User talk:Zvika/Interview/Integrated

/Pre-publication: comments made by the interviewees while preparing the final version of this interview (probably not very interesting to the general public)

Third-Party Comments
Thoughts responding to the final version of the moderated interview could go here.

I don't think I agree with either of the 'fundamental changes' being proposed. On the one hand, routinely or preemptively protecting pages from non mainstream scientific points of view while they are being edited would, in my opinion, be likely to chill debate among scientists and infuriate non-scientists. At the point where we need two tiers of editing powers based not on an editor's lifetime contributions to Wikipedia but on the content of the editor's opinions, we've already lost the battle to create a free, open, and accurate compendium of knowledge--the encyclopedia isn't open if you have to hold certain beliefs in order to edit certain parts of it.

On the other hand, making sure that "everyone's a winner" by letting the creationists write most of the text for Creationism and the evolutionists write most of the text for Evolution is more of a feel-good compromise than a real solution. To the extent that we (we being the Wikipedia community) have actual knowledge about which things are true and which things are not true; which things are prominent and which things are not prominent, we should say so, even if that means annoying people who disagree with our opinions.

The problem is that it's very awkward to say that the community knows that (say) homeopathy has no basis in material reality. The community includes non-scientists as well as scientists. To non-scientists, science may seem like a black box--information goes into the scientific community, and information comes out of the scientific community, but ordinary laypeople have no way of knowing or verifying the processes that relate the inputs to the outputs. It's not just a matter of willful ignorance. I'm relatively well-educated; I understand the basic tools of statistical analysis, I'm familiar with the idealized version of the scientific method, and I've disassembled my share of DNA in the lab. But just because a scientific experiment is theoretically replicable doesn't mean that I have the opportunity to run my own set of tests to check up on it--the technology is too complicated and the scale is too large. A layperson who suspects that flies are spontaneously generated by rotting meat can disabuse himself of the notion by replicating Louis Pasteur's experiments; a layperson who suspects that antidepressants aren't as effective as advertised can't replicate Pfizer's large-scale clinical trials. I happen to believe that most scientists are relatively disinterested public servants who enjoy providing others with their best guess as to what the truth about material reality is. But suppose I didn't hold that belief? Suppose I thought that scientists were primarily interested in spreading a set of materialist, atheist, and determinist philosophical assumptions, and that they use the amazing accomplishments made possible by scientific research to persuade people to adopt their point of view, just as some religions use the amazing miracles allegedly made possible by pious faith to persuade people to adopt their point of view. Such a belief is not, strictly speaking, a belief about material reality. There is no particular reason to privilege the opinions of scientists about whether scientists and their conclusions are trustworthy. Scientists know more about how science works, but they also would have more motivation to conceal any flaws that might exist in the scientific process. If scientists  were  somewhat corrupted by their sources of funding or by their ideological prejudices, we would expect scientists to conceal or deny this corruption, because most scientists, like most humans, do not like admitting their moral imperfections (even though many scientists, unlike most humans, enjoy discovering and discussing their technical errors).

Given this foundation for mild skepticism about the truth of a scientific consensus, when a minority of lay editors disagree with a majority of scientific editors, it's not clear that the scientists have any right to ignore, censor, or disparage the lay minority's views. I realize that there are any number of POV editors who are 'sociopathic' with respect to Wikipedia's mission--they adopt a superficial air of civility and make a bad faith show of attempting to arrive at consensus, but it eventually becomes clear to those who work with them that their only mission is to skew an article toward their preferred point of view. These lying cheaters should be punished rather harshly, in my opinion. There should be some kind of procedure for attempting to prove that a given user is abusively and deceptively tendentious, and then permanently banning that user. There should not be a default assumption that anyone who repeatedly disagrees with a mainstream scientific consensus is thereby a POV pusher.

Invisible Flying Mangoes (talk) 21:53, 29 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Mangoes (: I don't think what you call my proposal -or I think you do- is actually my proposal "letting the creationists write most of the text for Creationism and the evolutionists write most of the text for Evolution is more of a feel-good compromise than a real solution."  Maybe I'm getting you wrong, but all I said is that WEIGHT and Notability are relative to the subject of the article.  Just as Creationism is a notable minority view in Evolution, Evolution is a notable minority view in Creationism.  That's what's being challenged by SPOV.  With SPOV, you'd have mainstream science as the most notable and WEIGHTY view in both.


 * You'll get in real trouble with this:


 * To the extent that we (we being the Wikipedia community) have actual knowledge about which things are true and which things are not true; which things are prominent and which things are not prominent, we should say so, even if that means annoying people who disagree with our opinions.


 * Because there are a lot more people who know that God exist than there are Atheists. And there are a lot more people who know that psychics are real than there are skeptics.


 * But it kind of seems to contradict the rest, in that you then go on to say that one needs to adopt a universally skeptical attitude and let WP reflect at least the good faith doubts about science of the majority of editors? If I'm getting that right?


 * Then you say that we should punish the bad faith people who are sneaky about it. Well, that is one of the major complaints leveled against me, so I guess I'd be out.  They say I'm civil but otherwise a rat.  I'd suggest implementing a jury system, but I doubt it would get far.


 * The funny thing is, like me you can agree with the science, and even be very strict about it, and you'll still get tarred as a POV pusher for not saying things like this without attribution.


 * So, what would you do exactly? There is also a debate -I hope- here .  —— Martinphi     ☎ Ψ Φ —— 07:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I stand by my comments about your feel-good solution; letting the criteria for weight and notability vary with the subject matter of the article will, in my opinion, inevitably result in creationism articles being written mostly by creationists and evolution articles being written mostly by evolutionists.


 * You may have missed my point about knowledge and skepticism. If and only if the community has knowledge, ie, if and only if there is a solid consensus among editors in support of an opinion, then that opinion should be relied on.  A consensus is not the same thing as a majority, or even a supermajority.  To decide whether a consensus exists, editors should consider not just how many people agree, but also who agrees, what they agree on, how long they have agreed for, why they agree, and the process by which they came to that agreement.


 * What should we do? We should wait for a consensus to emerge before including an article in the finished product; Wiki 1.0, or whatever they're calling the releases these days.  Time is on our side.


 * If you're being unfairly accused of being superficially civil but substantively sociopathic, then I'm sorry, but I still think having a harsh penalty available will do more good than harm. Better that one editor should be improperly banned than that a hundred editors should wreak hard-to-detect havoc on the encyclopedia, requiring the efforts of a thousand editors to clean up after them.


 * Invisible Flying Mangoes (talk) 04:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)