User:MjolnirPants/The problem with AmPol

The problem with AmPol (American Politics) on Wikipedia is multifaceted, deeply entrenched, complex and sometimes irrational.

The topic is one of the most contentious on the project. The number of ANI threads and AE requests started over it is incalculable. Editors on both sides of the political divide have been warned, sanctioned, blocked and even banned by the community. The problems seem intractable at times. This is to be expected, as politics is a complex continuum. As the old canard goes, "Ask five people about their politics and you'll get 13 answers." But in America, at least, that huge variety of politics can be swept up into two groups: The Conservatives, or Republicans, and the Liberals, or Democrats. Now, we all know that many Republicans are not very conservative, and many Democrats, not very liberal. But the two sets of phrases are regularly used interchangeably. We all know what is meant when we hear one of them.

The problem with our current approach to conflict in AmPol
Put simply: Both sides are most certainly not equally valid.

These two factions are butting heads constantly. It long ago spilled over onto Wikipedia, and there's no denying it. We are not magically insulated from the outside world. Just as in American life, AmPol consists of two opposing factions in an endless struggle for supremacy, ​and one of those factions has been deeply infiltrated by a formerly small group of people with extreme political beliefs and deep-seated conspiratorial views. They include Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, fascists of multiple varieties (including a new, distinctly American sort), extremists and terrorists.

Their claims of fact are contradicted by reliable sources, so they argue against our policy on reliable sources, demanding we include unquestionably unreliable sources like the Gateway Pundit. Their leaders are constantly embroiled in scandal after scandal, so they harp on our policies on BLP, imploring us to refer to Fascists as "conservatives". They believe in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, so they deliberately misinterpret our policies on neutrality to demand we report on "both sides" of a non-existent debate. They enjoy relatively little support among the population at large, so they plot off-wiki to try and pummel us into submission.

Yet we continue to treat that side as if it has the same claim to legitimacy as the other.

When a brand new account makes their first edit to the talk page of our reliable sources policy, complaining that we don't allow purveyors of fake news to be used, we explain why they're wrong for the umpteenth time. These new accounts are then allowed to go on and add their voices (voices which we know vigorously oppose the fundamental principles on which this project is built) to article talk pages discussions about NPOV and DUE weight and our BLP policies. They participate in RfCs about sourcing and balance, all while we know they are deliberately trying to undermine our principles.

Experienced editors frequently do the same thing. Our archives are chock full of editors opposing such common-sense motions as deprecating the Daily Mail, creating and maintaining categories for White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis and endorsing organizations like CNN and the New York Times as reliable. Sometimes, they become downright hysterical about these issues, claiming that Wikipedia is trying to "re-write history" and serve as a "recruiting platform for the far left."

Of course, not every conservative editor is like this. There are plenty of editors who rather clearly value tradition over progress, for example, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is endemic to conservatism, but it is not inherent in conservatism.

And it bears noting that not all liberal editors are acting in good faith. As noted above, the sanctions have touched both sides of the political isle, and the shrill insistence that WP denigrate conservativism and laude liberalism is not an unfamiliar message here. And there are conspiracies and pseudoscience on the left, as well.

The difference between the two sides is not that one is pure and the other rotten, it is that one is mostly compatible with this project, and the other is mostly incompatible.

Failed solutions
Now, I wasn't being facetious above when I said the problem was complex, because one aspect of a problem is how to solve it. And this is not an easy problem to solve.

If Wikipedia were to simply ban conservative editors, then we would be conceding the very fight we've been waging against a subset of them. That 'solution' would be worse than the problem itself. It's just not even worth considering. It would be just as bad, if not worse, to ban liberal editors. In fact, such a site already exists, at Conservapedia. Not to mention that our project depends on having a diversity of views. Even if we successfully eliminated all conservative editors, our liberal editors would then be left in an echo chamber, where they would grow more and more liberal, as the only novel ideas that would be introduced would be those further to the left of the norm. We'd soon find ourselves becoming exactly what conservative pundits claim, without evidence, that we are: a left-wing propaganda operation.

