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. Some view this as just editorial bias of the normal sort, as Disinfopedia seems to have. Others view it as a symptom of an ideology called "virtual community", which seems to be a way for insiders to excuse methods to limit debate with outsiders they despise (which is necessary in a real community where physical contact is involved, but is not really an aspect of wiki communication).

To date none of these wikis 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. See also individual bias.

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 seems to be the basis for unity on which they have built their own social capital.

This is of course also plain bullshit in light of their claims to be "open", 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. Wikinfo is a better encyclopedia project that is aware of this problem and tries to overcome it, but not by compensation and faction mechanics, more by just separating the multiple point of view involved.

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.