Tim, maybe the reason biased articles are pounced on so quickly is precisely that we have a firm rule against bias; if we were to remove the rule, maybe they wouldn't be pounced on so quickly. I don't know if this is true, but it sure seems plausible anyway. New people (and maybe the old ones) might begin to view biased claims made in a given article as the "right" of the person who added them, and be less likely to de-bias the claims (after all, if there's no community animus against bias then what justification is there to render the article unbiased?). --LMS |
Tim, maybe the reason biased articles are pounced on so quickly is precisely that we have a firm rule against bias; if we were to remove the rule, maybe they wouldn't be pounced on so quickly. I don't know if this is true, but it sure seems plausible anyway. New people (and maybe the old ones) might begin to view biased claims made in a given article as the "right" of the person who added them, and be less likely to de-bias the claims (after all, if there's no community animus against bias then what justification is there to render the article unbiased?). --LMS I think and hope that Larry's right. I hope that I will jump on an article that is biased, even if I happen to enjoy the bias. Why do I do that? In part because we have all loosely committed ourselves to an ideal. The commitment itslef, as expressed in the loose community mores?, is important to me in my role as a contributor. The expressed consensus rule also serves as a reference point in case someone comes along and gets mad about us editing out their bias. They may say "Hey, why can't I be biased? Why do you jerks keep editing my article to be unbiased?" Because we have an expressed commitment to a lack of bias, we have a reasonable answer: because that's the community consensus of what Wikipedia is about. --Jimbo Wales |
So to encourage the creation of more articles, perhaps the rule should be, be as biased as you like.
That said, I largely agree with LMS, though I think biased material has a place in Wikipedia, sometimes under Wikipedia commentary. For an example of another approach, see the OS Advocacy page.
What I've observed in practice is that biased articles and comments get pounced upon very quickly. This rule was proposed after observing this. The fact of the matter is, the wikipedia process makes being highly biased unrewarding because a biased article is amended very quickly. As such, there is no need to have strictures against biased writings. Since there is little reward for biased writings, there is little need for discouraging that sort of behavior.
Perhaps people think that Wikipedia is collaborative in that one person will write one article, someone else will write another article, etc., until we have a big pile of content created by many different people. But the real essence of the wikipedia process is that articles themselves evolve under the loosely collaborative effort of numerous editors, unknown to one another and separated by an indefinite amount of time. Articles started today may one day be amended by editors yet unborn. The result of this process is that articles will gradually come to represent a consensus view, one that is mostly satisfactory to most people.
All this process needs is input. Bad input is not a significant cost because it is corrected very quickly. It may have value because it incites people to include other inputs. And this gets the process of evolution started.
It's equivalent to pitching the legion's eagles into the opponent's camp. It gets people moving, but not because they are happy or like what is happening, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people find it gets old fast. Something to be used sparingly at best. Surely we have more respect for our authors than to try to get them to work in such a fashion. --JG
Tim, maybe the reason biased articles are pounced on so quickly is precisely that we have a firm rule against bias; if we were to remove the rule, maybe they wouldn't be pounced on so quickly. I don't know if this is true, but it sure seems plausible anyway. New people (and maybe the old ones) might begin to view biased claims made in a given article as the "right" of the person who added them, and be less likely to de-bias the claims (after all, if there's no community animus against bias then what justification is there to render the article unbiased?). --LMS
I think and hope that Larry's right. I hope that I will jump on an article that is biased, even if I happen to enjoy the bias. Why do I do that? In part because we have all loosely committed ourselves to an ideal. The commitment itslef, as expressed in the loose community mores?, is important to me in my role as a contributor.
The expressed consensus rule also serves as a reference point in case someone comes along and gets mad about us editing out their bias. They may say "Hey, why can't I be biased? Why do you jerks keep editing my article to be unbiased?" Because we have an expressed commitment to a lack of bias, we have a reasonable answer: because that's the community consensus of what Wikipedia is about. --Jimbo Wales