User:Tuomas/the underlying flaw of Wikipedia

The underlying flaw of Wikipedia is that wikipedia naively believes in the good will and mutual respect of contributors.

In areas where this mutual respect is lacking, and the size of the minority isn't negligible, for instance articles on US politics and on US actions abroad, or on conflicts where English speakers aren't or weren't directly involved, there is a tendency to have protracted edit wars.

The edit wars make the Wikipedia environment more bellicose and barbaric, tending to chase away valuable contributors and instead attract the more aggressive and unsensitive kind of contributor. This seems to be a vicious circle. Although many domains of Wikipedia hopefully remain unaffected by the actual edit wars, all of Wikipedia is affected by the impact of the less cooperative wikipedians, who also have more of an incentive to get the limited power of a administratorship, which is why they plausibly tend to get overrepresented among the influential and authoritative wikipedians.

Remedy
I'm convinced that an automatized scheme for delaying the public display of edited versions of the articles would be the most important improvement of Wikipedia.

A serious proponent of an improvement for an Wikipedia article wouldn't care if it wasn't made public at once &mdash; as long as it was noted that there exist a proposed improvement, and readers of the page were given oppertunity to see it before they maybe made the same or other proposals for improvements.

The problem with such a scheme would be how to handle conflicting proposals (i.e. the equivalent to our current edit wars), but if no proposal for new wording or content of an article were adopted, unless unopposed or supported by a qualified majority, then the revert warriors and edit warriors should be forced to start convince others with argument instead of brute endurance, or be forced to work towards compromises and consensus!

/Tuomas