Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

Xiong Talk - Well said. Though quoting the sign on the entrance to hell is pretty pessimistic don't you think? I have to admit, I have only briefly attempted to edit pages in Wiki and found myself quickly challenged, "undone", and threatened by the persons who had spent the most time building these same pages. After about 6 days using various constructs and approaches attempting to correct the same simple paragraph, I realized I had entered some kind of hell. The pride of ownership can be a hellish thing to encounter. No amount of citations and truth seems to assuage the desire to destroy any challenger, no matter how well armed that challenger is with the truth and with authoritative citations. One's intellectual baby cannot be corrected or you will have hell to pay. Let the truth be damned.

I think the solution is a referee. I had attempted to engage some disinterested third parties as observers or referees to instill a sense of truth and fairness, but none wanted to get involved. Their disinterest was the very thing that made them spend no time at all on my dilemma. Wiki has been built by people with a passion for their subject, not necessarily a passion for the truth or fairness about all subjects.

So if Wiki is going to survive and be respected, it seems that there need to be people who will take the time to referee edits, who are skilled editors and writers themselves, and who DO NOT AUTHOR these same pages BECAUSE they are engaged as referees and must remain truly neutral. Their only role is in ensuring that claims have been properly cited and are appropriate to the topic at hand. And they should be skilled enough in Wiki markup to fix the technical markup without casting out the intellectual property due to technical markup errors. Along with this, there would need to be random audits of the referee's decisions to ensure that they are truly neutral.

As others have observed, declaring markup errors or policy violations is the current favorite tactic for protecting one's passionately held though mediocre intellectual baby. Some common tactics: a) Declare a technical markup error and send the editor back to study the markup language, b)Keep undoing the edits and threaten that the new editor will be blocked because they have created an "edit war" which is against the policy, c)Throw out citations as against the citation policy, d) Refuse to read the citations and continue to claim the citations are missing. I had one example of an editor who insisted that the documents from the Bishops and the Vatican were not authoritative sources on what the Roman Catholic Church believes and therefore did not meet the criteria for the citation policy. Really? He insisted on citing an anonymous web author who claimed to be a Catholic somewhere in the U.S. and he continually undid my attempts to cite official Vatican documents and Bishop's letters. I had met a real "devil's advocate" in this Wiki hell.

Most new editors who know they are right and on the side of truth won't bother with this childish behavior. These tactics are an extremely effective deterent to acquiring or retaining new editors, particularly those who know the subject they are editing and don't really care about Wiki's success, accuracy, internal policies, or markup language. We can publish in other publications and respected journals in much less time. And the Wiki mediocrity will continue until there are neutral referees truly committed to publishing what is true.