedia policy? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:18, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Going on a policy reading spree - let you know my thoughts.Akitora (talk) 10:19, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Enforcement again

I've noticed comments by two editors, one on a personal user page and the other in multiple posts to article talk pages, that, to varying extent, seem to be stating intention to ignore policies. While I'm usually extremely reluctant to censor, it strikes me that such statements are grounds for Admin warnings, and then potentially blocks.

In one case, the user page says "Wikipedia: God's gift to Serb ultranationalists in their mission to re-write history."

Is it just me, or is this a warning the editor is not going to follow WP:AGF toward editors? Should it be taken seriously only if it says "regardless of sourcing"?

In the other case, the editor explicitly says "Because you have known about this link and you have not reverted your earlier changes which are speaking about evacuation order my only conclusion is that you are bad faith editor. I will now delete all question for sources in places where we are having sources confirmed with NPOV internet links" To me, such a declaration calls for immediate admin action--but where are the boundaries? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:44, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

See: WP:UP#NOT and Wikipedia:USERPAGE#Removal_of_inappropriate_content.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 00:06, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Aki's Proposal

OK - it's rough and nasty - needs polishing. Feel free to give your input or thoughts please!! It's by no means complete or set in stone - I think groups like the much lauded Sri Lanka need to be looked at for ideas to integrate for a start. Here goes Akitora (talk) 13:09, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Proposal

I have given this discussion a lot of thought and come to the following conclusions.

While Wikipedia is a community, we don't give much thought to what that entails. What makes a community work? If you look at Wikipedia (and the WMF in a sense by extension) in another light, you can define it as a virtual state - it has leaders, policy/laws, financial system (free), police (admins) and at the heart of it - it has a) the respect and confidence of those who are a part of the community (the users) and it has a monopoly on legitimised violence (it controls the means of "internal violence" in that it controls the servers and thus permissions - it is the only entity which can block users/censor material/enforce policy etc etc because it controls and possesses our communities "land". They control the external use of violence through corporate means - ownership of Wikimedia, the foundation and it's interests etc etc - we are the shareholders in a sense as we own a stake just be being part of the whole thing.

That insight reveals that as in any state, the ideal means of working forwards in consensus is democratic politics. Not the committees and dictatorships so beloved of online communities usually. Most Wikizens just want to be left alone to do their thing, just like in RL. They are happy to have someone making the "big decisions". If someone higher and more "powerful" that Joe Wikizen decides that his Artic Monkeys article should be classified as "British Popular Music of the 00's" - so be it. It doesn't really worry Joe Wikizen usually if it's a rational decision that helps him.

However it's not all politics. As in any state, there is a legislature to be considered - a legal process of judges, juries, appeals and binding decisions by those we all respect and hold up to be impartial.

I believe a combination of both processes is the logical, indeed, the natural evolution, of the Wikipedia model of the open source encyclopaedic community it has created. The core rules of "Be Bold" and "break the rules" immediately highlight why a structured "legal" process is needed, especially in light of policies such as Assume Good Faith and the like. The constant issues of edit wars, talk page flame wars and POV issues also lend themselves to resolution through this process.

The general "political" system of admins and mentors, parent projects etc as outlined below in one move both outlaws travelling circus behaviour by making projects more insular and protected while encouraging collaboration and minimises issues by giving a voice to POV groups be they ethnic, religious, scientific, political or fan based, and a structured forum and way for them to voice these issues in a democratic decision making process and legislative process.

The general overall direction Wikipedia is heading appears from my reading to be roughly:

Wikipedia will be bought up to a stable version and released for distribution, presumably free to schools and learning institutions as well as retail versions. This release version will have a program within it's interface that will check for updated versions of articles on demand. As more and more articles reach 1.0 status, they will be included on future releases.

At the moment the Foundation is in a development phase for this project, as is evidenced by projects such as the Basic Topics Lists.

If we are to assume that these basic lists of core topics for Wikipedia are going to be a permanent feature of the encyclopedia, then in that alone we have a starting point for this proposed process.

While we already have a pseudo Document Object Model (DOM - a hierarchy of documents and objects within eg: sections and subsections) in place with the basic class system (stub through to FA), this could be easily expanded and thus properly documented in the light of the core topic concept. All articles related to other articles in some way - the Battle of the Bulge for instance, is a child of the Western Front, which is a child of World War II, which is a child of the "Long War" and so on and so forth up the line to the Core Topic of History.

It is fair to say that (it would be hoped) most day to day mainstream topics are being looked after in some way by an Wikipedia Project. It would, in a perfect world and within the scope of this proposal, be assumed that these independent projects are well run / administered and their workloads somewhat organised. (If this was not the case, then Project guidance/evaluation might be a notable side effect of making this work.)

So let us begin to outline the process. Throughout I will use a simplified example...

1. Each level of the Wikipedia process identifies its Core Topics. The Foundation defines Geography as a Core Topic of the encyclopaedia. Wikiproject: Geography enters at this point.

1. Wikiproject: Geography defines as one of its core topics Geography by region or location, then further defines that amongst these regions shall be Oceania. The regional topics are also defined as Core.

1. Wikiproject: Oceania also goes through and creates it's Core Topics - Australia is one of these.

1. Wikiproject: Australia starts to define the Core Topics of Australia, going through and finding, grouping and classifying articles.

Sounds pretty much like what is happening all ready right?

Core Topics above a certain level in the DOM should be locked from general editing - project admins only should edit here, and only after drafts are approved by the Project as a whole. These topics are considered basic central concepts - easily verifiable, not likely to change quickly or often, and are generally targets for vandalism. In my example, everything including Australia would be locked - in most cases these topics should be the centre points or parts of portal pages. I guess if Wikipedia deals in information, then these topics should be considered meta-information in a sense.

Below this level the real nitty gritty of Wikipedia takes place. Here are the Projects and Pages we recognise so well - the stubs, the occasional FA, the edit wars, the start class stuff.

Here the Project defines what is Core and what is not. Unlike the previous process, there exists both types of topic at this level, not just core topics. And unlike the core topics of the previous process, they, and non-core topics, may or may not be locked for admin edit only as need dictates.

