Getnormality

What I believe

Wikipedia is a serious project with world-changing implications. Billions of people trust Wikipedia's editors to provide, if not the final word, a starting point or foot in the door in their search for knowledge. Trust in Wikipedia is building as trust in other institutions erodes. We are making the world smarter and wiser.
On the inside, the story is not always so simple. Our power increasingly attracts less productive and more power-seeking behaviors which have in some ways corrupted this incredible institution. Our experiences here can be frustrating, even despair-inducing at times.
The most threatening of these corrupting behaviors are not, in the main, explicitly or even implicitly malicious. They can come from well-meaning, experienced editors and administrators with extraordinary track records of positive contribution. They come from the understandable, but negligent impulse to change the world without having applied due diligence to understand the world first, both in its factual details and its people's legitimate concerns.
The consequences of this negligent impulse cannot be dismissed. The 20th century's most tragic disasters have come from well-meaning attempts to change the world without attending to its material structure, or to villainize and run roughshod over people who are different or disagree with us.
My goal is to vaccinate this community against corruption by describing more explicitly the high standards we should follow when editing articles or setting policy on controversial matters.
If you see something of value in my work, please build upon it. Contribute your elaborations and clarifications. Add your questions and thoughts and criticism to my user or WP essay talk pages. Wikipedia is what you put into it.
Wikipedia is a legitimate source of meaning in life. You are not wasting your time here. You are making the world a better place, no less than the Enlightenment republic of letters or Diderot's Encyclopédie once did. Bring your best. Keep it up.

Essays

Reliable sourcing reviews

Reliable sourcing reviews summarize my findings when I investigate controversial claims for compliance against strict WP:RS standards. My goal is to apply journalistic source research and fact-checking methods wherever practical and appropriate, so that proper editorial discretion may be exercised going forward. I am especially interested in claims which are derogatory to living persons and organizations.

14 Jul 2024 - Removal of claim that LessWrong "played a role in the development" of Neoreaction. Text derogatory to living persons Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, present from approximately 2019-2024, was determined to be too vague to be verifiable. Even when unverifiably vague claims are repeated in generally reliable news sources, they are unreliable, because claims that are not directly verifiable are not plausibly subject to fact-checking unless supported by verifiable facts. In one news source, there was evidence from tone and categorization within the source itself that the specific cited articles were at least partially analysis or opinion in nature, rather than reporting which might reasonably be presumed to be rigorously fact-checked. Other citations lacked text supportive of the Wiki claim entirely, or presented claims that could be fact-checked by reference to online primary sources and proved highly unlikely to be true. The unverifiably vague derogatory material was replaced with verifiable factual material, which turned out to be less derogatory.

TODO: going forward, consider developing separate user subpages for each RSR to preserve cohesion of the analysis separately from talk page sprawl.

Personal notes

WP:Editorial Discretion

It is not original research to make judgement calls on what content to include or not include, how to frame an issue or claim, or what claims and subjects are suitable for Wikipedia. We are not here to robotically compile facts and citations according to a strict set of rules, we are here to create and edit an encyclopedia. This task requires the application of judgement and discretion in order to create a neutral and readable encyclopedia. The policy on original research is sometimes misconstrued as a blanket prohibition on any application of judgement or critical thinking by editors. The intent of that policy was never to turn editing into an unthinking task, and our articles into mere compilations of published data.

Also contains a wonderful set of links, which I am copying here for convenience.

Links

Administration - discuses both the human administrative structure of Wikipedia, as well as its non-human components.
Core content policies – a brief summary and background on Wikipedia's core content policies.
Editing environment - describes how Wikipedia is governed? What happens when content disputes 'boil over' into accusations of bad conduct?
Editor integrity - discusses how editors have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of Wikipedia and respect intellectual property rights of the sources they draw upon when they create and improve encyclopedia pages.
Formal organization - discusses who does what on Wikipedia? What does Wikipedia say itself about its own formal organizational structure?
The essence of Wikipedia – describes how Wikipedia is the harnessing of the collective intelligence and collaborative efforts of editors who hold opposing points of view, in an attempt to preserve all serious contributions which are reliably sourced.
The rules are principles - describes how policies and guidelines exist only as rough approximations of their underlying principles.
Wikipedia is a community - describes how there is nothing wrong with occasionally doing other things than writing the encyclopedia, and that community spirit is a positive thing.
Wikipedia is a volunteer service - discusses how editors on Wikipedia are mainly volunteers. Editors can contribute as much as they want, and however long they desire.
When sources are wrong – suggestions for coping with errors in sources