User:Talpedia/Responsible community governance: Equity and access to mental health information on Wikimedia projects

This is a draft response to https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2022:Submissions/Responsible_community_governance:_Equity_and_access_to_mental_health_information_on_Wikimedia_projects

How can community governance models adapt to subjects that require additional expertise, including mental health-related topics?

By functioning as they do. I would ask why does a mental health-related article require additional expertise than, say, an article about nuclear physics or chemistry.

I suspect the answer will be related to assumptions made about the people reading the material and a duty of care, broadly construed, towards them.

I am concerned that this "duty of care" at times is not to do with a patients well-being rather it is to reduce their autonomy and protect those who might feel responsible for harm.

Community governance models can be extremely effective at handling content moderation at scale and in ways that are less biased than top-down models

Does wikipedia engage in content moderation? In a loose sense, yes, material should be an accurate representation of sources.

However, inconsistent communication among subject matter experts, platform representatives, regulators, and volunteer editors can result in policies which fail to address the actual needs of users.

Does the use have any requirements besides an accurate summary of a user with due weighting? And if the requirements that you want to project upon the reader are in violation of this perhaps they cannot be requirements of the user.

Learning Outcomes

I am aware that talkshavea format where they talk about learning outcomes. But this topic is many ways a values-based and speculative argument about how wikipedia should be run. As such contextualizing it as "learning" is perhaps a problematic. If your tutor is correct and you have learned from them, surely they agree. They can certainly present a case for you and introduce to their arguments.

A general response
What do I actually think about this?

Everyone wants a slice of the wikipedia pie for their own ends. This applies to editors and "experts" alike. The fiction is that all wikipedians are purely motivated by the existence of a complete and free encyclopedia, and policies complain of point of view pushing. I would describe the reality as more people's POV shape their knowledge, worldview and interest and having a clear intention to share a POV or not this will filter into an editors action, and it may be that being unaware of one's POV does not produce more balanced editing. Nevertheless, wikipedian's may aspire to neutrality, engage in curiosity and craftsmenship, and agree to bind their actions in return for others actions to be bound or in exchange for the legitimacy and reach of their work, and in so doing the product of wikipedia can overcome with the failings of the individual or even turn failings into virtues.

The framework in wikipedia is designed to, and to some degree manages to, balance the desires and interests of different editors to produce a valuable product that is broadly true.

But I fear the framing here is someone that experts want to come along and do things different because of the process can't be trusted, and I fear that this can understand the complex web of disconfirmation that exists within wikipedia.