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by observationist
822 days ago
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If someone has staked a claim over an article, regardless of its factual accuracy, it's almost impossible to fix problems. Look at any politicians, celebrities, topics that are contentious in the public sphere, and you'll find control over the topic has been taken. There is no sane recourse - you can find endless examples of years long discussions as people who know what they're talking about battle it out with empty headed wiki editors who simply want the clout, or don't know the first thing about rational discourse and insist on their weird, distorted views of reality. Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page. Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political. |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
You make a change, it gets reverted, and then you discuss it. The number one mistake I see new editors make is they don't understand how discussion works and when to seek additional input.
After being reverted, you're expected to start a discussion on the talk page. So many people do not do that, and instead try to communicate through 200 character edit summaries.
But talk pages are just the first step. The next step is to get more people involved. There are a bunch of informal rules which editors have tried to write down on how you can bring more people to a talk page in a fair way (otherwise you would only solicit input from people you would agree with).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution
The typical way this is done is through an RfC, which is a structured discussion between multiple options. When you set up an RfC to resolve a dispute, a bot randomly messages people who are interested in the general area to comment at the talk page. That means you get a bunch of uninvolved editors that don't really have any stake in the dispute and are more level-headed.
The discussion's consensus itself is then evaluated by someone (a closer) who must be uninvolved. In a contentious subject it is often an administrator who has never edited in the topic area before. The closer must give reasons for their decision and an explanation, and there is a working appeals process.
Contrast to virtually any other website where decisions are frequently made by people involved in disputes, you typically don't get reasons for why something is moderated, and you can't effectively appeal to another decision maker as you don't understand the reasoning upon which the decision is based.