Dan Tobias wrote:
Why should any part of main article space (or templates included in it) be controlled by outside people and used to present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality?
Why? Maybe because all parts of current main article space are controlled by "inside" people and used to present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality.
By policy, rule, and decree, the "outside" people are told to try to voice their concerns on Discussion pages, which we all know, are not mandated to be heeded. So, the "outside" people don't have equal power. If the guideline is that contributors to the article should have no conflict of interest in the topic on which they're editing, almost by definition, experts are thus driven out by those who merely know how to do citation searches in the library (if even that). So, Dan, that's why Ray thinks it might be more "neutral" if such a space could be provided to "outside" people to even the playing field and maybe get the "inside" people to understand how things actually work among the experts in the area that the article covers.
But, Geni's concerned that this will take up too much server space.
Why don't the "outside" people just do what Angela does -- serve "inside" on the Board for a while, then go "outside", but retain the special "insider's" privilege of editing articles (like the one about Wikia) directly from the "outside"? I guess that rule doesn't scale so well.
Greg