User:Durova/Wikipedia is not an experiment in consensus reality

Wikipedia is not an experiment in consensus reality. Wikipedia's editors do not create philosophical truth when they revise articles. Instead, appropriate collaboration summarizes verifiable information from reliable sources in a neutral manner. The experts may be wrong and may need to be corrected, but as a tertiary source it is not an encyclopedia's function to spearhead new ideas.

In other words, the population of elephants does not triple just because some Wikipedian tries to say so. The elephants don't read Wikipedia, and if any human endeavor could inspire them to triple their population it would probably be reruns of steamy episodes from the Discovery Channel.