Can Wikipedia create an acceptable article on controversial topics? Options

[Donny]

When I look at some of the heated discussions on Wikipedia, I wonder if it is possible for them to ever reach a conclusion. I wonder if it is possible for both sides of a particular situation, for example, the scientologists and the anti-scientologists, to ever come to a conclusion or write an article that each side is happy with. For myself, I'm not optimistic. I think Wikipedia could be a success if it stuck only to factual matters, but it seems to be failing to reach any kind of acceptable level of stability everywhere there is some kind of controversy.

I think that the open editing method of Wikipedia can work for strictly factual material such as the "fan" material about Star Trek, and that is why it has succeeded, but for other material, such as biographies of controversial people, perhaps a Wikipedia-style open-editing system will never be a satisfactory solution. This is partly a response also to Blissyu2's posts about the Port Arthur article; I really don't think it is possible for Blissyu2 and the people who disagree with him to come to any conclusion. Perhaps it would be better not to even have an article about the topic.

What do other people think?

[Avillia]

Where the bloody 'ell is the comedy option!

[Ben]

Of course it is possible to write neutral articles. Yes, even Scientology articles.

But the people who are best at that--experts with academic agendas, and who are also expert writers--don't have the time to fiddle around on Wikipedia for nothing, even if Wikipedia was a nice place to contribute to. They have much better things to do. Things they get paid for even.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Of course it is possible to write neutral articles. Yes, even Scientology articles.

But the people who are best at that--experts with academic agendas, and who are also expert writers--don't have the time to fiddle around on Wikipedia for nothing, even if Wikipedia was a nice place to contribute to. They have much better things to do. Things they get paid for even.

I should think that if there were a serious effort made to enforce the NPOV policy, you could get a neutral article. Unfortunately, due to the functioning of the cabal, it all becomes a game to impose a particular POV, by selectively invoking Wikipedia rules to stymie and ultimately ban one's POV opponents (not necessarily in that order -- SlimVirgin in particular is resorting more and more to simply declaring her opponents to be disruptive, or sock puppets, and banning them if they offer the least bit of resistance. The fig leaf of Wikipedia policy has pretty much gone out the window.)

I initiated the first ArbCom "LaRouche" case in June of 2004, because I naively thought that the ArbCom would step in and insist that Adam Carr, John Kenney and AndyL edit in conformity with NPOV. In the Fall of last year, I proposed the policy called Wikipedia:Ombudsmen in an effort to address this problem, but the proposal was "rejected by the community."

[Donny]

Where the bloody 'ell is the comedy option!

Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to add any comedy options after the poll has been posted.

[Blu Aardvark]

Where the bloody 'ell is the comedy option!

Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to add any comedy options after the poll has been posted.

All hail the mighty Admin! (No offense intended at any of the comedy options.)

[Blu Aardvark]

yes, but absolute power absolutely corrupts. Could you change the last one to "Bush did WTC" in the interests targeting a political figure with comedy rather than a population group? Reputation management, etc.

Ok, ok. I used the original because it was a subtle joke about the alleged anti-semitic nature of this forum, and because the GNAA has a site at jewsdidwtc.com, but that is a better option.

[guy]

No fair changing the questions after I've voted!

[Donny]

Of course it is possible to write neutral articles. Yes, even Scientology articles.

But the people who are best at that--experts with academic agendas, and who are also expert writers--don't have the time to fiddle around on Wikipedia for nothing, even if Wikipedia was a nice place to contribute to. They have much better things to do. Things they get paid for even.

The problem is that once academic A writes his article, scientologist B then rewrites it to his point of view, then anti-scientologist C rewrites it, and so on, ad infinitum. So not only B and C are not satisfied, but A is also not satisfied.

My problem on Wikipedia was different from this: X writes article. Y inserts factual error. X tries to sort it out. Y fouls it up again. I was X several hundred times, and once or twice I admit I was Y. But I was never B or C in the top situation.

But this process seems to come to an end when Y eventually realises he's wrong, or in practice when X realises that Wikipedia is an idiot's paradise. No matter that this is irritating, I can think of some procedural solution for this situation. However, I don't see any sane procedural solution for the pro-anti problems in the context of an open editing environment. I really don't see how it could ever possibly work even in theory.

[blissyu2]

Okay, I'll answer this in two parts:

Firstly, on the Port Arthur massacre article:

It is imminently encyclopaedic. I haven't checked, but I would be dumbstruck to find that any major encyclopaedia was missing it. Wikipedia should at least have all articles that a major encyclopaedia has.

