User:DGG/new Approach to sanctions

(revised Oct 1, 2020

DS
You talk a lot of sense about DS, but I have concerns about how you see us managing intractable long-term disputes without them. What would you do with, say, a chiropractor who constantly demands that we change the page on chiropractic to state that innate is real? Would you just send this to ANI as tendentious editing?

AE started out well but has become one of the most capricious processes we have. My personal view is that this is largely an artifact of the underlying weakness of Wikipedia: we have no robust mechanism for definitely resolving content disputes, so any substantial content dispute will escalate and roll around the various drama boards until the first person loses their temper and gets banned. DS was designed to stop this, which it kind of does, but in a distinctly heavy-handed way. Ten or fifteen years ago we wasted a lot more time with disruptive editors, but also dealt out a lot less summary justice to people with half a dozen edits (leaving aside obvious vandals).

In particular, I think dispute resolution practice hasn't yet taken on board the more nuanced approach we can take using partial blocks. Anyway. I can't make up my mind whether DS is fundamentally a shit-show or just an example of, as per Churchill, "the worst system apart from all those others which have from time to time been tried". Do you have an essay on "if not DS then what", as it were? Thanks. Guy (help! - typo?) 11:05, 30 September 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree with you that it is much easier to eliminate DS than to replace it. But it isn't actually that hard in most situations. There are 4 sorts of problems: First, ones involving personal conflict, or someone obviously misbehaving. ANI and  Arb com  (for those with possible loss of rights, or involving privacy) by themselves can deal with them quite well.  We don't need any special sanctions. Second are ones that involve not content disputes, but internal features of WP.: the most notorious one this year is infoboxes. There is usually no principle involved, except who comes out on top.  RfCs deal with most of them now, and if that fails the solution is to ban all parties from the area--there are no fundamental issues of right or wrong, and anyone continuing the debate on other side is over-committed. An example last year was notability for schools. I lost that one--I remain convinced the AfC conclusion was both wrong, and misinterpreted. My initial plan was to continue to fight each individual case. I thought better of it, and just avoid the area. It's of no fundamental consequence.


 * Third, and much more important, are internal debates that do affect the fundamental principles of WP. There are two current ones of particular interest . One is the degree to which we permit promotional editing; Some think it inconsequential, for which the best argument is that readers ignore the promotionalism. I instead  think this has the potential to end the usefulness of the encyclopedia, because the intent is to be a reasonably reliable resource, and promotionalism  destroys that purpose, making us no better than Google et al., to the extent that people will be unable or unwillingto distinguish our real content from promotionalism.  Here I think trying to change formal rules relatively useless, and I consequently am increasingly avoiding general arguments and rather fighting as many individual instances as possible, with the result that I'm doing little else. I hope that the general sentiment is adopting my view of it, making it less necessary to do as much of the detailed work as I do. DS is irrelevant here, and we do not need arbcom except for tracing conflict off-wiki.


 * The other is how we handle pseudoscience. You and I have the same view of most topics that might loosely fall under this category: we are both quite sure of the general correctness of standard science. But the two of us differ very sharply in how we would handle it. Very roughly, you tend to decrease our coverage of it because it is proportionally insignificant and to  label what we do cover, for fear of mis-educating; I would increase coverage and present without editorial comment, in the hope of educating. You are correct that DS cannot handle this dispute. We each regard the principles involved as so important that we will argue over both the rules and the cases indefinitely. You used this area as an example, but its a particularly difficult one, because it can be hard to distinguish between disruption and the fair presentation of a minority viewpoint. But this is a situation where DS can only make things worse when used between editors who are possibly of good will, by escalating the arguments. Fortunately, only a very few admins make use of it in these areas. They need to stop, and possibly the most direct--and the most likely--role of arb com here is to withdraw DS in this area. The dispute between our two views of thinking in dealing with it will probably best be resolved by compromise, because I do not think either of our positions likely to change,  but this is another topic. The full presentation of it will take another page.