Here also, is where the Project comes into it's own. The key to this is organisation. At least three Project Admins (always an odd number more than 1 and no more than 7?) (as opposed to WP Admins, although it would be nice if Project Admins were proper admins) will be nominated by the body of each project to take that position. These admins will be possessed of the following qualities - a) knowledge of the topic area, b) a wikipedia account in good standing for at least x amount of time and with enough editing experience on WP and in the project to be considered for the post, c) qualities that Project members respect - neutrality, mediation skill etc and d) a willingness to go public - using their real identity with a crypto hash as well as openness and transparency about their POV on any topic they have to mediate or judge on before they act on that topic. Other editors may be designated Secondary Admins - these people would be well respected as leading people within the Project. They may have limited admin power over certain aspects of the project, or be designated a full admin in special cases such as acting as proxy during an Admin case.

Project Admins are prohibited from creating new articles, although they can all for an identified topic to be made into an article. This is simply to separate Admin from Edit, much as in journalism, journalists write and editors edit. Admins are concerned with overseeing the growth and well being of their areas, recruiting new editors to the project, writing to external sources on behalf of the project, and liaising with other Projects as well as with academics/experts. In a project with many admins, one might be designated the public relations officer of the project.

One can immediately imagine that in many "hot" topic areas this will result in "party" politics from POV groups. This is to be encouraged as a part of the democratic process. However it should be noted that in a topic area designated as sensitive by the parent project, there must be equality in the number of admins from a single POV group (unless independent?).

The project may also be adopted by one or more Mentors - industry professionals, graduating and post graduate university students, academics, former members (eg: veterans) or groups - academic, public or private sector. The role of a person agreeing to Mentor a project can be to aid, review, educate or act as a source of inspiration and knowledge to those who work on articles within their sphere of interest. Mentor's may act as a reference source, granting access to their own libraries. The list of assistance a Mentor can give a Project is endless. Within a project, mentors from a variety of POV's or experience/skill areas are encouraged where possible.

Once an article, particularly core topics, has been assessed as Stable 1.0 by the Project members, Project Admins, Mentors and Parent Project, it may be locked to admin editing with draft process only. An article in this state is deemed finished - all possible information is included and it cannot as of this time be made better, only updated as new information comes to light. It is complete.

Akitora (talk) 13:09, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think we are ready for locking down core topics; only a tiny fraction are up to high standards. Your proposal may be useful - but in a few years. With all due respect, I suggest shelving it till a time majority if not all of the Core topics are of a FA standard.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

You're absolutely right - we aren't ready for it. However I'm thinking well ahead, as noted from my opening comments about the if side of things - where I think Wikipedia is heading and wrote the proposal with that in mind - the WMF itself will push for all Core topics to reach FA as an obligation to their venture capital partners who would of invested based on the business model they have put forward along those lines - the question is how we, the editors, can help in that regard by putting up a "factory floor" proposal so to speak. (And don't give me due respect - I've only just become part of the community lol - not a lot to be given at this point) Akitora (talk) 11:22, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks, and comments, especially projects

Given the significance of this proposal, I thought it was appropriate to bring it up to a higher outline level. In fact, could the meta-discussion of this proposal be used as a test case? Without the need to bring in privileged Administrators and the like, could we mirror the process being proposed: project aspects, agreement on scope, the means of discussion, the role of infoboxes, perhaps explore the role of both Project/subproject and Article discussion pages ?

[edit] Metadiscussion and projects

Should articles, under their system, have a primary project and the others be "supporting"? If not, see first heading below. If yes, see second.

[edit] Multiple projects "govern"

Interestingly, I was looking at one article that has given problems Iran-Iraq War, and was asking myself if I should comment on, or even revert, one topic (infobox-related) that has been a problem that never seems to resolve. Another point has to do with the role of discussion pages, and perhaps a different way to look at WP:OWN.

Iran-Iraq is under four projects: Iran, Iraq, Arab World, and United States. Rather to my surprise, it is not under Military History, although that project is responsible for the infobox that has been the center of much of the more micro-storms. Military History, incidentally, has a current discussion on infoboxes, and is both looking at precisely defining some of the enteries in a conflict infobox, but also offering the strong guidance that it is impossible to resolve complex issues in an infobox. Second World War uses a method of not loading the box with flags and countries, but simply putting in Wikilinks to full articles on the topic (e.g., belligerents on one side or the other).

So, four projects own, and at least one other project has expertise. What is the proper relationship among these projects? Should MILHIST be added because it has responsibility for one controversial area, the inbox, and also has a good deal of "functional" rather than "geographic" expertise?Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:13, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] agreement on scope

If this were a new article, would the first step be for some group to establish an outline, perhaps of two levels? Should it attempt a relatively short essay about the purpose of the article(s)?

For complex topics apt to grow, should sub-articles be identified at the beginning? This works well in Central Intelligence Agency, which had sub-articles early in its history, but for what I consider the wrong reasons. The subarticles at the beginning were not part of any thought-out structure, but variously reflected POVs of conspiracy theory, or some topics, relatively small in the grand scheme, that were of interest or subjects of anger by their creator.

It was easier to come up with a coherent first-pass substructure here, as there were natural breakdowns of geography and transnational functionality in the basic CIA organization, and some other topics were fairly obviously taking up too much space in the main article but addressed a reasonably discrete topic. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:13, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] the means of discussion

I can read several things into this proposal. One is a radical proposal, with which I don't necessarily disagree, of having admins in control of what goes into the main-hierarchy articles. New articles and major text presumably would have to be in some flavor of sandbox.

Another aspect is that the "court" decides only on scope, which could include authority over WP:WEIGHT, WP:UNDUE, and similar points.

Question: would the court delete material that has been tagged (e.g., for citation), the tag point at least raised on an appropriate talk page, but there still is no response to the tagged point?

Are some of the Sri Lanka rules relevant here, such as 1RR, or mechanisms such as reliable source tables? Does this work there only because there is a culture of cooperation, and almost any mechanism would work? It's worth noting that they call the project Sri Lanka Reconciliation, not Sri Lanka Civil War; there's a message there for articles, etc., where there is little or no sense, IMHO, of an attempt to reconcile.Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it would be worth laying out the Sri Lankan rules here so that we can all be familiar with them within the scope of discussion - they do get raised a lot Akitora (talk) 11:24, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] the role of infoboxes

There are many kinds of infobox, and some seem fairly controversy-free. Presumably by the very nature of war, conflict infoboxes have been a special problem, and the presumed experts that created it are rather appalled at the fights over it in specific places.

