User:AaronSw/Policy comments

On the whole, Wikipedia functions amazingly well. However, there are some policy issues which are some things which are rather broken. As I wander through Wikipedia, I'll take notes on some of the more broken portions (with my own suggestions for fixes) here in this notebook. Please comment and disagree in the talk page.

Protecting pages from edit wars

This has to be the most broken Wikipedia policy. To summarize, any time two people start reverting each other's changes on a page, the whole page is protected from edits by anyone (including, by convention, admins). This is like evacuating a city every time there's a street brawl; the "solution" is way more damaging than the harm.

Sure, edit wars are a little annoying and should be discouraged. A better way to do this would be to pin the blame where it belongs: on the warring participants. Most are repeat offenders, and while one may be "right", getting into an edit war is never the right solution. Instead of protecting the page from everyone, banning the users (perhaps from only that page, when possible) makes much more sense.

But an even better solution is for the admin who would normally protect the page to resolve the dispute. True, Wikipedia stays away from value judgments like the plague, but most of these wars I've seen aren't all that hard to resolve. "Can I include plagiarized material?" "Can I insert some obvious POV?" and so on. We made these people admins for a reason, let them do a job.

Deleting pages

Deleting pages is another major whole in Wikipedia policy. Instead of simply going and fixing a page, it's added to a week-long vote for consensus. For deleters, this is a waste of time. For keepers, this requires constant vigilance to prevent pages from going up in smoke.

There's a much simpler solution: make a page act deleted whenever its text is blank. Links to it will go red, the page will say something like "(This page does not yet exist. You can create it by clicking Edit this page.)" when you visit it, but the page history will remain. This will allow deletions to happen in the same wiki fashion as moving, redirecting, and creating pages. No long votes necessary, and no permanent harm.

But what if people want the page deleted not because of its content, but because they think the topic is inappropriate for an encyclopedia. (This seems to be the most common cause for deletion these days, and probably the reason the voting system was instituted.) Again, the solution is simple: don't delete pages for this reason. A page on an "inappropriate" topic, perhaps never linked to from the encyclopedia, will not bother anyone and may help people who wish to look that particular topic up. If you feel it's necessary to say which pages are of importance and which aren't, set clear guidelines and create a Wikipedia: page stating them and listing appropriate pages. (Then the list can be used to do things like build Wikipedia 1.0.)

NPOV

In a world with determined and deluded adversaries, it's not clear to me how any statement can be NPOV. To take the first sentence from a randomly-selected page:

Ithaca, Michigan is a city located in Gratiot County, Michigan.

Well, I disagree. I think it's located in Monkey County, Michigan.

Ithaca, Michigan is a city located in Gratiot County, Michigan, according to the US Census Bureau.

Well, now you're just lying the US Census Bureau didn't say any such thing.

Ithaca, Michigan is a city located in Gratiot County, Michigan, according to the US Census Bureau. [1]

That page isn't representative of the Bureau's opinion.

Ithaca, Michigan is a city located in Gratiot County, Michigan, according to [2].

That page doesn't say what you said.

"Ithaca, Michigan is a city located in Gratiot County, Michigan" [3].

That quote is false, the page doesn't say that.

At this point, what do you do? How do you decide whose POV goes on the page?

Humorous NPOV stories

I once wrote an article about a man who investigated the Holocaust and concluded that the evidence showed it didn't happen. The original sentence I wrote was that "He flew to Germany to investigate the alleged gas chambers". Incredibly, a number of people ganged up on me and attacked the page for being biased because I said "alleged gas chambers". Apparently being neutral on some subjects only goes so far.

I once tried to make a list of liberal/progressive organizations, like political groups and charities and such. But people said that they didn't think groups I listed weren't really liberal. I said that there were scientific studies about the values and paradigms behind liberalism and conservatism and showed how the groups followed from liberalism. People got very upset at this and thought we should only have groups everyone agreed were liberal. This made the list a lot less useful and it ended up getting deleted.

Don't break the back button

Currently Wikipedia gives the time of each page to the editor to prevent against edit collisions. But this causes false positives when a user hits the back button and edits again. Wikipedia should issue random numbers instead, keep the random number assigned to the last edit, and allow a new edit if the submitted random number is the same as the last random number. Otherwise, it can do the same edit conflict thing.

Sensible URLs

Currently http://en.wikikipedia.org/wiki/Some_page is the proper address for a page; it would be nice if http://wikipedia.org/Some_page at least redirected.

Also, visiting Where's_the_beef? should work (it doesn't because the ? is apparently taken as a cue to begin processing query arguments!).

Sensible redirects

Wikipedia redirects should be reflected in HTTP, so that search engines like Google stop indexing each redirect page separately and people can see in the URL bar what page they're on. @@I filed a bug report on this, need to find the URL.