The problem basically is a lack of experts. Thus far, I have been the only expert that has contributed anything towards the article. To create a quality article, you need lots of experts. For example, if you took the views of Walter Mikac, Wendy Scurr, Joe Vialls, Shooters News (or the NRA), Pauline Hanson, John Avery (his first lawyer), Damian Bugg QC (the prosecutor), Roger Larner, the guy who warned police about it (me) and Martin Bryant himself (or his mother Carleen Bryant) then you'd have a bloody good article. Add to that a handful of random eye witnesses, a few police that were there, and then some professional commentators on this kind of topic, like policeman Andrew MacGregor, gun expert Stewart Beattie, and a few crime experts, and bingo you've got it as good as it gets.

All of these people have biases, of course they do. And perhaps Wikipedia can say that they can transport these things and "remove" the biases, as if they were artificial things. But the problem is that when you have idiots editing it, they don't know what is important. So they go ahead and write about John Flint, who is not an expert, or some Australian Freedom Scouts that is totally irrelevant, and put in nonsense that has nothing to do with anything. They put in summaries from people like the Crime Library, which uses no sources itself, and itself is unreliable, and then put in biased official political releases which are totally unreliable in a case like this. This is the problem.

You can never get neutral, but you can get accurate. And accuracy should come ahead of neutrality, in the order of operations. In the name of neutrality, Wikipedia has bold face lied there. They have lied that it start on April 28, when it very clearly started on April 27. They have lied that it ended on April 28, when it very clearly ended on April 29. They have lied that Martin Bryant confessed, when he never did. Now, these things are not a bias issue, they are a truth issue. Until such things are fixed up, then there are problems. They've failed to mention the name of Wendy Scurr, which is a really big problem. First person to call police is important, especially given the sheer level of media attention she got in the first week afterwards. They somehow seemed to forget that Walter Mikac was not even mentioned in the media until many weeks afterwards, and that there was a very clear reason why they switched from Wendy Scurr to Walter Mikac - because Wendy Scurr was saying that Martin Bryant was innocent. There was also a reason why they stuck to Joe Vialls rather than Wendy Scurr and company. Firstly, because Wendy Scurr was an eye witness and hence was reliable, while Joe Vialls wasn't, and secondly because Wendy Scurr was saying it was the work of terrorists aka serial killers, while Joe Vialls was saying it was the work of a Zionist conspiracy (all of his theories are about Jews trying to take over the world). Why did the government only mention Joe Vialls? Because his theory was somewhat unbelievable, especially the conclusion. Wendy Scurr's theory was very believable. Today, 10 years later, in our age of terrorism, I think we can see just how much it looked like a terrorist act, and just how right she was. She also was far from the only eye witness who was a part of her group. Good old Jim Laycock was there, and lots of others too.

But the article can never be neutral. Of course not. It can be accurate, but it can never be neutral.

Right now it is about 20% accurate and 90% biased. If I rewrote it, it'd be 90% accurate and 90% biased, but biased the other way. Is this so bad? It'd be accurate, and that's the point.

Can controversial topics be accurate? Yes. Can they be neutral? No.

You can never have a neutral article on anything even vaguely controversial. There is a clear reason for this.

Everyone has a bias, the only exception are idiots. Controversial topics require thought, and they require knowledge. Henceforth, in controversial topics, to increase accuracy, you need to also increase bias. You need to be thinking.

But there is nothing to stop an article from being a collaboration of a range of different biases.

Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy really falls down, and stands out like a sore thumb when you have a controversial topic.

[Ryan Norton]

A lot of old-time wikipedians are eventualists in that they believe over time with a minimal of patrolling articles will eventually work themselves out somehow. However, the truth is often far different, as often articles get one little POV statement in after the other and before you know it it is all messed up. This is especially prevalent on controversial topics. Eventually someone gets tired enough that they clean up some of the mess...

I think it is possible for a certain period of time with someone who understands the topic along with a good deal of time and determination to keep the article in the ideal state. The editor in question has to somehow edit from a NPOV, which is possible but takes a quality or skill which is really difficult to quantify. It helps to know the inherit bias of most wikipedians when editing a subject as well - for example on Microsoft most wikipedians are predominantly anti-Microsoft and will edit accordingly to that principle - often you can error on the opposite side of the predominant bias and it will balance out.

Of course, all this depends on a person spending a half of year or so just getting it up to featured quality, constantly updating it accordingly. But for more than a certain (usually short) period of time, such a thing is probably impossible in reality if it is all pro bono.

[Donny]

A lot of old-time wikipedians are eventualists in that they believe over time with a minimal of patrolling articles will eventually work themselves out somehow. However, the truth is often far different, as often articles get one little POV statement in after the other and before you know it it is all messed up. This is especially prevalent on controversial topics. Eventually someone gets tired enough that they clean up some of the mess...

I think it is possible for a certain period of time with someone who understands the topic along with a good deal of time and determination to keep the article in the ideal state. The editor in question has to somehow edit from a NPOV, which is possible but takes a quality or skill which is really difficult to quantify. It helps to know the inherit bias of most wikipedians when editing a subject as well - for example on Microsoft most wikipedians are predominantly anti-Microsoft and will edit accordingly to that principle - often you can error on the opposite side of the predominant bias and it will balance out.