My own reaction is that an infobox should summarize text, and thus should be created only if there is substantial text in place. I'd like to see infoboxes under admin control, if this is a reasonable technical change.

Support - as per my comments above and below Akitora (talk) 11:15, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] the role of both Project/subproject and Article discussion pages

There are bound to be metadiscussions of both multiple page issues, as well as issues that are discussed on article pages. I really, really respect WP:OWN, and the GFDL. Nevertheless, I again had material from an ongoing talk page discussion arbitrarily moved from the talk page to the main article, because he unilaterally concluded that there had been no discussion in a couple of weeks, and he made the move.

I believe this to be wrong, as I believe there should be a level of legitimate ownership over talk page discussion content. It is a guideline, if not policy, that talk page content is deleted only for strong reasons. If editor(s) chose to start content on a talk page because they variously don't think the material is ready for full test, or, which was the case here, the material stayed on a talk page because I felt the political climate of the main page wasn't ready for it. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Brief sketch of proposed solutions

Below, I'd like to very briefly sketch some of the proposed, actionable (more or less) solutions I recall from our discussions. Please add more, suggest alternative wording, elaborate, indicate if you think it's a good or bad idea (with a support or oppose). Of course, feel free to comment, too! Please try to keep the descriptions simple, this is not a place to propose new ideas but to summarize things discussed above (I suggest we keep this section at the bottom of this page and start new discussions above).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 00:39, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A list of pages affected by warring

1) Create and maintain a list of pages affected by warring. This list could be useful for other purposes (assign specialized mediators to them, identify editors involved in those conflicts, etc.). Related to proposals: 1) 7)

Support with caveat (no profiling - see proposal 6) Akitora (talk) 10:22, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Support, but concerned that some of this will be perceived as profiling. A quick observation there -- it's a pretty basic assumption, in cultural anthropology, that cultures tend to be either "guilt" or "shame". In the former, there is conditioning that taking responsibility for an error does not necessarily cause a loss of status; learning from experience is often commended. In shame cultures, however, peer perception is far more important than self-evaluation. It can be a very delicate proposition to convey criticism, to a member of a shame culture, in a way that does not cause them to lose face. Coupled with the delicacy of criticism is often a pattern of immediately counterattacking and shifting blame, often before anyone else has even suggested a problem. Obviously, I'm simplifying the social science, but there are conflicts where one or both sides have a significant number of people from shame cultures, where it will be most difficult to use consensus. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 17:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Define key concepts

2) So far several key concepts have been discussed; they should be defined somewhere. They include: "traveling circus" (#"Travelling circuses"), "chauvinism" (#What about ideologues?), "POV pusher" (#Motive: show that they are evil) and...? Related to proposals: 6) 7)

Support Akitora (talk) 10:27, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Give admins more power

3) A vague solution along those lines have been suggested by several editors. Related to proposals: 4)

Not being an admin, I don't know the exact capabilities, but I have the impression it's less a problem of having the power than not using it, or possibly not having enough admins. There's merit to having admins with subject matter expertise, or expertise in a relevant methodology, but I see too many situations where very basic rules of civility, good faith, and inflammatory language about the topic are blatantly violated on article talk pages.

• Are proposals 3 and 4 mutually exclusive?

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:00, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Support (and agree with Howard - I think they are) Akitora (talk) 10:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe we need to split the adminship into two categories. We need "janitor" admins to close AfDs and delete stuff. We need "judge" admins to deal with policy infractions. Those are very different skillsets. A mentality seems to have crept in where admins aren't supposed to deal with policy violations, unless they are screamingly obvious like 3RR violations or severe personal attacks. People who consistently misrepresent the sources they cite, or consistently display other strong signs of intellectual dishonesty, or consistently fight against NPOV, need to be cracked down on. <eleland/talkedits> 09:25, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

1.  :: I think catergorised admins are certainly a step that needs to be taken... Akitora (talk) 11:13, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Enforce poorly enforced policies better

4) Again, several editors seemed to have noted that policies like CIV/AGF/NPA/SOAPBOX and related are relatively poorly enforced. A way should be found to enforce them better (by identifying and banning editors who break them more efficiently, as is done with 3RR violations?) Related to proposals: 3)

1. Support obviously - should always be done as a matter of course - if it had been done already would we be having many of the issues we have now? Akitora (talk) 11:12, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Create a noticeboard dedicated to issues of ethnic/cultural wars

5) Noticeboards seem useful. Perhaps one can be of use here, for users to report issues and ask for help? Related to proposals: 1)

agree with caveat at least some noticeboards (e.g., reliable sources) are not archived frequently and essentially become unusable. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:00, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment: Bot-automatic archival is simple to set up (ex. I use it on my talk page).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:47, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Support (obviously we'd need to archive them yeah?) Akitora (talk) 10:30, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I would support the creation of such a "Battleground Noticeboard." <eleland/talkedits> 09:11, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

• Support Too right. --Folantin (talk) 09:21, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Define and identify problematic editor

6) It has been suggested that some editors contribute to the ethnic/cultural wars much more then others; and for some a primary activity is that of a "fighter". Related to proposals: 1), 2), 7)

Disagree - While I can see the obvious advantages in doing this, something tells me this is a bad idea - opens up questions of privacy/stalking, fascist police state tactics (come on - you know someone is going to level that one) "keeping lists", profiling - I think it's just to sticky an area to try and do. Most of the other proposals in concert should discourage problem editors from being a problem, regardless of who they are. Akitora (talk) 10:35, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I see your points, but we need some way to deal with editors who for example come and vote in content areas they have never edited just because some of their (ethnic) wikiopponents vote on the other side. This is a clear sign of a disruptive editor.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:47, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree - we do need some way to deal with those sorts of editors, and a direct and no-nonsense one. Certainly we should define and identify what IS a problematic editor, but... I guess actually, now I think of this as I write this, a combination of anti-problematic editor policy AND non-anonymous editing would both define and identify problem editors in one go... Akitora (talk) 11:10, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Have dedicated mediators and a set of guidelines for them

