User:Apostlemep12

I'm really not all about personal web pages etc. So don't expect much here. But better a few poorly-formatted words than nothing at all.

I am a 20-something male graduate student in theology, with undergraduate degrees in history and government & politics. I am a native of the City of Baltimore but went to college and grad school in other fine cities. I have traveled internationally, am academically fluent in Spanish. I have an identical twin brother.

I am proud to say that I am a TURTLE, seemingly an 'Imperial Turtle.'

In my Wikipedia life I am particularly sensitive to historical inaccuracies, generalizations, and sloppiness. I also try to be keenly aware of non-neutral POV issues.

As a political and an academic exercise, I find Wikipedia fascinating. As a source of information, I find it often very useful. It is as a political exercise, though, that Wikipedia is most frustrating and which negatively affects the quality of its content. While in some sense Wikipedia is democratic, in its lack of structure and its immense size the political reality is that most articles with interesting/debatable content do not reflect mainstream popular OR academic views but rather represent the views of a committed, passionate minority. It functions very similarly to a Robert Dahl-like pluralist system of government, where each "issue" (article) is controlled by an associated minority interest group which is most willing to spend time and energy advocating for their position, rather than controlled by the largely uninterested mass of people. The best one can hope for in such a system is two or more competing interest groups who arrive at a mainstream, factual, NPOV result by fighting with and possibly compromising with each other. Where only one interest group is active, though, that group can collectively squelch any dissent or disagreement voiced by more mainstream individuals who hop into the conversation/talk page and effectively control the information in an article.

To be fair, my spending lots of time reading and sometimes editing religious-related articles has greatly contributed to my level of frustration and this resulting perspective. At least in political articles/discussions there are usually at least two equally passionate and engaged groups of editors. But religious articles are often dominated by a group of extreme conservatives within a particular faith tradition.