User:つがる/ZLEA Interview

1. What do you wish would change about Wikipedia?

In my opinion, Wikipedia's weakest point is its neutrality policy. If I were to change anything about Wikipedia, I would change the focus of the policy from defining neutrality as the average point of view to defining it as a lack of a point of view.

I hate to use a political example, but in 2006, Jimbo Wales said, "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population." This should be a red flag that Wikipedia is going in the wrong direction if it is to become truly neutral. True neutrality is not slightly more liberal or conservative than the US population, or the world's population for that matter. In fact, being exactly in the middle of the left-right spectrum is not even neutral. Being truly neutral means covering political topics from outside of any political spectrum, left-right or otherwise. Another example is religion/science. Covering religious/scientific topics from an atheist's point of view is not neutral, even if atheism is just the absence of religion.

If I were to change the neutrality policy, I would throw out the consensus system we currently use, as that just a way of covering the majority point of view. Sure, the consensus system has its place in Wikipedia, but this this is not it. I would also require in text citations for controversial topics, that way it would not matter if a source is biased or not and the reader can more easily see where the information came from and choose for themself if they can trust it. Transparency like this would go a long way toward earning the trust of people who consider Wikipedia to be unreliable.

Of course there would be a lot of loopholes to iron out, but I'm sure a rewrite of the neutrality policy would be successful if we tried.

2. Why did you choose to edit Wikipedia?

I love the idea of a collection of all human knowledge. I know that Wikipedia will never be complete, but to me it's a good feeling to know that I at least had a part in an attempt.

3. What do you think about Wikipedia?

Currently, Wikipedia has a lot of flaws. However, nothing is perfect, and in time I believe these flaws can be ironed out. As I said above, I live the idea of a collection of all human knowledge, and Wikipedia may be as close as we are ever going to get.

4. Have you ever edited using an IP, before making an account? If so, how was it different?

I started editing in mid to late-2016 as an unregistered IP. Since then, there have been a few times that I forgot to log in (plus one time I was logged in but a bug caused the signature on my talk page post to be that of the IP I was using). I think I decided to create an account when I figured out I needed one to create articles. Other than that, I didn't really notice many other differences. At wasn't until about a year later that I really became aware of all the other differences, ones I wouldn't really have cared about when I first began.