7) Based on past experiences, there seem to be mediation tactics that have either proven useful (work on a sandbox, make sure the parties agrees on definitions). That advice may or may not be generalized to other issues. It has also been pointed out that mediators may be more useful if they have some knowledge about the content area (so they could spot fringe ideas and such). Due to a lack of experts, perhaps some sort of FAQ about frequent issues that flare up, and frequent fringe theories/characterisitcs of a POV (as well as known members of a traveling circuses and such) could be created. Related to proposals: 1), 2), 6) 7)

I'm not sure if this is a guideline, but I'd strongly suggest pointing to projects/pages that are self regulating. All honor to the Sri Lanka people, but can they be unique on Wikipedia? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 04:00, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Even if they are, no reason not to hold them up as a "best practice" Project Group Akitora (talk) 10:17, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Support non-anonymous editors

8) Editors who are not anonymous are both less likely to break our relatively sensible policies and are more vulnerable to harassment. They should be protected from harassment and such more efficiently, just as we enforce WP:LIVING (do editors have fewer rights article's subjects?); there should be a way to verify their claims (to prevent an Essjay incident reoccurence); and there should be a protection level for an article that would allow it to be edited only by non-anonymous editors.

• Support by proposer: --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:45, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
• Support (Essjay incident?)Akitora (talk) 10:00, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

• Linked.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:45, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

• Support. Other than in role-playing games, I can't think of a time I've stayed anonymous or with an unverifiable pseudonym. Without going into a great deal of technology, I would point out that there are ways to have trusted individuals confirm identity, without the individual's identity being widely disclosed. By no means is this a solved technical problem, but, if you'd like to get a sense of one approach, see Pretty Good Privacy#web of trust. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:51, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

• Hmmm, consider however that a big advantage of public name is the requirement to behave better, as one would not want to have his/her real name associated with flaming/harassing/etc. (presumably). Having a way for somebody (foundation?) to verify your real life credentials and allow you to be anonymous to most users may be slightly useful, but the point of my proposal is to encourage full non-anonymity, as I believe it would lead to vast improvement in some conflict areas. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:52, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

• I have to respectfully disagree that "full non-anonymity" would necessarily contribute to more responsible editing, taken in the aggregate. While using one's real name would undoubtedly make each individual editor doing so more accountable, the net effect would probably be to discourage the number of people willing to make contributions to Wikipedia, particularly to controversial articles. Harrassment is not only an online phenomenon. Just to use Howard for example's sake, since he is the only editor participating in this discussion who uses his real name, he has apparently made an informed decision that doing so in no way jeopardizes his status with employers (current and future), friends, family, people he runs into in the grocery store, etc. Although my background and circumstances are very different from his, I have made less substantial edits to some of the same articles that he has, which is how he originally came to my attention. While I admire his work tremendously, I couldn't have made the edits that I have made using my real name, owing to the fairly normal human fear of possibly getting a strange look from someone I encounter in the grocery store who has Googled me and found my Wikipedia user page. If I were editing articles dealing with fierce ethnic rivalries and ardent nationalism, I would be even more circumspect. Does that make sense? Plausible to deny (talk) 00:45, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Truly, I do sympathize. Verified pseudonyms may be the compromise position, but, having worked with the Internet long before it was the Internet, I have seen the tragedy of the commons effect of anonymity, even more so by IP address than unverified account name. USENET and its predecessors largely became useless after AOL made anonymous access easy. Of course there's a concern about privacy and harassment, but there is also a "broken window" aspect in that there is very little way to enforce sanctions against fully anonymous editors. Direct democracy works only up to a given size of deliberative body, and then procedure, and eventually representative rather than direct democracy becomes the only way to avoid a tragedy of the commons -- a few determined people, with grudges, shutting down general participation.

Everyone makes different decisions in life, which seemed right at the time. There are certainly things I'd do differently had I to do them again, but one that I would not change, which helped in dealing with the national security system, is to be open enough that no one can blackmail me. In like manner, I don't regret that some American Nazi Party members were not banned, as I was able to confront them directly and establish what fools they were. Now, I was born in Newark, New Jersey, about which Nietzsche may have written "that which does not destroy me makes me the stranger." Strange looks don't bother me. In the specific context, however, I see Wikipedia eventually collapsing under the extremists unless some form of personal accountability develops. If I leave it, which I have considered, it would only be to a venue that does not allow anonymous editing. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:04, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Good points. Guys from Jersey are tough. It would be Wikipedia's loss, but there's plenty of work to be done elsewhere: [6] Plausible to deny (talk) 01:50, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

• Support. I have been writing publicly online going back to the pre-Internet days of dial-up BBSes in the mid-1980s, and until I began editing Wikipedia, I always used my real name, or in the case of a defunct Yahoo! Finance message board that I used to participate in, what I would refer to as a transparently-obvious pseudonym. Despite my historical inclination toward the use of real names, I have come to appreciate the value of pseudonyms, and think Howard's proposal of verified identities that are not widely disclosed has merit. A quick glance at the list of articles he has made prolific, expert contributions to shows that he is a person of extraordinary background and personal circumstance in order to be able to do that kind of work publicly under his real name. I wouldn't have the nerve. Plausible to deny (talk) 17:12, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

• Actually there are two of us using our real names - Chris "Akitora" Beer is mine - the Akitora was effectively via deedpoll under Australian law (been using it for close on 10 years - long story, but not now). Chris Beer is my birth name (cept I'm adopted to boot and I recently found out I have a completely different real name (that I keep as a spare clean ID - who knows, might need it) and 99% a business name - in fact the only place it gets used is in my business - to all others who know me, I'm Aki, or Akitora. I'm even only the electoral rolls as Akitora Beer... That being said - I'm with Piotr on this one - full, non-anonymous editing is the way to go. At the least as I've said, admins and Wikistaff (per Essjay now I've read it) should be public. I'm with Howard in having realised that complete transparency in my life is the only way to go, both for my work in the past and now. And that said, I'm sure I've got a lot more to hide than Howard, but if I ever want to work in the intelligence community as I hope to one day when I get ahead enough to get to University, then I have no other option. And at the end of the day, who really cares who I am. If someone wants to come after me, god, let them. Guess it's better than them having no life at all. Now - on that note - we don't actually know that Howard C Berkowitz IS actually Howard C Berkowitz (I'm sure you are buddy :) ). Extreme case to be sure, but he might be someone stalking and pretending to be him, building up a credible and good reputation before somehow destroying it and wikipedia when he gets to a position of trust. He might say he's not planning that, but how would you know? Something to remember here is that even if USI or another verifiable pseudonym system is put in place across the board, even if it was as extreme as CC verification or photo ID scans emailed to the Foundation, it will only ever stop the honest people from abusing it. Like security on a house, it only stops honest thieves as they say... Akitora (talk) 10:39, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Just discovered there is a verifiable pseudonym capability

