Dan To adopt your analogy Ed Johnston is the systems manager guy in the wikioffice with seniority wide knowledge of the way it best functions and a demonstrated capacity for making judgements all sides accept as neutral and he s telling a less experienced wikipedian how this peculiar society works Most serious professional writers scholars and thinkers find this place exasperating and refuse to help out Some just learn to bite the bullet wear the bullshit adapt to suppressing the Ah you fucken dopey arsehole sort of thought that passes one s article parsing mind from hour to hour and write instead you re mistaken or even you screwed up Of course there are lots of ignoramuses and liars here like everywhere in the world and in every sphere of activity Here the rule is if you want to lie or push a POV against the evidence as long as you stick to the AGF rules you can enjoy longevity while enjoying exhibitions of suicide by people who call you out That looks outrageous at first glance but without it tens of thousands of quite good quality articles on difficult and controversial topics would never have been written Anthropologists when studying a tribe in field research understand that they must adapt provisorily to the rules of the tribe back in their professorial armchair a different discourse obtains which were it thrown the tribe s way would a only be offensive b obstruct the acquisition of a tribe s ethnography and c ultimately be detrimental to the tribe itself which down the line may well need that expert s return to assist it in adapting in turn to a larger world outside of its own mental confines Best