User talk:Ed Poor/Rights
The vanishing "right to vanish"
The statement (which I deleted) "everyone (whether they have contributed to Wikipedia or not) has the right to vanish..." is utterly false. We most certainly do not guarantee that anyone, regardless of what they have done, will be erased from our records on demand. ➥the Epopt 15:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
Expression rights and the extension of knowledge
I want to introduce here a concept that extends speech rights with respect to information and the information society, and try to show that a blended concept of rights and responsibilities can provide for Wikipedia the ability to extend, or construct, knowledge as part of discussion.
In my own life a number of concepts folded in on themselves causing my ideas, which I practice in my career, to be viewed as inflammatory and personal attacks when applied to individuals. I counsel troubled teens, many of whom are teenage felons. In the past year I have come to understand, and successfully apply, a concept of psychology that I developed from my understandings of the network layered model. My career has a specific point of view with respect to right and wrong, and my layered concept strengthens that concept. I can now easily determine from what people say, how what they say will affect others, and what the outcome will be. I know this sounds grandiose, but model works for me at a rate of at least 95%, and when I find I may be wrong, I update the model to make strengthen it.
Wikipedia, in contrast, has unusual difficulty with the concepts of right and wrong, especially with respect to expression. There is excessive deletion, so much so that a user criticized me for making accusations of evoking Nazism -- in advance.
Elsewhere in the Information Society, these issues have been resolved by allowing for forked discussions; this works in many respects, but prevents these systems from actually reconciling differences, and usually results dead forks. In my very successful Katrina discussion group on Care2.com, I believe that I attained a 99% rate of democratic free speech, where the 1% exception was for outright lying, an attempt at a coup. The lying, to me, was dangerous simply because the work we were doing was being used by policy makers to resolve the crisis, and the expression of false information, or any major disruption, may lead to loss of life. The coup attempt, of course, hit below the belt. During the extreme circumstance of the Katrina flood in New Orleans, I did once what I never do, which is delete another's information, and also banned a member.
When it comes to altering text, what I do often is edit fairly to create a more readable document, which is what I am doing on my talk page (not yet finished; this is fun).
I think that for these discussions to work, members have to be identifiable in some way, either through their online personality, or through typical identification such as common information. This allows for rebuttal, all important to discussion. The rules, I think, need to adhere to format, as in the presentation of the information such as a need for brevity, rather than by rules which dictate specific norms of behavior.
This is all the time I have right now to write this, but I hope that you can see that I am not trying to create a workable compromise between, say, left and right, but extend the idea of Wikipedia to give it the ability to extend knowledge especially in the contentious areas of social science to might be thought of as "meta data."
Truthfully, my thinking right now is that if a site cannot actually support the extension of information, the evolutionary reason for our collaboration facilities, because it is unable to support concepts of equality in the expression of information. If this is so, my time spent even editing this talk page is just a waste.
--John van v 16:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
Rights
Users have the right not to be harassed. This has time and time again been enforced by ArbCom. This essay makes it sound as if users have no rights whatsoever and could be treated like crap, at least in theory, without consequences. Horribly one-sided essay. EconomicsGuy (talk) 09:52, 3 January 2008 (UTC)