I need to read this in great detail, but see Template:User committed identity. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

This is designed to allow reclaiming of hijacked accounts. I don't see how this could be useful for dealing with ethnic/cultural wars... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

A verifiable pseudonym is not as good as a real name, but still is easier to track and become associated with a reputation for objectivity. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:36, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

It could be useful in dealing with ethnic/cultural wars simply by cutting down on both sockpuppetry and travelling circus's couldn't it? Well - it could help. Ethnic and cultural wars (discussions to make things clear) are fine IMHO - IF we know through USI, that we are dealing with real people (not sockpuppets) who "wear their hearts on their sleeves" so to speak about their POV's, then we are more likely to see their "warfare" as legitimate discussion, albeit from a single POV, than just targeted ethnic/cultural attacks on users that go against the spirit of Wikipedia, committed by people who use sockpuppets and who are happy to hide behind a psuedonym or worse, an IP address.Akitora (talk) 10:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Perhaps some writing/editing proposals

That the Sri Lanka project has created a table of sources that tend to be NPOV for one side and propaganda for the other, NPOV for both, or POV for both, may be a starting point in articles that are having source problems. The discussion of such a process may need strong moderation from an admin in the beginning, removing rants and even temporarily blocking people that don't seem to understand the process. Such a process might need one or more uninvolved editors to try to paraphrase, in less inflammatory language, something that comes across as attacking but actually does have content.

Support with addendum - Good idea, but I'd improve on it - not only should it be a table of sources in use, however it could be expanded to include sources that are found/read by editors which haven't been used in articles yet, or even better, also let editors submit sources for review for articles they are in the process of writing.Akitora (talk) 10:10, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Calling an academic...

On the Operation Storm talk page this morning, I responded to one editor that seems to believe there never will be consensus, but, especially given some earlier statements, may be making one last good-faith try to see if it is possible to identify sources in the above manner.

It occurred to me that an "outside the box" solution might be to recruit one or more academics, journalists, or other people that would be affiliated with a fact-checking organization. We have a Wikipedia policy of no individual OR, but does that rule out, if the resources can be found, having an external organization, with a review mechanism, take on a research task that they publish? This is quite ambitious, I realize, but some of the more intense error wars demonstrate that we may not, as yet, have the right tools or policies. Everything mentioned as a suggestion in the preceding list, functioning mostly within existing Wikipolicy, are appropriate, but I'm going to make some additional statements.

This sounds similar to my proposal above empowering having non-anonymous editors. Of course, we would have to protect them: I know several academics who left Wikipedia after they have been attacked (one accused of academic dishonesty, other of spamming). They all told me that they cannot afford - and don't want to - work in an environment which allows such attacks to go unpunished.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:11, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Similar and different, as in #Getting useful information from a POV source. In the proposal below, I suggest that it might be possible to have a special case of OR in Wikipedia: fast-turnaround work, by non-anonymous people, affiliated with an institution or organization, that does do original analysis to try to break deadlocks. Think, perhaps, of the Reference Desk on steroids. In one consulting task I had, there had been an assumption that a particular source had a strong anti-American POV. So, I constructed a scale of "strongly anti-American" to "strongly pro-American", and had readers rate the same 183 news article on this scale. Rather to everyone's surprise, the statistical distribution of the news reports fell into a "bell curve" (Gaussian, normal): its mean was slightly left into "mildly anti-American", but the assumed bias simply was not there when their entire output was considered. We formed the hypothesis that specific articles (e.g., a speech by bin Laden) were the ones that were remembered, and the more neutral ones forgotten.

I agree completely with less the "cannot afford" than the "don't want to" work in an area where I have verifiable credentials, yet had to argue the same technical points every few weeks. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:24, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

I completely Support the idea of experts/academics being involved with Wikipedia. During the course of this debate I had the good fortune of receiving an email reply from one Prof. Charles Keally, an academic in the field of Japanese pre history and early Japanese history. He has been quite outspoken in his criticisms of Wikipedia, in particular those topics he is conversant in. I took this as a challenge, being the creator of a new Japanese history portal. I emailed him and asked him to step up and write an article or two, as an expert. We got to talking and the reverse has in fact happened - he has convinced me to use his personal website, articles etc to my hearts content to write the articles in question, at which point he will give me his opinion and the like - in effect peer reviewing me, editing me and admining me all in one go. Prehaps this approach could work? Editors like us writing and having the academics review articles and offer their aid and guidance in a mentor sense, without the hassles of their identity being widely available and keeping them out of the wikipedia specific stuff like edit wars and slanging matches.Akitora (talk) 09:16, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Especially when it's an industry expert rather than a formal academic, I wonder how this could work? I gave up on the Computer Networking Project when I cited the exact language of formal specifications (e.g., the IETF defined 4, not 7, layers in RFC1172, and considers strict layering harmful. See User:Hcberkowitz#The Truth about Network Reference Models). People objected because their textbooks or professor had said something different, but I was citing the formal and recognized definition--and yes, I was also involved with the OSI model. When I cited the definition of an "internet core router" from RFC4098, of which I'm the lead author, a definition my colleagues and I put in precisely because the definition was ambiguous elsewhere, again, editors argued against something reviewed and approved by the IETF Benchmarking Working Group, the Internet Engineering Steering Group, and the RFC Editor.

