Should Wiktionary votes cast be required to have a rationale?
This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.
In various places where iconized votes are cast, including formal votes, Beer parlour polls and discussions and requests for deletion, users often post rationale-free and comment-free supports or opposes. Should this be disallowed?
Related questions: Should Wiktionary formal votes use pure numerical consensus?
Wiktionary votes cast should be required to have a rationale
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Pro Requiring rationale bolsters the idea that arguments matter and that mere unanalyzed opinions should not prevail.- Pro It helps prevent or reduce government by the unthoughtful and inarticulate.
Con
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Con That is excessive, requiring editors to articulate the obvious.
Objection Not really; only one editor has to articulate the matter and the other editors can say "per editor Joe".
- Con That results in an hard-to-read echo chamber, where editors try to outdo each other in articulation.
- Objection Not really; only one editor has to articulate the matter and the other editors can say "per editor Joe".
- Objection True in principle, but the policy of requiring rationales is still likely to contribute to people trying to articulate on their own.
- Objection That is not obvious. But if it is true, the policy can also say something to the effect of: if you have no genuinely new arguments to add, it is often preferable that you state "per editor so-and-so" over rearticulation of what has already been said.
- Objection People articulating on their own does not need to be a bad thing: one trying to put someone else's argument into their own words often activates the thinking and imaginative parts of the mind and can often discover elements of arguments that are new.
- Objection This scales poorly: if we have 500 voters and each tries to do original articulation, the poor closing editors has to aggregate and collate 500 arguments. This task is greatly relieved if one says merely "per editor so-and-so".
Comment True enough. Then, editors should be encouraged to use the "per editor X" form whenever they see the vote or discussion has already a lot of participants delivering solid arguments.- Comment Wiktionary processes usually do not have so many voters; they are glad to get 50 voters, and it is all too usual to get on the order of 10. This issue exists in principle but does not occur in practice.
