User:Geo Swan/opinions/Are you a genius...

=Are you a genius...=

Are you a genius? Short answer? No, for the purposes of the wikipedia, none of us are geniuses, all of us have to be prepared to show our work.

In some fields of human endevour there may be individuals who their coworkers recognize are so much more intelligent, so much more experienced, that they don't question their statements or actions. They may have so much confidence that they have genius colleagues they never consider questioaning those statements or actions, even when they don't understand them.

There are definitely fields of human endevour where coworkers don't question the statements or actions of some of their colleagues, when the colleague is at a more senior level in some kind of hierarchy.

But the wikipedia doesn't have that kind of hierarchy. There are very rare occasions when we are called to accept opacity, when someone with the Wikimedia Foundation, or the Arbitration Committee, claims an action is both necessary for the project's operation, and can't be openly explained, for some policy based reason. We should accept those rare occasions, when they are credible.

But ordinary wikipedians, even ordinary administrators, don't get to play the genius card. We should not allow them to claim something is too obvious to explain. If it is truly obvious, it should be easy to explain.

The wikipedia may disproportionally attract know-it-alls, people who thought they were the smartest kids in their class, or who might actually have been the smartest student in their grad school, or who even might be recognized by their peers as one of the top people in their field. That status might have freed them from feeling obliged to explain themselves to their peers, in school, but here we rely on outside experts. WP:Verify tells us to aim for verifiability, not truth. None of us is a WP:Reliable source.

None of us is a WP:Reliable source. Even if we are leading experts in our field, at our day job, we are not experts here. Our colleagues know us, at our day jobs, and can rely on our professional opinions, because they know, and we know, we are putting our professional reputations on the line, when we utter them. But, wikipedia IDs are semi-anonymous. With rare exceptions, like Mr Wales, we can't tie a wikipedia ID to anyone's real world identity. So, contributors who are the top people in their field, in real life, have no more recognizable expertise here, than any other contributor. And they should not be allowed to act as if they have no obligation to explain themselves to the rest of us, due to being a genius, or a real-world expert.