[Wikipedia-l] Certification

Sat Nov 2 17:05:43 UTC 2002

At 8:03 AM -0800 11/1/02, Larry Sanger wrote:
>  > Another benefit if this is it could divert the energies of those with
>>  strongly diverging POVs from "vandalizing" the page. They could
>>  instead channel their energies into expressing their difference via
>>  the rating and creating a linked counter-page...always room for one
>>  more page.
>
>Do you mean that we could create competing pages on the same topic?
>Well, notwithstanding the few pages where there are a few different
>competing articles on the page (this is viewed as a temporary expedient),
>this is one of the original ur-proposals for creating an encyclopedia, and
>on both Nupedia and Wikipedia we've always come out against it.  Cf.
>[[neutral point of view]].

Just the observation that if there are multiple POVs and one slot you 
will always have a power struggle between the POVs to own the slot; 
wheras if you have a place - someplace, anyplace to put each POV you 
can say to each of "them" - "You belong here... stop fighting with 
each other... there's room for both of you".

This could take the form of sub-pages or sub-paragraphs or whatever. 
This is much like the lemma of a dictionary and the multiple senses 
of the term that accumulate under the entry.

Of course it doesn't solve the extreme cases where one POV is in 
denial of another, but it does give them somewhere else to "live" in 
the document.

Just an attempt to convert some of the heat into light.

Peter.