Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a chatroom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it. |
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This page is NOT official policy, it is an original essay, describing personal criticism of the status quo at wikipedia, although its author, among others, repeatedly worked towards changing the claimed weak points[1][2][3]. |
Some Wikipedians believe that all of Wikipedia's official policies and guidelines are based on five pillars that define Wikipedia's character:
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Wikipedia is a chatroom, anyone can add anything to the article, contributions are made by incompetent editors AND the contents of articles changes constantly. No way you could call this encyclopedia.
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Wikipedia uses the neutral point-of-view, which means that the bunch of incompetent wikipedians, who edit the article, usually try to find common wording.
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Wikipedia is free content, so all text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and may be distributed or linked accordingly. That means that any extremist's view that is left on the page can be reproduced on some mirror site, thus spreading the "truth" further.
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Wikipedia follows the writers' rules of engagement: which are needed because it's not an encyclopedia, but a moderated chatroom. You need some rules so you can moderate the users.
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Wikipedia doesn't have firm rules, that actually means that if nobody notices what you have written, it's OK. Due to heavy linking from Google, wikipedia has become the best place to present your weird ideas.
The catch is not in the obvious spams, advertisements, blatant nonsenses etc. The catch is in normal articles, that are not censored full time, and that can be changed seamlessly to explain the minority POV, because the self-claimed mainstream editors are just not that interested to edit them all the time if their work is regularly being changed into something factually correct.
For instance, many mainstream health professionals reject the competition of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) methods out of hand. The articles about them are usually written and maintained by people who are researchers, enthusiasts or even practitioners. Although the books on CAM topics may not be considered reliable by a majority of competing, conventional health professionals, they are used as reliable and verifiable subject sources on Wikipedia because the majority of editors (or the most diligent editors) do consider them reliable sources about actual practices, philosophy, rationale and technical references. As a result, those articles contain some basics of CAM, whereas in the real world, the mainstream pharmaceutical based POV is skeptical towards CAM.
If we followed our Wikipedia guidelines etc., we would have skeptical articles with the minority POV included under some appropriate section, somewhere between AfD and speedy oblivion. This is one place where Wikipedia rules fail - such articles attract people with weird ideas - freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, encyclopedic knowledge, scholastic rigor, and an independent scientific POV, and no one will stop them from presenting those ideas to the world. Unless you do.
