Archive:Summaries of policy arguments

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Revision as of 11:00, 23 March 2007 by imported>Larry Sanger (→‎The rules for summarizing policy arguments)
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Generally, Citizendium policy discussion takes place on the Forums, not the wiki. But we might occasionally find it useful to summarize and standardize some arguments on different sides of a controversial Citizendium policy issue--and for that, the wiki will be useful.

The rules for summarizing policy arguments

  1. Our purpose here is to summarize and standardize arguments--not to argue niggling and idiosyncratic points that would be irrelevant outside the context of a particular person-to-person exchange. In other words, we are dealing with a relatively "universal" question and we are summing up "universal" arguments on each side.
  2. In designing the structure for our debate, simplicity is best: one side presents an argument; the other side presents a reply; there can, in addition, be a rebuttal and counter-rebuttal, but try to avoid this and don't iterate "downward" any further.
  3. These must be excellent, largely fallacy-free formulations of the arguments.
  4. Consider this page a style template. Begin "affirmative" and "negative" sections with top-level headings (one =).
  5. We will learn/settle on more rules as we go. Note, some ideas about how to proceed are given on this old Textop wiki page. See also Debatepedia.

The issues