Some solutions which have been tried and failed include restricting editing to acknowledged experts. This was the idea behind Larry Sanger's project, Citizendium. It didn't work out very well for them, and is likely to work out worse here, where it contradicts one of our most basic principles of being the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Another solution which has been proposed before is to create a cadre of neutral, experienced editors to take edit requests from those interested in the topic and perform them. But this require additional bureaucracy, which is one of the last things Wikipedia needs more of, and has the inherent and inescapable problem of determining how one would prove one's self to be neutral. There's nothing to stop an editor from lying about their political views. A community-review process (similar to RfA) would be a hot mess, and unlikely to work, as there are extremely few people who don't lean to one side or the other, yet still have an interest in editing in the topic.

Other proposed solution include; requiring editors in the topic to announce their political leanings, such as with userboxes; broadening the available sanctions which can be applied to editors who cause disruptions (an idea I wholly endorse, but not one which actually solved anything); restricting editing to users with some experience; and taking a zero-tolerance approach to civility in the topic. None of these solutions have worked. Indeed, most have such obvious problems that they haven't been tried, and the rest have done little to nothing to reduce disruption.

The root of the problem
None of these solutions have worked, because none of them address the root of the problem. Namely, that there is a small group of editors who are here for ideological purposes, and those editors encourage and give ideas to good-faith editors who are more sympathetic to their cause. In other words, the POV pushers provide an appealing alternative to good-faith conservative editors who dislike the demands our policies make on our article contents. To rephrase it yet again, the problem is not just bad editors, but also bad content. Distinguishing between good and bad content is at the core of our mission, and it's something we expect all of our editors to do, when editing articles. But, for reasons which seem noble at first, we've decided as a community that this core part of what we do here should never be done by an admin dealing with disruption.

Our admins do a mostly thankless task, being more likely to be castigated than congratulated for any admin action they take. And we don't just expect, but demand they do this job fairly and objectively, without letting their own personal biases influence their decisions. This is fine and proper, of course, but the way we've gone about it has made it all but impossible for admins to use the full extent of their faculties to make these decisions.

In our incessant need to know the admins are behaving fairly, we have built up a wall between content and behavior that we expect the admins not to climb, or even peek over. We expect them to enforce our rules without any consideration of the content discussion, which is invariably the root of the problem. We demand that liberal admins be willing to sanction liberal editors, and conservative admins sanction conservative editors, and we assure ourselves that this is the case by scrutinizing their arguments for any hint that they might agree with one party or the other on content, and then hyping that up and demanding the admin admit it (or answer leading questions about it) if we find anything.

The solution
The solution is, in a word, to stop demanding that admins ignore the content favored by editors in a dispute. Allow our admins to engage with sources and article-space edits that do not nominally violate any policy. Stop demanding that admins be removed from the content questions, stop scrutinizing them so closely for any hint of bias, and let them do theirs jobs as admins by dealing with issues, but also let them do their jobs as editors by working to improve this project at every step. They should judge editors pushing more controversial content more harshly than editors pushing more widely accepted content.

Example: PineapplePooper1992
If the hypothetical editor PineapplePooper1992 is insisting that shoving pineapples up one's ass is a cure for colon cancer, and is arguing politely and otherwise following our rules, we will extend good faith to that editor for days, months, or sometimes even years before we finally reach a point where the question of indeffing or CBanning that editor seems legitimate enough to ask. And when we do, we will inevitably focus on the sheer number of times other editors have had to have the same argument with them. We will not, under any circumstances, put any weight behind the argument that an editor pushing for such a ridiculous claim has no business editing an encyclopedia. Sure, some editors will show up to link to WP:CIR, but we almost never see that essay cited in a block rationale or CBan close unless the competence in question is technical. Meanwhile, an editor who grows impatient with PineapplePooper1992 and calls them a "soda-masochistic lunatic pushing their incomprehensibly stupid bullshit on this project," might very well be blocked within seconds of that edit coming to an admin's attention. They will, at the very least, be given a stern warning.