Of course, all this depends on a person spending a half of year or so just getting it up to featured quality, constantly updating it accordingly. But for more than a certain (usually short) period of time, such a thing is probably impossible in reality if it is all pro bono.

On what seems to be your topic, Ryan, Microsoft, the last time I looked at the Visual Basic article it was not much more than a hatchet job. I seem to remember the section on criticisms of Visual Basic was the largest part of the article. On the other hand, the last time I looked the articles about Python basically read like advertisements, with no criticisms in sight, even though prominent figures like Larry Wall have certainly criticised the language. I haven't studied other articles in this area, but it's interesting you brought the topic of anti-Microsoft bias up. This is potentially non-controversial enough to be fixable, but it's hard for me to see how other topics can be resolved into a reasonable form.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Right now it is about 20% accurate and 90% biased. If I rewrote it, it'd be 90% accurate and 90% biased, but biased the other way. Is this so bad? It'd be accurate, and that's the point.

For the benefit of newbies like myself, could you provide a short history of the conflict over the Port Arthur Massacre, including a summary of your POV, along with a summary of your opponents' POV, and the user names of your principal opponents? Who banned you, and what was the ostensible reason?

[Ryan Norton]

On what seems to be your topic, Ryan, Microsoft, the last time I looked at the Visual Basic article it was not much more than a hatchet job. I seem to remember the section on criticisms of Visual Basic was the largest part of the article. On the other hand, the last time I looked the articles about Python basically read like advertisements, with no criticisms in sight, even though prominent figures like Larry Wall have certainly criticised the language. I haven't studied other articles in this area, but it's interesting you brought the topic of anti-Microsoft bias up. This is potentially non-controversial enough to be fixable, but it's hard for me to see how other topics can be resolved into a reasonable form.

That's quite true. On the Python talk it is brought up various times, only to be shot down as unencypedic and other things (which is obviously not true because I believe all of our featured programming language articles have a beefy criticism section). I just did some small cleanup on the Visual Basic intro, but that really needs some quality time put into it to clean up :\.

Anyway, as for other topics I agree that it is often be quite difficult, if not impossible. I spent a bit of time on the rather controversial George W. Bush article... I'm not 100% what the problem is there, but it seems like a lot of editors there get a little too involved with their own POV, some editing for the sole purpose of having their POV being heard as if they were being snubbed or something. Soapboxing I guess, which is a really big problem, especially on some niche articles as well when "organizations" get involved. On something like Bush people are often polarized before they even edit the article, and the chance of finding someone unpolarized and willing to put biases aside for editing is very, very low - so that minority will often get overruled by the predominant polarization there.

[blissyu2]

Right now it is about 20% accurate and 90% biased. If I rewrote it, it'd be 90% accurate and 90% biased, but biased the other way. Is this so bad? It'd be accurate, and that's the point.

For the benefit of newbies like myself, could you provide a short history of the conflict over the Port Arthur Massacre, including a summary of your POV, along with a summary of your opponents' POV, and the user names of your principal opponents? Who banned you, and what was the ostensible reason?

Shortest possible summary of the conflict:

I wanted to make the article accurate, add in references, mention the holes in the official story, who was actually there, some names, and general accuracy. "They" didn't want me to, and wanted it to be a totally inaccurate mess with ZERO references - not just no reliable references, but none at all, and when they did use references to misquote them.

More detail:

It was not an issue of people hating ME the person. Nor was it an issue of ME hating someone. There was nothing personal about it. It was a simple case that for some reason a group of people took possession of the article, and this group was so powerful that they had the power to ban.

Robert Merkel is the first person in the history (note: there is one hell of a lot of deleted history so there may have been someone before him) to take possession of the article, in January 2003. I never met him.

In May 2005, my "conflict" was primarily with the 2 people that owned the article, Longhair and Thebainer. Because I put on my userpage possible reasons why Longhair had owned it and why he had attacked me, Longhair became the person that "reverted on sight" any edits I made, and demanded me to be banned. Others to join in were AYArktos and Tannin.

None of these users were admins at the time, so a number of admins assisted them, deleting edits from history, adding reliable references to the spam black list, deleting their edits to talk pages from history so that I would be unable to defend myself on Request for Arbitration, and so forth.

As a result of the abuse, all of the people involved in attacking me were made admins, unopposed no less.

That's the conflict in a nutshell. Not a me vs them. A truth vs fiction issue. I wanted truth, they wanted fiction.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

[
Shortest possible summary of the conflict:

I wanted to make the article accurate, add in references, mention the holes in the official story, who was actually there, some names, and general accuracy. "They" didn't want me to, and wanted it to be a totally inaccurate mess with ZERO references - not just no reliable references, but none at all, and when they did use references to misquote them.

