User:Burressd
I am a retired economist still working on a book. I'm going to use this user page to make remarks about the Wikipedia enterprise, as seen by a regular user.
I'm glad Wikipedia exists. I'd like it to be better than it is, but as an institution it seems to have topped out at a certain level of quality. Perhaps my experience will be informative as to why.
I often visit pages where I believe have some degree of expertise in some aspect of the contents. I make comments in the talk page on occasion, and more rarely make direct edits. I make far fewer edits than I think of, and I will probably never contribute a page, though there are number of pages I could contribute. Here's why.
1. To make any serious changes in Wikipedia, it appears I would need to be prepared to defend those changes against critics. That's not bad in itself. However to defend adequately I would have to become somewhat expert in internal Wikipedia culture, politics, and quasilegal code of procedure. I have neither time nor energy left in me to take on that whole new project.
2. I know some things about law, and from what I can see the Wikipedia quasilegal tradition is probably not very well crafted. Working in a badly crafted system of law isn't any fun.
3. I don't like the abusive style of discourse. Abuse is controllable. Most importantly, anonymity is the enemy of civility. Every editor ought to be fully identified, so that long-term reputations are at risk with each edit or comment. Wikipedia also needs a more transparent and swift trial procedure for removing editing privileges from abusive authors.
4. Truly controversial topics are handled very poorly. Instead of trying to create a neutral scientific consensus where none exists, I'd set up unsettled issues like a debate, with some consensus points (if any) plus two versions of the truth. I am by no means saying that climate change deniers should have a page, but I am saying that truly scholarly issues (e.g. feminist and non-feminist views of an issue) might be clarified by a more open conflict not confined to the talk page.
However where there are more than two viable scholarly versions of the truth, then I'd go to a meta-omniscient view that just listed and summarized the various positions.
5. If I were reorganizing Wikipedia I'd assign a lead editor to every page (subject to appeal to higher editors). The lead editor would have mainly traffic cop rights, but also an ability to settle extended debates.