Community point of view

The community point of view is the implicit systemic bias that is shared by all who consider themselves to be part of a "community" of editors or contributors on a large public wiki. To date none of these has put measures in place to deal with this bias other than informal methods which have proven clearly inadequate. Starting by acknowledging that there *is* such a POV, and that it must be neutralized or limited like any other POV, is critical.

As an example of the systemic denial, there is no discussion whatever of this on Meta-Wikipedia, despite several attempts to start one. It seems the Wikipedia Liars Club is quite determined to pretend that they have "no POV" and are "inherently neutral" or something.

This is of course bullshit, and, detrimental in the extreme to that project. Similarly attempts to declare that m:Wikipedia is not a social club have been attacked, deleted without process, etc., by those who use it primarily for social means. This is detrimental to its mission as an encyclopedia of course.

See also sysop vandalism.

The Consumerium approach should be to start by treating the current set of contributors as at least one faction, and, permitting other factions to be started as differences of view become too extreme to accomodate without some system of factionally defined or approved edits. In other words, something controversial should not stand without at least one faction "behind it", and it should be this factional backing, not the contributor's "reputation" or any conflicts between users that determine whether the edit stands or not.