Value, respect, and strive for diversity in editors

I don't think it's as easy as that. The bigger and more "complete" projects need to concentrate on quality rather than quantity, and for that we need experts. For many topics the pool of experts is very small, and if one of them comes to help us we should be able to use that help even when the expert is not particularly good at cooperative editing with Randy and his mates. A university professor who comes to Wikipedia to edit an article about their field cannot be expected to "cooperate" with a teenager who is trying to educate them on their field in a patronising tone. Many will not remain civil in such a situation, and it's not their fault, but it's our fault for exposing them to this in the first place. (Cooperation about presentation and accessibility is a different matter.)

Perhaps we could have an external peer review system. We might have a cooperation with certain academic institutions, and when an article in their field goes through something like featured article candidacy it is sent to them for review. This allows experts to contribute without editing Wikipedia directly, but it is also likely to increase the number of experts active in certain fields, creating a more expert-friendly environment.

But this isn't strategy any more, it's much more fine-grained, and I think the current version of the strategy page has taken these things in account.

I agree with most of what Hans Adler wrote. I have never seen any great divide between inclusionists and deletionists, no matter how popular this is among Wikipedia-watchers. Instead the great divide is between those with a prescriptive mindset and those with a descriptive mindset. Much of the infrastructure is aimed at encouraging the prescriptive mindset; all those Help-pages (proclaiming that anyone can edit, etc), emphasis on edit-counts, etc.

Nevertheless, putting an encyclopedia together requires a descriptive mindset. Wikipedia is not likely to make much more progress than it has already, not with the "facts, who care about facts? I am going to apply my favorite, and personal, rule!" attitude running rampant, and being aware of more than a single texbook on a topic being pretty much a shooting offensive. - Brya 07:38, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

And how do you intend to judge which university professor is "qualified" to review, for example, an article dealing with aspects of the "middle east conflict" ? Which academic institution should we rate as competent - an which one not? I fear that we are about to import the entire range of some hundered years of academic rivalry into the project.