Difference between revisions of "Essay: Edits to blocked editor accounts ratio at a wiki"

Revision as of 07:58, December 15, 2021

Reasonable people at a wiki do not block others for capricious reasons such as protecting a false ideology, false political narrative, pet theory, etc.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary a "reasonable person" is "a fictional person with an ordinary degree of reason, prudence, care, foresight, or intelligence whose conduct, conclusion, or expectation in relation to a particular circumstance or fact is used as an objective standard by which to measure or determine something (as the existence of negligence)."^[1]

The edits to blocked editor accounts ratio at a wiki measures the close-mindedness/intolerance and groupthink of a wiki. Mathematically, the edits to blocked editor accounts ratio can be expressed as: Edits to blocked editor accounts ratio at a wiki = E % BE, where E is the number of edits to the wiki and BE equals the number of blocked editor accounts of the wiki.

A wiki with a low edit to block ratio tends to be a closed-minded wiki that is dogmatic and intolerant.

The inventor of this metric is one of the editors of the User: Conservative account. According to a self-administered Political Compass Test, the inventor of the edit to block ratio of a wiki is moderately to the right on the political spectrum and slightly libertarian.

The case for not being a political partisan and being more objective

The abstract for the journal article At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives which was published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science states:

"Both liberals and conservatives accuse their political opponents of partisan bias, but is there empirical evidence that one side of the political aisle is indeed more biased than the other? To address this question, we meta-analyzed the results of 51 experimental studies, involving over 18,000 participants, that examined one form of partisan bias—the tendency to evaluate otherwise identical information more favorably when it supports one’s political beliefs or allegiances than when it challenges those beliefs or allegiances. Two hypotheses based on previous literature were tested: an asymmetry hypothesis (predicting greater partisan bias in conservatives than in liberals) and a symmetry hypothesis (predicting equal levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives). Mean overall partisan bias was robust (r = .245), and there was strong support for the symmetry hypothesis: Liberals (r = .235) and conservatives (r = .255) showed no difference in mean levels of bias across studies. Moderator analyses reveal this pattern to be consistent across a number of different methodological variations and political topics. Implications of the current findings for the ongoing ideological symmetry debate and the role of partisan bias in scientific discourse and political conflict are discussed."^[2]

Arthur C. Brooks wrote in his article Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being: "A 2012 survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University asked a sample of Americans about their news-consumption habits, and quizzed them about U.S. and international political and economic events. They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all."^[3]

• Psychological Features of Extreme Political Ideologies

"In this article, we examine psychological features of extreme political ideologies. In what ways are political left- and right-wing extremists similar to one another and different from moderates? We propose and review four interrelated propositions that explain adherence to extreme political ideologies from a psychological perspective. We argue that (a) psychological distress stimulates adopting an extreme ideological outlook; (b) extreme ideologies are characterized by a relatively simplistic, black-and-white perception of the social world; (c) because of such mental simplicity, political extremists are overconfident in their judgments; and (d) political extremists are less tolerant of different groups and opinions than political moderates. In closing, we discuss how these psychological features of political extremists increase the likelihood of conflict among groups in society."

Reasonable person standard for blocking people at wiki

Reasonable people at a wiki do not block others for capricious reasons such as protecting errant ideologies/political narrative/pet theories, etc. Instead, they block for uncivil behavior.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary a "reasonable person" is "a fictional person with an ordinary degree of reason, prudence, care, foresight, or intelligence whose conduct, conclusion, or expectation in relation to a particular circumstance or fact is used as an objective standard by which to measure or determine something (as the existence of negligence)."^[4]

As noted above, individuals who are political extremist exhibit psychological distress. Individuals at wikis with low edit to block ratios often display strong feelings of anger/hatred/frustration/anxiety/fear/dread provoked by people who point various deficiencies in their errant thinking.

Wikis with low edits to block editor accounts often block others due to their cognitive dissonance.

Examples of individuals feeling psychological distress due to political matters

References

1. ↑ Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of a "reasonable person
2. ↑ Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives by Peter H. Ditto, Brittany S. Liu, Cory J. Clark, Sean P. Wojcik, Eric E. Chen, Rebecca H. Grady, Jared B. Celniker, and Joanne F. Zinger, Perspectives on Psychological Science, May 31, 2018
3. ↑ Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic, 2020
4. ↑ Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of a "reasonable person