Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> I gave up. Eventually I came across a controversial topic that
> particularly interested me, where I had the background to understand
> the sources and where my research radically changed my mind. So I
> started working on it, I even bought a pile of books about it (on all
> sides of the controversy), and a major recent and very expensive
> mainstream work on it was donated to me, and I became much more
> vulnerable as a result, since I now had an opinion and a POV, based
> on reading the sources, and I started asserting content based on the
> most reliable of the sources, especially peer-reviewed secondary source.
>
> The information necessary for my major shift of POV is much more than
> most editors could absorb with some light reading. There exist
> secondary sources that cover the field that, if editors would trust
> them, would make it easy, but .... they don't trust these sources,
> even when published by independent, non-fringe publishers, since what
> they say contradicts the easy positions of ignorance. After all,
> doesn't everybody with a background in science know....? Reliable
> source guidelines, if followed, would address the problem, but are
> useless against entrenched opinion, because editors will invent this
> or that excuse for disregarding them, so that the article doesn't
> fall into their view of undue weight.
>
> So ... I'm no longer a Wikipedia editor, I'm now working off-wiki,
> with real knowledge and research in the field that interested me,
> and, as well, on the kind of voluntary structure that I see as the
> only way out of trap that Wikipedia has fallen into. It's much
> easier, though, of course, it all takes time. I still have an
> account, and the block will expire, and I'm not burning any bridges,
> but .... once I realize that a wall definitely exists, I don't butt
> my head against it. I walk around it or dig under it or climb over
> it, if I actually want to get to the other side, or I do something else.
>
So rather than address the problems inherent in this narrative so as to
retain editors, we have a "Bookshelf project" to recruit cannon fodder.
Ec