User:SPACKlick/Advocacy is not the issue

At controversial articles you are more likely to get disputes between editors, as personal opinion will be more split. One need not be an advocate against badgermancy to prefer

"Studies have not found that badgermancy is safe for children."

or an advocate for to prefer

"There is no data showing badgermancy is harmful to children."

However, where opinion differs about the phrasing, advocacy concerns may well be raised. This essay is about why they shouldn't be.

Advocacy isn't the problem, disruptive editing is the problem.

Why is Advocacy harmful

An advocate is, per the WP:ADVOCACY essay, someone who edits wikipedia with the purpose of raising or minimising the visibility or credibility of a specific viewpoint. The issue is where an advocate violates core content policies and guidelines. In particular advocates are at risk of violating;

• WP:NPOV — In particular WP:WEIGHT, ignoring the balance of viewpoints in the sources in favour of highlighting a preferred version.
• WP:ASSERT — By promoting opinions in sources to fact status where they agree with them or vice versa.
• WP:DISRUPT — By repeatedly ignoring consensus or not engaging in consensus building because they have the truth. By citing unencyclopedic sources or misrepresenting reliable sources.

So what's advocacy got to do with it?

Nothing. Imagine two editors we'll call BodgerSummoner and NaiveGoodFaith. And two situations A and B. BodgerSummoner vehemently believes, from their experience with badgermancy and the reading they have done that badgermancy is perfectly safe and a great hobby. They think the wikipedia article is overly negative and needs improving. NaiveGoodFaith doesn't know much about Badgermancy and was generally aware that there was some concern over its safety. On a random article wander they see the sentence in the lede and think it is a bit too negative.

Each editor then changes the sentence in the lead to "Badgermancy has never been shown to be harmful to children." Which gets reverted.

A. They go to the talk page to argue that this is the best interpretation of the sources. Eventually the discussion leads to the sentence "There is no data showing badgermancy is harmful to children, although the data are limited." B. They edit war for the inclusion, claiming any sources that deny it's harmless are biased and present quote mines from journals as long as several blogs as evidence that badgermancy is totally harmless. They hear no point being made about professionals who consider the risk enough to fund massive studies and advertise warnings.

It's clear that situation B is disruptive, whether the editor is an advocate or not. It's clear that situation A is good editing practice whether the editor is an advocate or not. The problem is the violation of policies and guidelines, not whether the editor is an advocate or not.

How to proceed

It's never worth accusing someone of being an advocate. It's never worth raising advocacy in a dispute or dispute resolution scenario. While the dispute is a content dispute, focus on content not editor. When the dispute becomes behavioural take the diffs of the behaviour to the relevant board (such as WP:AN/I). Calling someone an advocate is never helpful.

Why you shouldn't call someone an advocate

Potential advocates fall into four categories.

1. People deliberately trying to circumvent the system to instill a POV.
2. People aware they have a bias but trying to overcome it to edit neutrally.
3. People unaware that their bias cannot be represented by wikipedia.
4. People unaware of their bias or without a bias.

Calling the first an advocate will have no effect, they may make a show of defending themselves but they're aware of what they're doing and will likely not stop till sanctioned. Calling the second an advocate will sometimes make them re-check their edits but only if they're willing to concede their editing may be problematic, calling out the problematic edits would have the same effect. Calling the third group advocates will seem like an insult, whereas explaining to them the purpose of the wiki will, in most cases, chill the lean in their editing. Calling the last groups advocates shows an astounding lack of good faith and will again be seen as an insult, call out the bad edits, point to where sourcing is not at the same position as they are.

Why do people worry about advocates?

To blame the boogeyman. It's easier to dismiss someone as editing because their POV makes them want to harm the wiki than to consider whether their edit has merit. And it's a compounding problem. If editor A likes edit x and is an advocate with problem behaviour then editor B who also likes edit x must be an advocate and so can be ignored.