User:Amarkov/Problems with Wikipedia
The intention of the policy is to prevent people from wikilawyering over strict interpretations of what policy says, to the detriment of the encyclopedia. However, more recently, it has been treated as carte blanche to do whatever you please if you think it improves the encyclopedia. If it were only new, unexperienced, editors that did this, it would not be a problem, since they can be reverted easily. But it's not. A significant number of our active admins are ready to delete things, either against consensus or without a discussion to establish consensus, because they believe that deletion will improve the encyclopedia. And when this happens, you have to spend 5 days at DRV getting it overturned, because reverting an admin action, no matter how absurd, is actionable as wheel warring.
Discussion
[edit]The discussions that we have on Wikipedia are decent. But they could be better. Our current system of discussion seems to be roughly equivalent to a legal proceeding. There are opposite sides, and the goal is not so much to find the truth, or a consensus, as it is to make your side win. That is arguably the best system when you want to weight the results towards one side, such as we want to avoid prosecuting innocent people. But on Wikipedia, we should not be protecting one side or the other from unfair decisions, we should be trying to come to a consensus. People in a discussion still, although probably unconsciously, treat it as anathema to argue with someone on your "side".