User:Filll/response2

It is often said that science is what Wikipedia does best. It has been reported that a large fraction of professional scientists use Wikipedia in their work. Nature Magazine's comparison between Encyclopedia Britannica and the Wikipedia articles showed that Wikipedia articles were only slightly worse than Encyclopedia Britannica articles, at least for the small sample of articles examined.  Yet there are some troubling signs for Wikipedia in the future. As Wikipedia has become more popular and more prominent, it has become the premier venue for promoting fringe theories, pseudoscience, alternative medical treatments, paranormal and supernatural beliefs, religious interpretations of the natural world, etc. This is normal and should be expected, given the interests of the general public and the relative sizes of the science community and the general public. There are policies like WP:FRINGE, WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:RS which are intended to still allow articles related to scientific topics to be written with the balance one would expect of a respectable reference work. However, scientists and academics can find Wikipedia to be a difficult environment for a number of reasons. In particular, much of the internal machinations of Wikipedia have to do with obscure Wikipedia internal political struggles and byzantine palace intrigues, rather than writing a reliable reference work. Frequently scientifically-oriented editors find that Wikipedia's culture often ignores Wikipedia's own policies such as WP:NPOV. Also, WP:CIVIL, particularly the extreme, unrealistic and inconsistent version of civility applied at Wikipedia, frequently is used as a weapon against science-oriented editors and takes precedence over content-related policies. This WP:CIVIL policy is very different from what is found in scientific, academic and research communities (reference to recent AfD discussion with expert). As a result, there is a steady hemmorage of discouraged and demoralized technical talent from Wikipedia which presents an increasingly unfriendly environment to scientifically-trained editors. Wikipedia must pay attention to this issue, or it will inevitably lose its advantages it has on scientific topics, and most if not all of the volunteered scientific talent it has depended on.