Grants:IdeaLab/Logical statements as guidelines

Inspire campaign

Logical statements as guidelines

To replace existing guidelines by ones which leave no 'grey areas' and no 'openness to interpretation'.

idea creator• Mathmensch

project manager• Mathmensch

community organizer• Mathmensch

researcher• Mathmensch

designer• Mathmensch

developer• Mathmensch

created on09:32, Friday, March 18, 2016 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Many of the guidelines of wikimedia are open to interpretation in the sense that it is not always logically deducible from them which information may be shared within an article. As an example, at wikipedia I attempted to contrast some racist statements of Donald Trump by actual facts; an edit that was immediately reverted in its whole (including the more neutral formulation of the opening phrase, which previously had been 'Trump has made border security a priority' and already sounds very suspiciously like an advertisement). Fortunately, in this case an administrator noticed the wrongdoing and intervened in my favor. However, i myself have witnessed countless occasions where such fortunate intervention did not show itself, and deletions of critical information remain in effect, although the deleted information was of direct interest to any reader in each single occasion.

Very often, those who delete the content (and who may well be paid editors, as we have seen from the exposure of such folks in the recent past), argue that the specific passages may be irrelevant or may tip the article's balance, such that the subject of the article may be seen in a bad light. The rebuttal to that argument is obvious; some things just are appalling if described in a scientific fashion. But currently, the guidelines seem to allow for such arguments to pass through unhinderedly in many cases.

What is your solution?

The solution to the problem is to be found within the realm of mathematics. We simply create guidelines for articles which are a function from all possible edits to the set $\{{\text{true}},{\text{false}}\}$. This we do by partitioning all edits. Each edit will then belong to exactly one equivalence class, for which we shall specify if the edit is valid or not.

Project goals

With this project, I would like to

• substantially lower the amount of immoral paid editing done within wikimedia projects,
• make the editing process more efficient by providing guidelines which are more comprehensive due to their logical clarity,
• decrease the amount of politically or otherwise biased edits in favour of edits of good-will and high quality,
• create increased legal certainty, so that wikimedia users do not have to fear being sanctioned in an arbitrary fashion and, in this way,
• decrease the loss of highly qualified editors from wikimedia projects due to frustration about incompetence or arbitrary sanctions.

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