But the thing is, PineapplePooper1992 most certainly is a sado-massochistic lunatic pushing incomprehensibly stupid bullshit on this project. So we've just sanctioned an editor for stating a fact. Now, as many might point out, there are other ways of phrasing that which would be far more civil than this. One might say "The notions pushed by this editor are both painful and harmful, supported by neither science nor any logical argument, and their efforts here appear unhinged and irrational." The two phrases mean much the same thing, though the latter leaves a lot more room for interpretation. It's arguable that the more rude version is clearer and more succinct, but it's not arguable that it's far ruder and less civil.

So we sanction the rude editor, and allow the other to continue arguing in favor of incomprehensible bullshit. Have we improved the project in doing so? No. Not even close. We've made the project worse, by taking an experienced editor who'd grown frustrated with seeing the project disrupted in way they can't do anything about away from the project, and giving them a reason to be bitter and angry at the project. We've also encouraged a sad-masochistic, lunatic editor who's pushing incomprehensible bullshit to continue doing so. And one day, we'll block that lunatic in a process that, to their perspective, comes out of nowhere and flies completely off the rails. Sure, eventually, we're left with one experienced editor and no lunatic editors, but we've also got lunatic ex-editor out there, talking to others about their experience on Wikipedia, who'd gotten distinctly mixed signals from us, and our retained experienced editor is that much more jaded and cynical about this project. Assuming, that is, that they didn't give up editing in disgust.

Now, if we didn't demand our admins refuse to acknowledge content, this might have gone very differently. Someone might have filed an ANI report after PineapplePooper1992's first couple of edits to colon cancer, to which an admin could have asked if PineapplePooper1992 had presented any RSes making that claim, and when the (obviously) negative answer came back, indef blocked them under CIR and NOTHERE. The end result of that would have been a consistent message to the lunatic editor saying "we do not permit lunacy here," a consistent message to the experienced editor saying ""Our admins care about the core values this project more than the processes we've invented to manage it," as well as saved that editor from engaging in the endless back and forth that would have ended in them hurling abuse at the lunatic out of sheer frustration, and the ensuing block that, as we all very well know, would have done nothing to assuage that frustration.

How this can apply to AmPol
Now, the example above uses pseudoscience as the topic area. The point of that was that it's easy to construct a truly absurd example of pseudoscience. Politics is far less clear, with blurry lines between good-faith and bad-faith editors. But there remains very clear-cut examples of users pushing bad content, which we can look to in order to distinguish good faith from bad faith editors. And the use of admin actions, such as imposing sanctions, is already intended to be preventative, not punitive, which means there's already a very clearly stated policy reason for imposing sanctions on good-faith editors who are pushing bad content. And the simple fact is; this problem is self-perpetuating. Just as every little pile-on increases the problem disproportionately, so does every helpful solution reduces the problem disproportionately. So we don't need a perfect solution, we just need a good enough one.

As explained above, both sides of this issue are not equally legitimate. We may be somewhat uncomfortable with it, but it is perfectly reasonable for an admin to give closer scrutiny to right-wing editor's positions and contributions than to left-wing editors. Statistically speaking, a right-wing editor is less likely to be competently engaging with the sources and engaging on WP in good faith than a left-wing editor.

Examples of things admins can look for
Instant red flags
 * Arguments that the January 6th riots were merely protests.
 * Arguments that there is doubt about the veracity of the 2020 elections.
 * Arguments that far-right politicians are not far-right.
 * Arguments that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias, if made with any frequency or force.
 * Arguments that widely accepted RSes are unreliable.
 * Arguments that unreliable sources should be permitted for claims of fact.
 * Arguments that we should call a politician a loaded term, like "racist" or "child-trafficker" in wikivoice, when that isn't clearly supported by the vast preponderance of RSes, and disputed by only a few or none. You might notice this one isn't targeted at right-wing editors. That's true. It's still a giant red flag for bad behavior.

