On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Ken Arromdee <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Will Beback wrote: >> The article doesn't say that a conspiracy within Wikipedia tried to bias >> articles. It says that a prominent industrialist and political contributor >> paid professional writers to alter Wikipedia articles to change the >> descriptions of his involvement in a political movement. >> >> It's a situation where organized professionals are working against >> unorganized amateurs. > > Getting rid of bias is not an action movie. You don't try to give the other > side a fighting chance. Professionals versus amateurs is perfectly legitimate > if they really are trying to stop the amateurs from introducing bias. And of > course the assumption "they may say they're getting rid of bias but they > really want to add bias and they're lying about it" is just an assumption. > > We went over the same thing with CAMERA. A target of the left wing decided > to try removing bias against their side from Wikipedia and was treated like > they were trying to introduce it instead, with the main reasoning being > "they couldn't possibly really want to remove bias, after all, they're > too organized, and anyone who likes the cause that they like must be biased > anyway. Besides, Wikipedia has no bias, so nobody could really want to > remove it". CAMERA did make a few missteps (trying to become admins, for > instance), but that's far from all they were blamed for.
I disagree with this. Our key problem here isn't bias - we all know there's bias, we all know we're all biased. It's unfair advantages. Someone sockpuppeting and stacking on consensus and !votes is an unfair advantage for their viewpoint and biases. Someone organizing an off-wiki organized group intended to push on-wiki bias one way or the other is an unfair advantage for their viewpoint and biases. A corporation paying someone to spend time pushing on-wiki bias is an unfair advantage for their viewpoint and biases. I believe that our organizational core value here is balanced eventualism - If we are able to keep the playing field level, individual biases will over time even out and articles will on the average more closely approach neutral coverage. As far as I know, there wasn't an off-wiki organized Palestinian campaign before, during, or after CAMERA's run. Maybe I'm just missing something, but I didn't see one. There are a lot of on-wiki partisans. They largely balanced out before. I know why CAMERA thought there was a problem. And I have some sympathy for their objections. But they sought to clandestinely gain unfair advantage. Ultimately, that's nothing short of an assault on the community and its method of random walk gently closer to perfection. We can't have that. What we have instead is functionally an oligarchy of the active and interested and politically (in the social interactions and online communications sophistication sense) capable. That is certainly not an even slice of society writ large, but the slice lines up reasonably well with western common values (less Republicans, more liberal, more libertarian than "average", and much (!) more male). Everyone knows these things. Generally we're able to balance around them. What CAMERA was doing wasn't working around one of those community participation biases. It's not defensible that way. -- -george william herbert [email protected] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
