User:EnWikiAdmin/Essays/On neutrality, sources, and content

(This was prompted by questions from Millipede which can be seen in Ikwipedia:Help. Much of the below probably belongs amongst the "Ikwipedia:" policy page. This will hopefully be put in there eventually so as to be in a more readable format.)

Disadvantages of some source limitations

I want to summarize some of our thinking and clarify our guidelines. If an encyclopedia article's content theoretically reflects a "weighted-average" of available evidence or sources, then its content depends on the choice of allowed sources, the extent to which editors can synthesize sources (i.e., act as investigators producing secondary works), and the "esteem" conferred to (or the implied reliability attributed to) each source (i.e. how much weight it is given). As just one example, a wiki article could only refer to an alleged paranormal event as a hoax (without further qualification) if a vast majority of allowed sources refer to it that way. As you alluded to, these choices are significant, and it may be difficult to draw consistent lines. I personally think that Internet Archive and Wikipedia are among the most important websites on the internet, and Wikipedia, to its great credit, appears to have achieved consensus on source allowability in way that that is more or less internally consistent throughout the scope of its coverage (and produced many superb articles in the process). I could wax poetic about Wikipedia.

That said, we saw instances where we felt the article was not fair to its subject matter, including, in some instances, the same problems that you alluded to — certain apparently well-researched works by apparently competent investigators not being allowed as sources for certain topics to which they're well-suited. Another type of thing we noticed is when articles on alleged witnesses of alleged conspiracies, coverups, aliens, exotic technology, etc., such as Bob Lazar, fail, in our view, to faithfully describe the witness's key claims because no acceptable secondary source covered them seriously and/or because doing so would presumably amplify the claims in an undue or unbalanced manner. We also felt the problem extends to topics — such as the paranormal claims of Jonathan Reed and Dan Burisch — for which an article does not exist on Wikipedia and probably would not be allowed to stay if it did, also due to a lack of serious coverage by mainstream sources. We wanted to have a set of rules that — yes, definitely — allows for a wider range of sources than Wikipedia, but is also internally consistent and administratable.