User:Unixtastic
Random quotes:
“Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.” -- Plutarch
“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still” -- Lao Tzu
“The words of truth are always paradoxical.” -- Lao Tzu
"Truth is not the criterion for inclusion of any idea or statement in a Wikipedia article, even if it is on a scientific topic" -- WP:TRUTH
What's wrong with wikipedia, and how to fix it ( in no particular order ):
- A lack of respect for truth in cases where truth is clearly established. This is a wiki, that means it can be updated quickly if our view of what's true changes. The fix is to adjust WP:TRUTH and stop pushing verifiability over correctness.
- Administrator functions attract people who desire power over others instead of people who do a good job. Maybe this could be fixed by paying some professional non-fiction writers as super-administrators if the budget allows.
- Editors pushing certain viewpoints by hounding those that disagree with them and/or attracting those with the same viewpoint as their own. Maybe maximum edit limits per article would help? Or some kind of credit system for established and respected editors to encourage them to check and edit random articles.
- Contempt instead of NPOV for viewpoints that hit on social taboos. See the race and intelligence discussions for an examplesof this. Another example is Countries of the UK. Wales is considered a country when it isn't operationally independent and doesn't issue it's own money or passports. 'Country' is being used in some uncommon nationalistic sense here and any other view is strongly opposed. I see no easy way to fix this other than editor education.
- References require too much manual code, this intimidates new editors. Maybe some technical fix could be thought up.
- A moot insistence that wikipedia is about 'making an encyclopedia'. Wikipedia doesn't have to be and shouldn't be a free version of encyclopedia Britannica. The fix is a simple change of policy.
- Experts on a given subject have no more say on their areas of expertise than uninformed editors do. I can't think of a fix for this.
- Math subjects are written to be as pedantically correct as possible. They should be re-written to be informative and helpful to people who are not already experts in that field. Fix - rewrite them.