Wikipedia talk:Assume high intelligence

Not a bad idea, but I think this is something better added to WP:FAITH than placed on its own page. Wikispace is large enough as it is. ( Radiant ) 12:26, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
 * - Samsara (talk • contribs) 12:42, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Clarification needed
Are we supposed to assume that people are knowledgable about the thing they're commenting on, or just intelligent in a general sense? Because the former seems condescending to people who really aren't knowledgable. -Amarkov blahedits 05:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll clarify this. Samsara (talk • contribs) 11:31, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Other than that, what was proposed here is now part of Assume good faith, and this talk shall be moved over there shortly. Please adjust you watchlists if you have not already done so and wish to continue to participate in discussion (or do redirects take care of this automagically?) Thank you. Samsara (talk • contribs) 11:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Removed from WP:AGF
This stuff proved controversial enough to be removed from AGF. I have undone the redirect accordingly. Friday (talk) 03:05, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, that should be a clear indication that this proposal is rejected, or should be re-tagged as a personal essay like WP:AAGF and such.  &gt; R a d i a n t &lt;  13:05, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

High intelligence versus reasonableness?
Some critics of this pointed out that maybe saying "high intelligence" is overstating the case. Do we really mean we want to assume a certain level of general competence and reasonableness? Friday (talk) 16:21, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree with the un-named critics. AGF is worthy; I fail to see the point in this. KillerChihuahua?!? 23:43, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
 * As I noted elsewhere, this is quite possbly one of the most indefensible and inane ideas ever to darken Wikipedia's doorstep. Given that "high intelligence" is generally defined as an IQ of at least 130, and given that only 3% of the populace meet that criterion (see Bell curve), it is preposterous to assume that the makeup of Wikipedia editors would represemt such a significant deviation from the normal distribution, and in fact, I would argue that the population of editors closely mirrors the normal distribution except among the more technical articles. However, as we have relatively few technical articles compared to the large mass of articles on rather pedestrian topics, I don't see the techie anomaly significantly skewing the overall distribution.   &#0149;Jim 62 sch&#0149;  09:28, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
 * More important is the problem that even if you assume this means "Assume normal intelligence", you run into the problem where someone puts some stupid thing in. Then, if you're assuming high intelligence, they must logically be acting in bad faith. Whereas now, I would not assume that they had high intelligence, so I could still say they were acting in good faith. -Amarkov blahedits 18:27, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd still wager that good-faith editors have a higher median IQ than the population of the world in general. As for vandals, this may well not be the case, although we have to accept that many vandals are probably children or young teenagers.-h i s  s p a c e   r e s e a r c h 16:32, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Speaking as one good-faith editor to another, I must say it certainly feels good to assume that good-faith editors have a higher median IQ. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.137.161.27 (talk) 07:32, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Conflict with AGF?
In many, many cases it is impossible to assume both good faith and high intelligence; when this happens, Hanlon's razor suggests that assuming the former is far, far more likely to be correct. Should this be mentioned? -- A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 10:00, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

indeed. From assuming high intelligence it will follow immediately that about 60% of Wikipedians are trolls. I mean, you can easily be highly intelligent and successfully pretend to be a blithering idiot, but that is the very definition of bad faith. The opposite won't work, incidentially. We get many editors with limited education and/or intelligence who very much try to create a different impression, but they fail every time, mostly after about three or four contributions.

Come on, you can only assume whether a person is editing in good or bad faith, but once you assume good faith, you don't have to assume intelligence, you will be able, provided that you are yourself sufficiently intelligent, to perceive whether the other party is or is not intelligent. Once it has become clear that an editor is perfectly clueless and far, far out of their league, what is the point of artificially "assuming" something that isn't there. --dab (𒁳) 15:54, 22 September 2010 (UTC)