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