In other words, getting expert advisors is conceptually a great idea. Anonymous expert review is common for peer-reviewed publication, but there is an editor/publisher trusted to make sure that process is fair. I don't know how this could work as long as the experts are non-anonymous but the "editors" can be anonymous. USENET, once it opened up generally in about 1987, started having this trouble, the classic example being an anonymous poster telling Dennis Ritchie that he didn't understand C (programming language).

lol - Never heard that one in my IT years. Throwing an idea on this in as a new section mate. I'll post it once it write it. And I reckon you'll always get a tosser who thinks he knows more than the man who invented it. Me and my mates joke that it's lucky Einstein wasn't an Aussie who ran down the pub upon coming up with the Theory of Relativity. "Guys guys! I have developed zis zing saz explains vy a fly's patooshi doesn't go through it's head when it is in ze car you are driving!" "No shit sherlock - figure that out all by yourself did you? Jesus Albert... come on mate. Where have you been! Macca thought of that last week. Aw - don't be like that - sit down n' have a beer. It's not like your a genius or anything." Akitora (talk) 10:49, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Ve ex-spurts in networking know about Aussies. When we were being cruel, we would not warn a British colleague, off to give a seminar about Internet routing in Australia, that the device that performs routing should be pronounced "row-ter", not "root-er". Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 10:56, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I applaud any way this could be made to work. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 10:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

This is a useful idea. For severe cases academics should be formally hired by WMF and paid appropriately (just a pity WMF has no money to do this). It would solve a lot of problems. Moreschi2 (talk) 15:10, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

COnsider that academics do much stuff for free (peer review articles, sit on journal boards, write papers). What we really need is to engineer a paradigm shift, and make academics want to contribute to our project for free. This involves however not only raising how they perceive the project (which I think may be improving), but how they are treated in it - few academics will want to linger around if they are subject to flaming and such. They may be willing to discuss content and educate others - but will not be willing to engage in more or less visible name calling, I am afraid.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:43, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Getting useful information from a POV source

Again, let me preface this suggestion with the knowledge that it's not going to be viable if the best-intentioned editor does it by himself/herself. It may, however, be useful if someone that can write, get peer reviews, and web-publish properly, could start a "feeder" effort.

There may be some less ambitious but still useful source, that have a POV on some things and not others. For example, thinking about some completely different pages, there are some sources that are total propaganda as far as anything they say about the "rebel" side in an (ongoing) civil war, but are quite valid when identifying who, at the moment, is the official government spokesmen; who commands various units; what deals the government has made with other countries. There are other sources that will only have propaganda about the "government" side, but are accurate about a specific local situation about the rebel policies and personnel.

Now, in what I'm going to describe, I recognize it would be OR if it ware done only for Wikipedia, and that it is less plausible for a specific event in history, such as Operation Storm, than a continuing process. I'm describing an academic and research technique called content analysis. There's a reasonable set of links on it, although my 1967 textbook, North's Content analysis, is probably quite obsolete -- very few computers available tat the time.

Long ago (during the Vietnam War), I had a job in which I surveyed, each month, Nhan Dan, the North Vietnamese party journal. Looking at any one issue, it would seem to be all propaganda. When we started comparing such things as the number of mentions of an official and how it changed from month to month, it started showing a pattern of the status of that official. Sometimes, and I recognize this would be OR if someone simply started doing such things in Wikipedia only, there is still material to be gained from a biased source. In other words, I was doing content analysis, in an academic research lab contracted to the U.S. Army.

There are many variations. That which I described deals with comparisons of a sequence of written articles. Another technique, which I once used to be surprised that an apparently biased news broadcast actually had a normal statistical distribution around a slightly POV mean, is doing quick ratings of lots of short pieces, as typical of news media. There are techniques for checking if externally known facts are described accurately in a given source, and, if they are not, is there a predictable variation?

Anybody out there in an appropriate institution? I know little of the Foundation; can they respond to specific proposals in any reasonable time?

Any analytic technique, analytic or intelligence, can fail. As some of you know, when the Soviet Union still existed, the relative power of the senior leadership could be derived from where they stood watching the May Day parade. The closer to the General Secretary, the more powerful, but you'd also see younger members clustered around their patron, and there could be some left-vs.-right information on status.

After one May Day, the U.S. intelligence community went somewhat crazy for several weeks, because it seemed as if all the relationships had changed. Finally, one analyst looked at the photograph under magnification, and noticed that Khruschev had a birthmark (IIRC) known to be on one side of his face, but the photograph showed it on the other. The negative had been printed backwards. As soon as a mirror image was made, the main pattern of power straightened out. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:40, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Support;) I think someone just volunteered to write the "Wikiguide: Getting useful information from a POV source"... Gee you're a stand up bloke for volunteering like that Howard :)

 ;) I could write a guide, but who could use it without doing WP:OR, unless some mechanism is created for doing such analysis in support of articles? At this point, it would appear useful only if material brought up in an editing discussion triggers research that is then published in some reputable source, a process that can take months or years.

While I believe there should be such a mechanism, the best that can happen, under present guidelines, is that consensus discussion might lead to a table of agreed NPOV sources, sources that are POV for one side and NPOV for another, or completely NPOV.

As one example that works in a consensus-based organization, although it still can take months, sometimes with in-process discussion, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body that creates technical specifications for the Internet, sometimes creates a "design team" of recognized experts covering a range of positions, if the matter is so complex that the regular mailing lists cannot even define the scope of the problem. It's a rare but effective technique. The last one I observed was for Multiprotocol Label Switching, if anyone cares. RFC4098, the last document I coauthored, spent over a year in review cycles, admittedly simply getting misfiled once and assigned to a former coauthor as independent reviewer on another occasion. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 10:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Well the Open Source community is a classic example of how consensus-based development of both software as well as RFC's, white papers and documentation can work... That said - write it anyway - it's not an article, it's a guide, something that helps all community members - there has to be somewhere on Commons to post it, even it it's just links to one of your own talk pages where it's hosted. It would also serve as a basis for some parts of any proposal we end up putting together and throwing up the pipe? Akitora (talk) 10:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Serious example of an essay

Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Essays/Declassified documents I did for the Military History Project, with additional information from people who knew the systems of other countries. It applies somewhat for this discussion, in identifying places to find official documents. If it's about conflicts and wars, MILHIST is one place a new essay could go.

