Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-03-31/Op-Ed
Pro and Con: Has gun violence been improperly excluded from gun articles?
Content disputes on Wikipedia can sometimes seem to drag on forever. The debate about including material on the criminal use of guns in articles on the guns themselves has lasted a decade. Much of the debate has centered on
On this page two editors debate whether criminal use has been improperly excluded from firearms articles. Dlthewave gives the pro side, Springee gives the con side.
Pro: Criminal use was inappropriately excluded from firearms articles
"But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever."
—The Verge, 6 March 2018
By Dlthewave (adapted from User:Dlthewave/Firearms essay)
Weapons used in mass shootings often make headlines, and readers flock to Wikipedia to learn more about them. Despite this interest, many of our articles about guns excluded negative information such as "criminal use" due to an extremely restrictive WikiProject Firearms advice page that was enforced as policy for many years. Editors resisted change by corralling all discussion to the project page, citing "long-standing consensus" as if it were infallible and, when concerns were raised at community venues, dismissing the project advice as a harmless, unenforceable essay. The effort stretches back to 2007 and was finally curtailed in 2018 when an RfC established community consensus to decide mass shooting coverage on a case-by-case basis.
While editing US current events articles in early 2018, I became curious about "The
A typical example occurred when an editor tried to add mentions of the
A
In February 2018, I opened an RfC which proved to be a turning point: "Should articles about firearms include information about mass shootings?" The discussion was well-attended and reached clear consensus to decide inclusion of criminal use on a case-by-case basis.
Despite strong
Although the changes seem fairly minor, they made the project advice far less prescriptive. Combined with the outcome of the RfC, this means that any editor who tries to enforce a blanket ban on Criminal Use inclusion is acting against community consensus and is subject to Discretionary Sanctions under the
Although the situation has improved significantly over the past year, our normal processes failed to swiftly address the disruption at WikiProject Firearms and allowed it to continue for years even after it was brought to the attention of the community through noticeboards and RfCs. This phenomenon can happen anywhere on Wikipedia, particularly when a small group of editors stakes claim to a relatively obscure topic that attracts little outside attention. There are a few ways to ensure that these articles are written to reflect broader community consensus:
- Talk page conduct matters. Consensus determines article content and talk pages are where consensus is built. Problematic article-space edits often trigger admin action by crossing a hard line such as WP:3RR, but false consensusachieved through filibustering and misapplication of policy tends to receive far less scrutiny even though it has the same effect. Walls of text and personal attacks are not part of our consensus-building process; they are behavioral issues which should be addressed promptly.
- Project space content matters. Concerns about Wikiproject Firearms guidance were often dismissed because it was "just an essay" with no formal standing. The fact is that advice which goes against our policies and guidelines does not serve a valid purpose and should not be tolerated. A project's interpretation of a guideline should reflect community consensus, not prescribe it, and project pages should never be used to host the opinions of project participants.
- Consensus should not be based on a majority vote. When closing a discussion, editors almost always announce that it is not a vote before proceeding to count up the !votes and declare the side with the most !votes the winner. In Project space, project members can easily win the vote due to higher turnout. We need to do a better job of assessing policy-based arguments even if they come from the "losing" side. In the few cases where a closer actually evaluated the arguments made in a criminal use discussion, it turned out that many of the !votes on the majority "do not include" side were counter to policy.
- Diversity is important. Often, the folks who are the most interested in and knowledgeable about a topic are also be the ones who push a certain POV. Firearms articles in particular are full of descriptions and statistics that are boring and bewildering to the average editor, and the few outsiders who dared to dip their toes in the water were often asked not to edit in this area due to their lack of specialized knowledge. However, experienced editors can usually recognize and call out policy and guideline violations in any area without having an in-depth knowledge of the topic. Long-term ownership behavior should have been obvious to anyone who gave these articles more than a cursory look.
Con: Criminal use content has not been improperly excluded
By Springee
Politically charged topics on Wikipedia are ripe for content disagreements where each side will use claims of
The pro thesis above is that over a decade, a group of editors excluded
Like any good conspiracy theory there is some truth here. Some editors strive to add criminal use content to firearms articles, others see it as only tangentially related or as a
The pro view is a stool that stands on three legs. The first is the "turning point" RfC. The need for an RfC was discussed by many editors on both sides. A pro side editor took the initiative but didn't get enough input from involved editors. The resulting RfC question was convoluted, resulting in a lost opportunity to get sound guidance on the issue. The result was an insignificant change to the project recommendation which had remained little changed for about a decade.
The pro view of the essay's content change - one phrase was added and another removed - is misleading. It starts with a version of the text that lasted less than a year. It ignores the largely stable version of the text that had been around for almost a decade. When compared to other versions of the text over a decade, the difference is almost exclusively in one sentence reminding that local consensus is the ultimate decider.
In order for
acriminal use to be notable enough for inclusion in the article on the gun used, itmustshould meet some criteria. For instance, legislation being passed as a result of the gun's usage (ex. ban on mail-order of firearms after use of the Carcano in JFK's assassinationwould qualify). Similarly,or if its notoriety greatly increased (ex. the Intratec TEC-DC9 became infamous as a direct result of Columbine). This is determined on a case-by-case basis in accordance with WP:WEIGHT. As per WP:UNDUE,editors "should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to its significance to the subject”."Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources.”Differences between the October 2008 version of the essay and the April 2018 version as changed by User:Dlthewave. Additions shown in bold, removals striken
The net result was an understanding, which had already been in place, that local consensus was ultimately going to decide these issues. It's too bad that the question didn't help editors understand the broader question of
The stool's next leg is the idea that the RfC broke a logjam and now
The last leg of the stool supporting the pro is the assumption that all the excluded material should have been included per
Some editors will intuitively say that is correct and follows
Some editors argue that when the topic is firearms, rather than automobiles,
The pro view has a bit of the smell of sour grapes.
- Examples don't prove the rule. Yes, there may be examples of material improperly excluded, just as there are examples of material properly excluded.
- Consensus changes. Local consensus can change and is unpredictable.
- Don't ignore advice from a Wiki project. Yes, people have cited the Project Firearms style guide improperly but that doesn't prove the guide's intent is wrong or that the guide should be ignored.
- A lost opportunity. The landmark RfC was little more than a lost opportunity to get better community consensus on how to handle WP:WEIGHTin these cases.
- Content disputes and WP:WEIGHT, mixed with the ebbs and flows of article content, and promoted to into a grand conspiracy... but not much more.
Discuss this story
Well done to both sides for putting their viewpoint forward and making it fit the editing requirements -- and well done to the editorial team for making this happen. It appeared there were quite a few hurdles along the way. MPS1992 (talk) 00:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This Op-Ed has parallels to recent controversies and criticism regarding Wikiproject Military History and the "
USAmerican bias
The notion that the use of guns are permitted is very USAmerican centric. In the rest of the world this is not at all accepted or acceptable. As this is not reflected in the reporting on guns and gun violence it is proof perfect that Wikipedia is biased. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 13:37, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Quite an interesting debate. Perhaps we could get more articles in this style in the future? --Joshualouie711talk 21:58, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]