As you may suspect, I am a political dude. I am interested in finding out what the ideological basis for the conflict was. Was there some info, or a POV with respect to the info, that your opponents were trying to suppress? Can you speculate about their motives?

[Henning]

As a newbie to wikipedia and wikis in general I wonder why the proposal of "multiple POVs" instead of NPOV hasn't received more serious attention/dicussion.
(Note: I am not affiliated with the wikinfo crowd!)
Most articles I am able to judge as "adequate" (engineering & social sciences) have a more or less extensive section on "criticism" that helps a lot to put the more sympathetic claims into perspective.
So why not split any controversial article into several "points of view-articles" and let the opposing camps organize themselves to make their sub-article as convincing as possible to the non-partisan reader?
Why must there be a "One page = One keyword" identity plus a huge, totally chaotic and therefore frustrating discussion archive?
Of course organizing wikipedia in such a way would make it look more like a forum than an "encyclopedia" but so what?
How many people seriously believe that "the Encyclopedic, Factual Truth" is going to emerge simply by more or less chaotic, random editing? Obviously this process woukd take infinitely long to converge anyway so all you get during the process is a "dynamically changing forum" anyway.

[guy]

Henning, welcome to Wikipedia Review. I do wish that this sort of simple logic would prevail, but it doesn't!

[blissyu2]

Wow 20 votes on a poll. That must be close to a record.

[
Shortest possible summary of the conflict:

I wanted to make the article accurate, add in references, mention the holes in the official story, who was actually there, some names, and general accuracy. "They" didn't want me to, and wanted it to be a totally inaccurate mess with ZERO references - not just no reliable references, but none at all, and when they did use references to misquote them.

As you may suspect, I am a political dude. I am interested in finding out what the ideological basis for the conflict was. Was there some info, or a POV with respect to the info, that your opponents were trying to suppress? Can you speculate about their motives?

I told police in 1995 (3 August to be precise) that this was going to happen. They failed to investigate it. This means that when it actually happened, police had egg on their face. There was so much evidence that police knew it was going to happen that they were in deep shit over it. They had to try to hide it. There was a major effort that could only have come from the government itself, using the Australian secret service, called ASIO, to distract from all of these questions. They used disinformation and other tactics to hide it.

Of course, some of that information still skipped through. If you look on Google, 95% of all articles written about this basically agree with me on it. However, thanks to the suppression orders, 100% of all published novels disagree with me. That is of course what the suppression order was there for. So its a simple matter of saying that you can only refer to the published novels and then you can support the ASIO/government point of view.

People on Wikipedia are not stupid. When they see 95% of people agreeing with one side, they are going to go with that side. Indeed, for the first 3 years or so, the article was actually a decent quality. From 2001 until January 2004. So they decided to get rid of it. They wiped huge chunks from history, banned people to stop them, and so forth.

Someone behind the scenes had to be ASIO. It is not believable to suggest that it was just gullibility or the idea to take book sources ahead of internet sources. Wikipedia ordinarily goes the other way. And if they had noted the suppression order, they would recognise that the book sources are unreliable because they were not allowed to say everything that happened.

Even on Wikipedia, the vast majority of people have said that the article is wrong. But there has been an ownership of the article.

Who is the person pulling the strings? If we believe the first edit, then its Robert Merkel, and he must be the ASIO insider. I have never met him, so I can't say. And I don't have access to all of the deleted posts. But we had Thebainer come here and lie his little heart out about all aspects relating to what happened on the article, and he was acting very much like a spy.

Of course, it could just be that we have a bunch of really stupid, gullible people. I just don't think that people on Wikipedia are that stupid.

[Ryan Norton]

As a newbie to wikipedia and wikis in general I wonder why the proposal of "multiple POVs" instead of NPOV hasn't received more serious attention/dicussion.
(Note: I am not affiliated with the wikinfo crowd!)
Most articles I am able to judge as "adequate" (engineering & social sciences) have a more or less extensive section on "criticism" that helps a lot to put the more sympathetic claims into perspective.
So why not split any controversial article into several "points of view-articles" and let the opposing camps organize themselves to make their sub-article as convincing as possible to the non-partisan reader?
Why must there be a "One page = One keyword" identity plus a huge, totally chaotic and therefore frustrating discussion archive?
Of course organizing wikipedia in such a way would make it look more like a forum than an "encyclopedia" but so what?
How many people seriously believe that "the Encyclopedic, Factual Truth" is going to emerge simply by more or less chaotic, random editing? Obviously this process woukd take infinitely long to converge anyway so all you get during the process is a "dynamically changing forum" anyway.

That is a very interesting idea! One problem I could see though is that if it isn't neutral it may get bashed for being "unauthoritative" or something.