Wikidebates:Purpose and goals
From Wikidebates
The following statements refer to "Wikidebates contributors". That means you, if you find them agreeable and would like to help write the debates. We hope you will.
vision
Wikidebates contributors envision a world in which all people can easily educate themselves about controversial subjects.
mission
The mission of Wikidebates contributors is to make Wikidebates the best source of written public debate.
goals
- Provide articulate, respectable arguments in a manner conducive to fully understanding controversial issues.
- Prevent ulterior manipulation.
measures of success
bottoming out
Ideally a debate would end with both sides agreeing. A normal debate, however, "bottoms out" at fundamental disagreements over unarguable definitions, beliefs, or values. Such unarguables are equivalent to the axioms in a proof. They are more or less irrevocably fixed in the debater's mind--maybe unconsciously, maybe genetically. To the extent that a debate bottoms out, whether the opponents agree to disagree or pick up arms for more serious battle, we can consider the debate itself to be a success. By delineating the reasoning, from the initial general claim all the way down to those fundamental disagreements at the bottom, the debate did all that it could be expected to do.
