My views on Wikipedia:

• AFD: Being a Deletionist or Inclusionist is inappropriate. In my opinion being either is a violation of the neutral point of view and an assumption of bad faith. Each editor that thinks about deleting another article or participants in the AFD process needs to enter either with an open heart and an open mind, and then apply the relevant Wikipedia guidelines/policies to the individual articles. Otherwise your bias can get in the way of making a sound decision based on the current policies.
• Policies: They are not perfect and never will be. The only proper way to change them is to take any policy argument to that policy’s talk page. And then, if the community decides a policy needs to change, it needs to be brought up much like the Foundation Elections and not be left to the couple hundred people who happen upon the relevant discussion at just the right time.
• Consensus: I’ve been told by an admin that consensus can be wrong. I know, but unlike that admin I realize that consensus can be wrong. Yes, that is what I said, but think about the meaning when someone applies previous consensus to a new consensus, which one is wrong? Consensus can be wrong in the current argument, as in everyone says an article should be deleted for failure to meet WP:BIO, but previous consensus says it should not be deleted. Well the previous consensus can be wrong too.
  • Neither a substitution of the community’s voice (i.e. vote counting in a call for consensus) by an admin nor actual vote counting is truly consensus. Consensus is about trying to get an agreement, and unfortunately vote counting is the only tangible and objective way to measure this. Admins substituting their opinion for the community in a specific area is certainly not consensus. Otherwise, technically since “consensus” can be wrong there could never be a change in policies, since stare decisis would apply and all future shifts in opinion could never be implemented, as excluded from not conforming to the original consensus. Not to mention in the specific case of AFD where unless there is consensus in that discussion then it is supposed to be status quo. At least that’s what it says at Wikipedia:Deletion policy: “...pages are deleted by an administrator if there is consensus to do so. If there is no consensus, the page is kept...”

• Conflict of Interest: “A Wikipedia conflict of interest (COI) is an incompatibility between the purpose of Wikipedia to produce a neutral, verifiable encyclopedia, and the potential motivations of an individual editor.” It’s really as simple as the first sentence. Some people only think it applies to the mainspace, some people only think it applies when you work for company X and are trying to promote company X by editing the article on company X, or it doesn’t apply if I edit and proclaim the bias. That’s entirely missing the point. When an editor’s potential motivations can lead to the incompatibility of producing a neutral encyclopedia then there is a conflict of interest. Then, as the guideline says, the editor should announce their conflict and can still edit. But, the conflict remains, it does not magically vanish, which is why it is best to refrain from editing articles where that incompatibility exists. Even though an editor may promise to edit in a neutral tone, all I have to say is that Bush I said “no new taxes” and we all know how that turned out. Is it really that important to you to edit those articles? If it is, then again your motivation for editing on Wikipedia is the wrong motivation. Editing is about building the web and writing the best encyclopedia, not about getting your message out, whether that message is promoting your community’s history, letting people know about library or archival resources on a topic at the place where you work, adding information to an article to put the subject in a negative light because you dislike the subject, or for promoting any other personal agenda.

• Put more simply: I you are editing a Wikipedia article in order to affect the real world, you have a COI.

• Wikipedia is not the Real World: A common problem new editors encounter is the vast array of rules and procedures that rival the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. They are many and it can be difficult to keep track of all of them. Plus some are policy, some are guidelines, and some are mere suggestions. All in all, unless you have been around awhile, its difficult to maneuver and even more difficult to make your point. Related to this is that new editors want to import notions from the real world into Wikipedia. For instance style guidelines they are use to, or ownership of the article they just wrote. In theory, this would be great. But in reality, Wikipedia is not the Real World and editors need to leave those notions at the proverbial door.

• The problem with bringing in your own sense of style or rules, is that there are hundreds of cultures and styles out there and we can not possible integrate them all. Wikipedia is the Borg and will assimilate your content into Wikipedia as an article that follows Wikipedia’s Manual of Style and other content guidelines and generally accepted practices. This is for the good of the collective. I and other editors may not support the policy or guideline at issue and may not follow it in the real world, but for the good of Wikipedia, we follow it here to provide uniformity. In the real world, I do not support murderers or White Supremacists, but we do not censor Wikipedia as that leads down a slippery slope of discrimination based on currently disfavored groups. In the real world I am fine with and often write only one or two sentence paragraphs, but no article will make it through GA or FA with this type of paragraph structure. These policies and guidelines are in the best interest of the project and I assume they are well reasoned and have a purpose. If they were not well reasoned, I would assume they would be degraded by now and discarded.

• Related to this are notions of notability. In the real world, notability comes down to have I heard about the topic. That cannot work on a world-wide project. As the voting for deletion would boil down to I’ve heard of it, and I haven’t, which would likely lead to an encyclopedia of only 1000 articles where the topic has attained world-wide recognition. How many editors in Greece know all the US Presidents, and why would they need to? The notability guidelines serve two main purposes. First, as each requires the use of sources to demonstrate the notability (something the vast majority of editors fail to read, not to mention WP:V is a core policy) it works as a screening function to prevent made up items that have been part of the Criticisms of Wikipedia. We really do not need more black eyes. The second part is to great a level playing field for determining what is notable in a more objective and quantifiable format, WP:RS. Part of the process will always be subjective, but if you require the subject to be mentioned in reliable sources at a certain level you set a standard that all articles can be held to fairly. It also, as the guidelines hint at, guarantees the topic has actually been worthy of note, since a “respected” publication has actually noticed the subject and taken the time to write about it. The only real problem I see is that people misconstrue some of the exceptions and fail to recognize that it is notability, not world-wide notability. For instance people will claim the sources are only local or regional. So what? That only means it is notable locally or regionally, which again notability is notability and not world-wide notability. Or the most used exception for deleting articles about people seems to be the “notable for only one event” that people misinterpret to mean people have to have done two notable things to be included. Most people are only notable for one thing (Babe Ruth was only notable for being a baseball player), the one event rule is to prevent someone who literally has been mentioned for only one item and only in one or two reliable sources. Think the person who kills a family of four in a DUI accident. Now, if the story makes the national wire services or becomes a world-wide news story, that is pretty notable, despite it being for only one event. Hurricane Katrina (not a person so not subject to the “rule”) was only one event, but that is a pretty notable subject.