User:Senor fjord
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Welcome to my user page. Unfortunately, due to a number of issues which I briefly discuss below, I won't be editing Wikipedia any longer.
I've come to realize that for contentious topics, Wikipedia at its best attempts to discern truth by committee. Personally, I think that committees are great mechanisms for things like compromising on legislation, or deciding where to go out for dinner -- cases where finding the middle ground of two opposing camps is often the best answer. Taking the middle ground between truth and falsity however, is not a good answer.
Many will respond to this common criticism by saying that there is no better system than committee, and that Wikipedia is a world-wide participatory democracy. On the surface, that is an attractive viewpoint, but would you be happy with your democracy if someone with enough determination got to vote effectively an unlimited number of times, by hanging around the polling booth all day? What if they also discouraged others from voting by arguing to the point of exhaustion where the others just gave up?
Those whose opinions get transmitted into many pages are not necessarily those whose views best represent the mainstream, they're those who are willing to doggedly tend to pages they care about. This causes a number of other problems. The most significant is the doctrine of not removing information. Many pages chronicling controversial personages have immense criticism sections (much longer than any normal encyclopedia) and almost nothing else, to the point of even missing basic biographical facts. When people complain on the discussion page, the answer is always that interested parties should add more positive information. That's well and good to encourage people to participate, at the same time having only criticisms is very poor taste and certainly not encyclopedic for all but a very limited number of articles.
When these facts are coupled with the fact that demographically the average Wikipedia contributor does not closely resemble the average human, it in my opinion makes the set of controversial Wikipedia articles show a very considerable religious, political, and philosophical bias.
Lastly, there are always people who will argue that the best remedy is to try to fix those pages yourself and contribute. Fixing all the flaws I perceive in wikis and open source software I use would be a multiple lifetime effort, so I have to pick my fights wisely. I've decided to back down from this one.
