Talk:Main Page

General discussion

Is there somewhere for general discussion of how Ikwipedia works, similar to the 'Wikipedia' pages on Wikipedia? It seems like, there are a lot of things I can't quite make sense of that are general things rather than being specific to any one page - I know the basics of editing pages on Wikipedia and edit pages on Wikipedia sometimes, but there are some specific things I can't quite make sense of on Ikwipedia and wasn't sure whether they're intentional or things that just haven't been done yet. Millipede (talk) 16:45, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

@EnWikiAdmin‎

Thank you for your interest and contributions, @Millipede! We've started to explain our overall philosophy and approach on these pages: Ikwipedia:About, Source transparency, Motivations for Ikwipedia, Acceptable sources, Evidence, Manual of Style, Neutral point of view, Notability, Published, Reliable sources, Replies to objections, Synthesis and interpretation of source material, Testimonial accounts, Article creation. We plan to update, expand, and organize these pages to be more clear, including, among other things, regarding how our approach differs from Wikipedia.

The recommendations and practices, like on article management, are still evolving and subject to change. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have truly exemplary articles to show what we think would be ideal. We are working on this.

In the meantime, I will be happy to answer any questions you might have.

EnWikiAdmin (talk) 23:03, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure about any of the following.

The descriptions of how Ikwipedia works have changed or are contradicting each other or both. I've seen it say that it's supposed to be unbiased, that it's trying to 'counteract' mainstream bias by being biased in the opposite direction (which strikes me as a bad idea), and that it's just seeing what happens if you use a wider range of sources than Wikipedia does (which strikes me as a very good idea - Wikipedia gets good results for a lot of things, but is not suited to some subjects where there isn't much information from mainstream sources, or where the mainstream sources are actually evidently less well-informed than some non-mainstream ones, I've had difficulty with this in editing some Wikipedia articles). Which is it? Do you know?

It's also a bit difficult to tell what sort of articles it's supposed to be - some of the links you mentioned say that it's any articles that people don't think Wikipedia can do well because of sources, but in practice it seems to be mostly UFOs and the wilder and more science-fiction sort of conspiracy theories, and that's also what mostly appears in the 'List of topics' on Main Page. Is that just what happens to have been posted so far?

Possibly, this is a bit vague so I'll give a concrete example of both. Would Royal Raymond Rife do for Ikwipedia? The Rife device is a lot less off-the-wall than the things that are currently listed under Exotic technology since its design is mostly known (though there's argument about the details) and doesn't defy any known laws of physics and it's just whether it's effective at destroying germs that's disputed, but it is very unsuited to Wikipedia because mainstream sources tend not to discuss it except to say that there's no formal evidence that it works, and it's in the ridiculous position of having to rely largely on 1930s newspaper articles even though the inadmissible sources (websites with photos of Rife's letters and lab notes and so on) often demonstrate that the newspaper articles are wrong. Millipede (talk) 22:52, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Here is an example that has multiple issues/problems but gives an idea of what an interesting article might include in that it synthesizes allegations regarding a common topic from a multitude of alleged witnesses, albeit from primary sources and testimonial accounts. Poseidon (talk) 07:44, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Additional information

I wanted to add this as well for anyone looking for additional information. We see our current practice of "forking" articles from Wikipedia as a reasonable starting point, but we unfortunately haven't laid out how an article should evolve from there, and we're considering changing this practice anyway.

We want to cultivate a perspective that reflects what editors think a subject truly entails, including the choices of the article topics and the titles of articles.

For example, articles on alleged incidents for which the Wikipedia article title and/or lede describe the incident as a hoax can be edited to reflect a different (more credulous) perspective, including by changing the title.

As another example, I believe that in addition to — or perhaps instead of — the article on the Roswell incident, we will eventually have articles on subjects like

• the alleged Roswell craft (or "Roswell vehicles" because there were allegedly two that collided, or something like that, and the term 'craft' is the same plural and singular which may be confusing. Anyway...)
• the alleged history of trying to shoot down an alien vehicle using supposed scalar weapons
• the allegedly successful hit (the "operation to ensure recovery")
• the alleged Roswell craft retrieval operation (see also UFO retrieval program)
• alleged pieces of the Roswell craft

and so on. Some of these article titles are speculative, but hopefully people get the idea until things are more understandable. We are working on how to have standardized consensus terminology for different things including article titles. EnWikiAdmin (talk) 10:21, 23 December 2024 (UTC)