Wikipedia:Editing philosophy

When editing articles, Wikipedians sometimes have fundamentally conflicting ideas about what should be done with an article. This page aims to provide new users with an easy to access list of questions that have found no single suitable answer, without falling into jargon. This page is intentionally on the English wiki to be friendly to new users; to discuss the merits of particular stances in the debates below, please head off to the meta wiki.

Note that the questions are intentionally open to provoke new users to think about them, rather than try to fit their answers into existing ones. They are drawn mostly from meta:Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies.

Questions

 * 1) If an article is likely to be a stub forever, what should be done with it? Does it matter whether the article's stub status is caused by (1) a lack of editors making the effort to edit the article or (2) a lack of information available about the topic?
 * 2) Something is added to an article without citing a source. Should it be removed? Why (not)?
 * 3) Should we include very detailed specialist statistical data, like the composition of the consumer price index for the last 30 years, or the body mass index of Olympic medalists for the last 50 years? What about detailed data on the difference in income between men and women (or other groups), or a list of which athletes have won the most in a particular sport? Why are some of these statistics included, and others are not? Should this depend on how many people use them, or how many people write about them? Should it depend on who those people are?


 * 1) Several sources conflict. How do the authority and reliability of the sides in the debate and the number of sources on each side come in here?
 * 2) Does it matter whether you're editing a page that you've written yourself, or one that is written by another editor?
 * 3) When two editors disagree about a change one of them made to a page, whose version of the page gets to be displayed during the discussion? Does it matter?
 * 4) Do editors with a connection to a subject (citizens of a city, members of an organisation, etc.) get any special treatment because of that? Does this depend on the type of connection (citizen vs. mayor, employee vs. CEO, in the extreme case being the subject, as is the case with biographies of living persons)? If your answers differ or don't, what is the reason for that?
 * 5) In disputes and discussions, do the real-life credentials of editors matter? Or the on-wiki credentials? When discussing something, does everyone have an equal say?

Reasoning behind this page
Recently, fundamental changes in policy and technical changes with wide-ranging consequences (e.g. Attribution, implementing version sighting, etc.) have been proposed. The discussion behind these proposals has been rather ineffective, usually resulting into huge polls with no clear consensus. By provoking new users to think about common problems that go beneath such proposals, discussion could be improved.