User:Larry Sanger/WikiProject Intellectual Diversity/Welcome to Wikipedia (with warnings)
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If you are new to Wikipedia, welcome! If have been gone for a very long time, welcome back!
Especially if you want to participate in WikiProject Intellectual Diversity, you may need to learn a few important things, before you participate much.
Basic Policy
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary, soapbox, newspaper, etc. It can look like a soapbox, if reliable sources uniformly take a very controversial point of view; in that case, it might look like soapboxing to you, if you are more inclined to fringe theories, but it is actually encyclopedic. If your view is not fully documented and accepted by reliable sources, then you certainly cannot treat Wikipedia as a soapbox.
We follow a neutral point of view. Now, some views are more neutral than others. If a view is found in reliable sources, then it is "neutral." If it is not, it is "biased." Of course, we know that experts disagree, and so, when there are different theories found especially in approved, secondary sources, then we are very careful to represent them fairly. We do not pick winners or losers. But we do declare certain sources to be unreliable, and so any theory found only in such sources cannot be expressed in Wikipedia, excepted as documented as an object of objective study in reliable sources. You must be careful not to bother editors, especially if they are established (as determined by edit count and other marks of status), with complaints that views that are contrary to those found in mainstream academic sources are not represented in Wikipedia. This may result in your being blocked. When in doubt, to avoid charges of POV-pushing, be very sure to provide reliable sources (on which, see the next item).
We are devoted to verifiability using reliable sources.