Is this the sort of essay you have in mind? I'm confused on how we might make use of something that really sounds like an excellent idea, but is quite different from Wikipedia policy. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 11:01, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

For protection reasons you should have a control version in your Userspace :) Exactly that sort of thing in terms of layout etc - disclaimer at top, assumes some prior knowledge but nothing an experienced user (ie: an active MilHist member) can't get their head around. What I had in mind was a how to - it shouldn't be a problem really - Wikipedia has a policy called POV/NPOV - you are simply taking that policy and showing people how it can and should be applied in a best practice sense etc etc. Give examples, screen shots if needed, that sort of thing. A User Guide to writing a good NPOV article or just getting meaning content from a POV article I guess I mean. And remember rule no 1: Break the rules. In another sense: There is no policy I know of that says you can't contribute to the community by writing how to guides for WP that help new and experienced users. :) Akitora (talk) 09:59, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, OK. Here's a first draft. User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-FactsFromPOV

OK - I'll play the editor to you the writer. I know you'll take it in your stride :) Excellent essay. Well written for a draft, researched and you have used your own experiences to highlight an otherwise dry topic. Flowed well with logical start, middle, conclusion. That's the good bit.

Remember that it is a) a how to guide which simplifies policy and shows examples on writing a good article using POV sources and b) remember your target audience. Assume no prior knowledge. Assume that at a minimum your audience will be a eager 15 - 16 year old, of average intelligence, average education and with, as newspapers are generally written for, a vocabulary of an 8 year old. Options? Rewrite and I'll comment again or we can collaborate - I, the self taught relatively new Wikipedia editor paraphrasing the elder statesman and professional ;) Akitora (talk) 12:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Time for my mantra

Each of the engineering books I've written has the same question as the title for its first chapter. Since I often ask that same question in meat and virtual design discussion, computer networking people often call it my mantra. Before going further with the essay, it's relevant to ask here.

“

What problem are you trying to solve?

”

I'd welcome opinions about the problems that this essay may help solve. Part of my hesitation comes from very recent POV edit battles.

The Sri Lanka folk appear genuinely interested in getting at truth, understanding there will be multiple POVs but to try to come up with a framework that tries to extract the whole. While they have a great many techniques, such as POV source evaluation, that mindset seems to be the key. In contrast, I do not believe there is any consensus to reconcile POVs at Iran-Iraq War. After some text editing to point to detailed analysis of the role of multiple countries in supplying Iraq, I removed the iconic picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand.

Now, that picture might be reasonable in the US support to Iraq article. As long as it is there by itself, and commended as "iconic" by several editors, whom I believe have a POV that the U.S. is the chief villain, IMHO it violates WP:UNDUE. I say WP:UNDUE because the Soviet Union and France provided the great bulk of weaponry to Iraq, much more lethal than a handshake. My iconic image of that war is of the shattered bodies of Iranian teenagers who died clearing minefields -- made up of Italian-designed mines, first built in Italy and then under license in Singapore, with Swiss and Swedish explosives.

The group of editors suggests I add more pictures to the main article, but that has several problems. If I added a picture of those Iranian dead, it would be invoking emotion rather than facts. I could put in pictures of actual Soviet tanks and French aircraft, but they don't have the possibly misleading visual appeal of a handshake.

Also, the entire point of having country-specific articles was to move the details of foreign involvement to articles where its compexity could be explored in depth, and allow, as silly as it may seem, the main article to focus on the interaction between Iran and Iraq, something apparently not of much interest to some editors as long as they can point fingers elsewhere.

[edit] So what's the answer for the essay?

How does one evoke the mindset to recognize there will be multiple POVs and no monopoly on absolute truth? I'm perfectly willing to work on the essay and have no problem with being edited, but I have to ask myself: if this essay were absolutely perfect, how would it help an article with a vocal group of POV editors? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

That's a really really good question. And one that I think holds with anything that gets done on Wikipedia - What problem are you trying to solve is easily turned into What is this article about? Is this a good article? Is this a NPOV article? And so on...

Perhaps the answer lies is discarding the assumption that we need to evoke a mindset and working on the assumption that everyone has their own POV on any given topic, ranging from extreme to neutral to extreme again. So this leads to three results: a) everyone who edits an article does so with some measure of preconceived POV. b) Everyone who reads an article does so with a level of preconceived POV. and c) everyone is assuming already that to some degree, that wikipedia articles are not POV by default because everyone subconciously knows that there are different POVs and accepts that field of play, like the opposing POV or not. One way to think about it would be to use your own information rating matrix - POV rating of the article + POV rating for the topic of the reader, leading to a myriad of different interpretations and opinions of articles and topics. If we work with those assumptions, the essay title becomes more along the lines of "So you're a new (or veteran) editor and you want to get a POV on a topic out there in the appropriate article? Don't really understand what they are saying at WP:NPOV? Or perhaps you are writing an article and can only find POV sources and references. This is how you write a good article or section using your own limited POV information". The answer you ask for is therefore "In a multiple POV environment, following an easy to understand set of guidelines (with examples) when writing will ultimately get multiple POV articles written cleaner and with less debate by creating a loose standard that everyone can work to." I think that's the answer. I'm pretty sure. I'd class it as a B2 answer. :)Akitora (talk) 23:57, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Mu. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 00:44, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Mu? Akitora (talk) 02:01, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Mu (negative). Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 02:11, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

((Quick search)) Ah. Mu. Simpler answer at the risk of more mu. It may not help an article with a vocal group of POV editors, but it might help future articles and vocal groups of POV editors to come? I think invariably the initial scope has changed - it feels like we have come back to searching for a good collaborative way for multiPOV/controversial articles to be written, albeit from a guideline/educational POV?Akitora (talk) 03:18, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Alternatively, moooooo, since some POV groups exhibit herd behavior.

No one in the herd controls the herd, as a favourite song says. While this is good in the sense of not having to operate under megalomaniac mini-Hitler types, you're right - the initial diagnosis of herd behaviour is, prima facie, not good. Akitora (talk) 11:15, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Correct me if I misunderstood, but I think the guideline is useful only if you have a group of editors, POV or not, that have a commitment to working through controversies and want tools for doing so. There also needs to be a policy consensus that it does not constitute WP:OR or WP:SYNTH Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Look - the userpage tag with a disclaimer, plus template guideline list should be enough - it's not an article so WP:OR and WP:SYNTH don't apply - it's a guideline interpretation of an editor or group of editors on wikipedia policy. I think the user guide will be useful simply because, as you point out, POV groups, and indeed most people full stop, exhibit herd behaviour. If one person reads it, uses it, and more importantly refers to it and points others to it, especially new users, than over time it will become a best practice procedure because new users want to emulate in a way, veteran respected users. Eventually you'll get alphas in POV groups who use this system, and so will their herd. If it becomes widespread enough, then you begin to, as in the development of international politics/relations (which mimics individual interpersonal relationships more than any other political area), see a situation where a) respected users and POV group leaders use the system as it gives them legitimacy amongst their peers (other respected users and POV group leaders) and b) NPOV editors and admins knows by accepting the herd premise, you really only have to worry about problem leaders - take them out, or educate them into a good line of thought, and the rest will follow. (Can't believe I just put that out there - sounds so... well. You know...) Akitora (talk) 11:15, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

