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This is an essay, a page containing the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints, and they may be heeded or not based upon your judgement and discretion. |
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This page in a nutshell: Don't "However" a position in the middle of stating its case. |
Anybody who has ever participated for long enough in a two-sided discussion of any sort, especially online, knows that inevitably there comes a point where nobody is discussing anything anymore. With the same arguments and counter-arguments having been asserted and refuted over and over and over again, the average participant has lost all hope of achieving dialogue or synthesis; what was a discussion turns into a competition of who has the wit and strength of argument to better crush and humiliate their opponent, perhaps for one minute even grabbing the fluttering, elusive, holy grail of The Last Word.
The effect is often subtle, stretching across forums, media outlets and centuries. Not on Wikipedia, though. Wikipedia, by a unique process of collaborative distillation, often manages to pack all that polarized futility into a single paragraph. You might find the following eerily familiar:
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- Apples have often been claimed to be objectively better than oranges by experts; estimates as to the exact amount of betterness of the apples vary, but are usually claimed to be between 3 and 5 kilobons. However, these experts have at many instances been exposed as interested parties, culminating in a particularly embarrassing incident where one such expert was discovered to have, in fact, been an apple, thoroughly discrediting the Applist propaganda efforts and winning the Orange faction renewed support in faculties worldwide. Though Apple representatives assert in response, backed up with concrete empirical proof, that these alleged claims are nothing more than an Orangist smear campaign. However, in a report published late 2006, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both condemned Applists for war crimes and other violations of the Geneva convention. But these accusations are old and have already been addressed and debunked by the Applists long before the report, which in turn led to widespread accusations of hypocrisy due to lack of references or condemnations in that same document to the prevalent Orangist apartheid...'
And so forth, and so on. To get the full effect, remove all factual information that might have accidentally served to put any of these claims into perspective. 1
What happened here? One editor decided to assert something and another editor, who fancied themselves fit to deliver a proper rebuttal, did just that. A third editor, who is entirely familiar with that argument, rushed to formulate his own counter-rebuttal so the truth can be known, and this went on and on until this hypothetical piece of text reached its current state, which is about as insightful as a match of table tennis. This can get especially ridiculous when a dedicated editor or a few of them swoop down on an entire article and pulverize it with this method; each and every assertion contrary to their views becomes stapled with the proverbial "however" or "but", the one true position gets the last word on everything and as a humorous side-effect the article becomes physically painful to read through.
There are several possible solutions to this. One quick first-aid solution to pull a section out of thread mode is to segregate the cases for the two positions, such that position A gets to state its main arguments, then position B gets to state its main arguments, with neither being in the face of either. This helps put the gist of the points of view involved into intelligible form, encouraging new editors to add relevant information in a constructive way instead of as contrarian interruptions. Once that has been achieved, an ideal long-term solution would be to absorb the different arguments and counter-arguments into a continuous logical narrative, presenting arguments where it is their place to be heard and to the degree that they matter, as a consequence of the article's outline rather than as its foundation. The latter solution can often be achieved by drawing on the two narratives which typically evolve from the former solution, which means that jointly, they sketch a general plan outline of salvaging a thread-moded article.
A good rule of thumb is, if a position is notable and reasonable enough to be represented in an article, it is notable and reasonable enough to be represented without being instantly however-ed. Encyclopedias should read like encyclopedias, not like forum discussion threads.
