User:DGG/"uninvolved"

prepared but not presented at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/

I think the present Wikipedia definition of "uninvolved" is naïve and ignores the realities of human behavior in general, and in particular on Wikipedia. It is impossible to investigate a controversial topic without becoming involved in it, and emotionally invested with one or another position. I have seen in myself, and observed similarly in others, that once one starts looking at a subject about which one has no prior knowledge, in a field about which one is uninterested, on a matter which has no general implications affecting anything one cares about, one nonetheless inevitably adopts a   view favorable to one side or another. The only uninvolved administrators or mediators in a dispute are those who decide on formal criteria and ignore the actual issues, and I am not sure that ignoring them necessarily produces a fair result.

The only practical rule for whether you are sufficiently uninvolved to be useful, is whether both sides are willing to accept you. I am not sure I think even this to be truly equitable, for a person is a dispute might rightly think everyone available to be prejudiced against them and be forced to accept the least prejudiced, or alternatively be able to prevent resolution entirely by asking for impossible condition and accepting no decider at all. Or, if a party to a dispute knows that they have a very weak case, they might think that to accept a decider who is known to decide extremely erratically is the only possible chance to get a favorable decision; perhaps this last reason is the basis for the acceptance of arb com as decision maker..

The principle of WP:Writing for the opponent might seem a practical basis for producing a fair article, but this only works when both sides are actually willing to use it fairly, and not, for example, deliberately handicap the other side. It is perhaps possible to produce an article by writing it in such a structured way that there must be a compromise, and to a considerable extent this is the basis for the various forms of mediation, but in practice this favors the side that cares the most about the issue and will therefore hold out longest for the strongest position. The only way of getting a fair overall presentation is for each side to express their own point of view in separate articles or sections (otherwise known as a POV fork), and let the reader judge. This favors the person who can best cater to the readers own prejudices, but so does all controversial writing.. My own attempts at writing for the opponent did not work out well--I knew and was able to produce the most effective arguments for my opponents, who had,hampered by the ignorance, to the extent that the side I actually supported and had said I actually supported accused me of being a covert member of the opposition (being themselves equally ignorant--all the other people here who actually knew about the topic were wise enough to ignore the discussion). -

Myself, I will not work on the  articles  in question here. I know myself to have on this topic so strong a POV towards one of the positions that I am unwilling to help the opponents, because I think that side dishonest in the sense of being willfully ignorant, and in something so consequential that they are leading the world to certain disaster.