Ikwipedia:Help

This is the page for help with Ikwipedia and general discussion. For functionality problems with the website, please see Ikwipedia:Functionality.

General discussion

This discussion was moved from Talk:Main Page. on 31 Dec 2024. EnWikiAdmin (talk) 22:51, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

Thanks so much for your perceptive observations and question. I'll try to answer each of your questions (and the one below) in turn over the next few days as well as make edits elsewhere on the wiki (some of which were already planned on my part) to try to illustrate my points.EnWikiAdmin (talk) 00:37, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

In response to your first paragraph, Millipede, apologies for any seemingly contradicting and inconsistent descriptions. Some aspects of the wiki are definitely still evolving, but I think we have a good idea of what it ultimately should look like. I will eventually put the bulk of my response in the new section below because it is very long and sort of deals with topics that we don't have fully agreed-upon rules on yet. But just to directly answer your initial question about whether this aims to be unbiased or to counteract mainstream bias with an opposite bias: in short, we intend for it to be the former (unbiased). As I said, I will post a much longer discussion about this, hopefully in the next few days.

In response to your second paragraph, yes, the latter, aliens and all of that stuff just happen to be a big interest of contributors so far, but we intend for it to potentially cover at least every subject for which "the picture" "changes" even slightly (compared to Wikipedia or other "standard" sources) when a fuller range of acceptable sources is used. The front page list of topics is really more appropriately called the "quasi-organized selection of topics" and is both sort of a starting point and a way to illustrate (or set a "lower bound" for) the scope of the wiki. We plan to eventually have a more organized and complete catalog, if possible. I should note that we also don't necessarily consider Template:Exotic technology or other navigation boxes to currently be even close to "balanced", accurate, or comprehensive. We will be adding more sections/content to the list of topics partly in response in to your comments and questions.

Regarding your third paragraph, thanks for asking about the Rife device. That is certainly within the scope of the encyclopedia! All of that stuff... frankly, anything that's a subject of a conspiracy theory is a good candidate for the encyclopedia. Just to illustrate further, I would suggest (only to the extent the following reflects a correct understanding) a whole slew of things like "mortal oscillatory rate", Rife's "universal microscope" and alleged sub-diffraction-limit-resolved optical microscopy, the whole topic of alleged individual- or organism-specific electromagnetic signatures, "healing frequencies", alleged monochromatic electromagnetic frequencies with specific capabilities, alleged medical advances suppressed by the FDA (one of multiple alleged tragic/ironic categories of regulatory capture we might cover), alleged influence of the Rockefeller Foundation that allegedly served to co-opt the direction of certain research endeavors in ways that allegedly benefited corporations owned by its board members, philanthropic capture, elite capture, Flexner Report, etc.

EnWikiAdmin (talk) 07:07, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Millipede: Thanks for your patience and for your continued and much-needed contributions such as Collins Elite. Articulating a complete answer to the "counteract" aspect of your question is taking longer than I anticipated. Instead of posting an extremely long reply that might not be that helpful for you, I'm going to directly incorporate parts of my planned reply, hopefully in the very near future, into some of the project namespace (Ikwipedia:) pages. Below is a somewhat-incomplete summary.

Basically, "seeing what happens if you use a wider range of sources than Wikipedia does" is essentially the main idea of the whole thing (or one of the main ideas). That is, it's probably desirable for articles to represent a "weighted average" of acceptable sources on a given subject than a weighted average of a subset of them. However, we are affirmatively leaving open the possibility that editors might only achieve "full" coverage of a given subject by identifying, in an as-yet underdetermined fashion, the alleged systemic, insidious, and multifarious influence within the "information ecosystem" that allegedly serves to elevate alleged pro-mainstream-viewpoint falsehoods and allegedly distorts the "world" of available information; and the possibility that an unanticipated and otherwise obscure "picture" of the "truth" may emerge when all available evidence, allegations, theories, etc. on these subjects are organized and critically examined (and maybe not even then).

The mention in Motivations for Ikwipedia of 'amplification' of content that is aligned with 'extremely non-mainstream-aligned viewpoints' is meant to acknowledge that articles that try to give such a "full" picture (along with, to a lesser extent, articles that "merely" present a "weighted average" of sources) may be seen by people both in favor and opposed as "amplifying" the pro-conspiracy-theory viewpoint beyond what is warranted by the available sourced information. It is also meant to unequivocally assert, in pre-emptive response to potential criticism of this approach, that such amplification may indeed be warranted in light of the alleged distortionary influence.

Hopefully this makes some sense and suffices to answer your question for now. I'm happy to try to answer any follow-up questions you might have.

EnWikiAdmin (talk) 20:31, 27 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 and/or alleged craft retrieval operation (the "operation to ensure recovery") (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) Edited: EnWikiAdmin (talk) 17:31, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Regarding guidelines on sources and neutrality

The response I'm preparing to Millipede's questions above on bias, use of sources, etc. is so long and wide-ranging enough that I am putting it in its own sectionit needs its own section, so I will be putting it here. I will be back later to start posting it. EnWikiAdmin (talk) 17:31, 25 December 2024 (UTC) ; edited 16:27, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

I posted my extended response to @Millipede's questions here. -- EnWikiAdmin (talk) 17:23, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Citations

Is it possible without a lot of difficulty to add the 'Cite' function to the edit box? It's possible to work round it either by typing out the code or by doing it in Wikipedia and copying and pasting it and cancelling the Wikipedia edit without saving it but it's a bit awkward. Millipede (talk) 22:56, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing this out. We were aiming to have more or less the same functionality as Wikipedia, so I will investigate and hopefully get this fixed.

EnWikiAdmin (talk) 07:12, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

This has been added! See Project:Website updates.EnWikiAdmin (talk) 22:56, 31 December 2024 (UTC)