My concern there is that once the POV problem is recognized, the group, without considerable admin intervention, will not get back on track. Two recent examples, slightly changed to avoid specificity. In one case, there apparently were no editors working on a very brief article, and, about a week after I posted an intention to rewrite, an anon IP made a dramatic appearance, argued politically, and claimed, fairly nastily, that I had political motivations to rewrite the work of 73 editors, who had apparently been inactive for months. After taking it to a noticeboard, and getting some help, the eventual resolution was to move my material to a new article, and let anon and any friends continue to make their article more inaccurate. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm. Another case study in why anon IP shouldn't be allowed for a start... Akitora (talk) 11:15, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

In another case, there was a WP:UNDUE issue, which, in part, involved a graphic that I believed no longer belonged in the main article, but a subarticle. When I removed it, several editors said it was "iconic", and should not be relocated. It was suggested that other, related images to spread out the emphasis might be an alternative, and I added two, deliberately in a sequence with the original image. An editor insisted on moving that on grounds that it put too many graphics next to one another, perhaps for formatting reasons. What does one do in a case when a delete is reverted, balancing material is inserted at the suggestion of some, but then the balancing material is rejected for reasons not stated at the time it was requested? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:46, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Again - another case study, this time in why admins should be actively monitoring volatile articles as well as a case study in locking and admin only edits after discussion. In answer to the question? Mu probably... lol. Certainly if our user guide and over all system resulting from this whole discussion was in place, then the differing POV's would discuss and agree on the final content of the article in a mature adult manner... (and then the magical money fairies from fairy land would come and give me lots of magical fairy money I could use anywhere in the world and a big magical castle and a... ) :/ In that specific case I'd have to ask "where were the admins or higher ups to review and mediate..." Akitora (talk) 11:15, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I posted links to the essay and this discussion at Sri Lanka Reconciliation; since they seem to handle this best, apparently not needing admin involvement much of the time, there are obviously things to learn. Does anyone know if Elonka is aware of this discussion/the essay, and might be another person to ask for input?

Incidentally, the problem I mentioned with the graphic resolved. I've definitely noticed that what variously is herd behavior, or perhaps a struggle for dominance in the herd, may resolve itself given time. Whether time will do it, and how long it takes, is an open issue. Sometimes, it's a matter of hours or days. While I don't want to generalize, the relatively short-term process seems to benefit from gentle restatement of the issues, especially if others aware of it also do some paraphrasing to check understanding.

In another case, to my pleased amazement, one editor had become more and more confrontational, took a Wikibreak, and, on returning a couple of months later, awarded me a Barnstar of Diplomacy for the area where we had been arguing. I'm trying to remember that now, as I find myself rather irritated at a college that's assigning "post material at Wikipedia", in the intelligence area, but not making much attempt to integrate their work once it's here.

Apropos of herd behavior, however, perhaps a calming mental image might be the only time I drove any distance in the UK, with varying degrees of terror but a large number of useful stories. I'm reminded of taking a wrong turn from the British Telecom training center in Stone, trying to get back to Heathrow, and road eventually ... became a pasture. Two cows calmly regarded me. How many cows do you need to have a herd, anyway? I asked them for directions, and the moos were not informative...but were a sufficiently calming effect to let me review my turns and work out the proper path.

So, there is mu, and moo. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 11:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Refining topic bans

One solution would be to impose content bans on problem editors specifically tailored to their type of disruptive behaviour. For instance, uninvolved admins should be allowed to ban a user from making any edits regarding ethnicity on biographical articles or from taking part in naming disputes. This would help crack down on "travelling circuses" and the POV-warring SPAs which afflict pages with endless quarrels over names (e.g. the Japanese/Korean fights over Liancourt Rocks and the Sea of Japan). --Folantin (talk) 12:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

It happens I need to start porting Wiki software to a server of mine, so I will probably be able to start answering a question, but not immediately. Off topic, but I've now done a technical project where we used a private Wiki for project documentation and patent claims, and, in that very non-anonymous context, was a superb collaboration tool that produced far better documentation than marked-up Word documents.

Here's my concern. A number of good suggestions here assume that it is possible to define user restrictions and/or topic access control at a fairly fine-grained level. If I were to start a single suggestion along those lines, it would begin with requiring all (controversial) infobox changes to go through an admin, and perhaps not create an infobox until a "project advisor(s)" saw enough consensus in the main discussion to be able to summarize down to infobox level. AFAIK, however, I don't think the software is set up even to permit this, and setting up the specific control rules would require a substantial amount of system administration.

I would be utterly delighted to be wrong about this, and find that it only takes a policy decision rather than modifying software. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 13:36, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

We already have topic bans. They aren't enforced by technology but by admins. Users are forbidden to edit on certain topics. If they violate this restriction then they are blocked for, say, 24 hours. On their next violation, this is doubled and if they keep disrupting eventually it becomes a permanent ban. The system already works with topic bans and revert paroles, so I see no difficulty applying it on a smaller scale. --Folantin (talk) 14:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry guys - ANZAC day yesterday - took the day off given I was rightly and patriotically pissed for most of it. I've really taken to this idea of infoboxes and I completely agree - the infobox really is where you look at first to get a fast summary of things and if any part of an article should be locked from edit, or strictly overseen, it's this. Given it operates from a template, it does present a difficult situation since anyone knowing the appropriate tag can use these includes as they will. Being only a template, all it governs is formatting. So there really isn't anything to stop someone hardcoding an infobox into an article either. The only way I could think of it working off the top of my head given standard HTML or even php structure, and wiki software would be to make the includes part of the uneditable metainformation for the page and then as suggested, admins would create them when an article was of sufficient quality... I don't know - unless Howard can figure away to do it through software, than Folantin's right - it would just have to be policy driven. Which, as he points out, is perfectly do-able.Akitora (talk) 10:03, 26 April 2008 (UTC)