User:JesseW/Hillman quotes

Quotes from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&target=User%3AHillman&timestamp=20060724210709 for the purpose of explaining the note on the top of my user page. The user who wrote this has now entirely left Wikipedia, and requested the deletion of the previous location of this material due to harrassment. Please let me know if any of this is objectionable.

I believe that Wikipedia should be:

  1. a free on-line general encyclopedia which aims to offer timely, accurate, and unbiased information on all topics of knowledge, in sufficiently many languages as to reach, ideally, all citizens of planet Earth,
  2. a utopian social experiment in voluntary collaborative authorship, predicated upon the central premise of the "open source" movement: large numbers of individuals will be willing and even eager to do good work for something other than money,
  3. a website constructed to facilitate this experiment, by providing
    • a suitable technical infrastructure, embodied in the wikicode used to prepare and serve up content,
    • a suitable political and social infrastructure, whose evolution is wisely guided by a good helmsman to ensure that it continues foster our mission.

If one accepts my proposed Wikipedia mission statement, then I believe it follows that editing the Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right. I believe that editing the Wikipedia constitutes voluntarily providing a service to our readers, rather than exploiting a soapbox for the expression of controversial views in order to further some personal hidden agenda. If one accepts this mission, then I believe that all disputes concerning the detail procedures for fostering it should ultimately reduce to the question: which option best serves our readers?

And if one accepts this mission, then I believe that one must also be willing to accept a marked bias toward mainstream knowledge and belief. Such a bias seems ineluctable, but not inappropriate, since mainstream belief is inherently the most stable and plausible, compared to the alternatives.

I believe that the most valuable service offered by expert editors to the readers of a general encyclopedia is not the mere compilation of facts, but rather the judicious choice of what information to present and how to present it. Unfiltered information tends to be overwhelming in quantity, and ultimately of little value to the recipient. For this reason, I hold that the value of an encyclopedia resides not in the compilation of raw facts (for that there is Google), but in presenting information which has been expertly evaluated, categorized, refined, screened, sorted, summarized and weighted by importance and prominence in mainstream belief.