You might want to contact David Gerard, who has substantial experience with Wikipedia policies.
Here :-) gwern is at least as good too. Wikipedia's little ways are opaque and scary from the outside.
Simplest way is "references out to here". "The sky[1] is blue.[2][3][4]" Write your stuff, in that dull grey Wikipedia style, and festoon it with blue numbers. Highest-status references you can find (journal articles are ideal, actually famous self-published papers generally OK, blog posts frequently lose unless from the actually famous).
The threat model is "aggressive and persistent idiot armed with three-letter policy abbreviations." Defences are (1) references (2) note anything that might even faintly resemble a conflict of interest to the most bad-faith-assuming idiot on the discussion page (3) occasional superhuman assumption of good faith.
I'd be interested in knowing in detail what your worries were/are. Editor retention and newbie recruitment are BIG concerns at the moment on the Foundation level (though you wouldn't think so looking at how a lot of the English Wikipedia community actually do things).
My email is dgerard@gmail.com if you don't want to talk about it publicly (though I'd love to be able to quietly share your concerns with others).
occasional superhuman assumption of good faith.
If that's an euphemism for "give up and just let the idiot deface the article", it's a strategy I had to resort to a couple times.
No, I mean "don't explode the way any normal human would even when you're firmly convinced they're malicious rather than stupid." Remember that "assume good faith" is a restatement of "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice".
When giving up and letting the idiot deface the article, I've found coming back in a few years and fixing the article works well. The typical enthusiasm-span of a Wikipedia contributor is 12-18 months.
I think this is probably a good rationality technique, similar to this seqence post. http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0/are_your_enemies_innately_evil/.
Pretty much. But you might comfort yourself with thoughts of better uses for the atoms they are made of.
"Assume good faith" is very, very different from "do not reveal your belief of bad faith." Really, they are opposites. Actually assuming good faith is an extremely bad idea. I think what you really meant was: the one slogan you should know is "Assume good faith."
At this point I think we're arguing definitions. IME stupidity has a special persistence to it. You get occasional paid shills, but they're vastly outnumbered by people working really hard at being stupid. YMMV of course.
I have upvoted you for using the word "festoon". Also for writing a good and helpful and topical comment, but mostly for using "festoon".
Hi all,
At the Singularity Institute we're looking for a volunteer with experience making edits to Wikipedia. The quality of some Wikipedia pages related to our subject matter could use improvement, but we would like to consult with someone who has an editing background on the way to go about it.
Please get in touch with me at michael@intelligence.org.
Thank you!