Cunctator wrote:
A brief summary of what I'd like to see as the policy:
- The ultimate goal of Wikipedia is to be neutral and authoritative.
- All claims made in Wikipedia should be confirmable by outside
sources. 3. For contentious issues, provide the reasoning behind the antagonists' contentions. 4. Recognize that neutrality is impossible to achieve without omniscience. 5. Eliminate ambiguity. (Make as strong claims as possible.) 6. Celebrate terseness. (If another entry says the same thing, link to it. Don't say it twice if possible.)
This is all well-stated, but some of this goes beyond mere editorial policy and reaches the status of philosophy. Maybe we need a new word: "wikilosophy"?
Regarding the idea of simply "reporting things that really exist," Cunctator wrote:
Yes. Fortunately we can rely on the pool of perfectly accurate, non-propagandizing, value-judgmentless historical references to do so.
Oops, they don't exist.
Actually, they do. For example, "Napoleon Bonaparte died on May 5, 1821" is a statement whose accuracy no one seriously disputes, and it doesn't carry any particular propaganda or value judgments. Whether you believe that Napoleon was a great leader or a foolish despot, you're bound to agree on the date of his death.
Unfortunately, there are many other things about history and the world that are important enough to deserve inclusion in the Wikipedia that are _not_ this clear-cut. If the Wikipedia restricted itself simply to these sorts of undisputed facts, it wouldn't be a very interesting encyclopedia.