Why WikiProject Intellectual Diversity?

WPID

PolicyScanner

Invitation

Heads Up

We invite you to join Wikiproject Intellectual Diversity (WPID). But what is this? Why is it needed? And why should you join?

WPID is a group of Wikipedians committed to making Wikipedia a more welcoming place for an intellectually diverse set of contributors, who heretofore might have been, to some extent, marginalized for holding views contrary to those of many Wikipedians. Similarly, we hope to make Wikipedia reflect intellectual diversity in the views described in articles—this being a definitional requirement of neutrality.

For many years, Wikipedia has wrung its hands about its own systemic bias; there is even a WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias (WPCSB). Our group is in the same spirit, with one difference. WPCSB has the laudable goal of starting articles covering topics of less interest to Wikipedia's core contributor base—especially (not only) international topics. By contrast, WPID has the goal of ensuring that the persons and viewpoints that are not well represented on Wikipedia are included as respected editors and as neutrally documented ideas.

There are many possible examples we might give. Wikipedia now, in its own voice, asserts that essential tenets of major faith traditions are false, ironically because they do not comport with Wikipedia's neutrality policy on religious views. Nearly 100% of identifiably conservative news sources are restricted or blacklisted, compared to about 15% of left-wing sources. Two attempts to create a community-level non-discrimination policy both failed.

If you understand the problems and want to work for change, we hope you'll join. The PolicyScanner gives you a daily-ranked list of consequential votes and RfCs that you might miss otherwise. The PolicyScanner surfaces those issues that need your attention. We want WPID to be a lively community of like-minded editors for advice and input.

WPID is perfectly consistent with existing Wikipedia policy. We work exclusively through established Wikipedia processes, such as RfCs, Village Pump, and noticeboards. There have been other groups seeking to improve and reform Wikipedia systematically. As you might expect, WPCSB is not the only precedent for the WPID. WikiProject Inclusion has advocated for inclusionism for nearly 20 years, and even explicitly coordinates members around policy advocacy. In addition, three prior reform WikiProjects (ArbCom Reform Party, Reforming Wikipedia, Wikipedia Reform) all operated within the WikiProject framework without being shut down.

Wikipedia was founded on the premise that we could bring the whole world together to write an encyclopedia that would be open to the broad range of humanity, expressing neutrally the broad range of views found throughout the world. Join us, and help us return to that better vision.