Less obvious, but still indicators of pushing bad content
 * Arguments that the opinions of non-prominent individuals deserve the same weight as those of prominent figures.
 * Consistently arguing against NPOV arguments by citing BLP concerns.
 * Citing an editor's admission of having left-wing political views as evidence of their poor faith.
 * Consistently disputing common interpretations of policy by more experienced editors.
 * Frequently dismissing widely cited Wikispace essays.
 * Writing essays endorsing far-right or far-left views; or conspiracy theories in userspace.
 * Requesting sanctions for experienced, respected editors based on diffs that aren't unambiguous evidence of bad behavior.
 * Editing entirely within the topic of politics while invariably taking one side of an issue.

Most of these are pretty obvious. There's little here that the majority of admins won't recognize, and I'm not saying anything that anyone doesn't know. But it bears pointing out.

Why this solution will work
When faced with editors who consistently engage in these behaviors, it's not a sign of an intractable nature, or even of a problem on their part when an experienced editor grows frustrated and uses intemperate language. That's normal human behavior, and it's not the problem, it's a symptom of the problem. The real problem is that there's one or more editors working to damage this project for political reasons. It is the presence of these editors in this topic, repeating long-debunked arguments, making dubious claims of fact, dismissing reliable sources as partisan or inaccurate and engaging in tortuous misinterpretations of our policies, combined with the fact that good-faith editors know they won't be sanctioned for that behavior which causes the frustration that results in incivility.

Furthermore, there are many good-faith editors who support the arguments and tactics of bad-faith editors, because those bad-faith editors support their political views. By cracking down on editors pushing for bad content, we can create distance between good-faith editors and them. Many good-faith editors will get caught up in the crossfire at first, naturally, because those editors have already been pushed by the partisanship into the camp of the bad-faith editors. And they outnumber the bad-faith editors, too. But this would still drive a wedge between them. Good- and bad-faith editors will both begin to tone down their claims and work harder to ensure the content they support is good content, and the differening ways they go about this (bad-faith editors by obfuscation and good-faith editors by critical analysis) will mark them separately. This has the benefit of driving good-faith conservative editors into greater cooperation and agreement with good-faith liberal editors.

This would rapidly stamp out bad-faith liberal editors as well. Since this variety tends to be remarkably less subtle, the effects on them would be markedly greater.

How to implement this
First, we need to agree that bad content is a thing (we already do), and we need to agree that at least part of an admin's job is to keep out bad content (this is where it gets controversial). Once we do that, we need to agree that admins can and should look at the content preferred by various parties in a dispute, and include that in their consideration of how to resolve it.

Basically, we need to agree to implement this solution.

Once we're in agreement, one of the first steps is for the admins to rebalance how sanctions are handled. We should be using more and less severe sanctions. We need to simply stop using blocks so much, and start using temporary and indefinite topic bans more, with a focus on the temporary variety. Use more of Awilley's discretionary sanctions, and use them liberally, across the political spectrum, until there's hardly an editor involved in the topic who isn't subjected to at least one sort of sanction. This will have the effect of removing the stigma, and will reduce the sense of accomplishment editors feel when getting an opponent sanctioned.

Don't be afraid to sanction good faith editors engaged in civil attempts to include bad content. Obviously, this is not ideal, and bad content should be kept out through normal means, but by keeping the severity of sanctions low, and the number of sanctions high, this becomes a much less severe issue. Remember, the purpose of sanctions is not to punish, but to prevent disruption. The matter of who a sanction falls on is only of relevance to the issue of what effect that will have on the editor. By spreading them around generously, we can allow editors in this topic to grow used to them.

Blocks should not be eschewed entirely, but reserved for the worst cases. Look for editors whose entire purpose is to push a political agenda, and then give them one warning before applying an indef per NOTHERE. Editors who work exclusively in AmPol are a prime candidate for inspection, here. Editors who work on topics related to politics in addition to their political work should be given more leeway; We're seeing an editor's interests at play when we look at their editing topics, and though many topics overlap with politics, pure politics is a relatively rare set of interests.