User:Aquillion/Our goal is not to have a good reputation

Often, when people disagree with something on Wikipedia, they will say something along the lines of "this is going to harm Wikipedia's reputation!" or "things like this are why nobody trusts Wikipedia!" or the like. This argument fundimentially misunderstands Wikipedia's purpose. Our goal is not to be seen as trustworthy, our goal is to be trustworthy; these are subtly different things. We seek to write an encyclopedia from a neutral point of view; but not everyone is going to agree with the way we define neutrality, and that's not necessarily a problem.

This matters because many people want things out of Wikipedia that contradict with that core mission - they have strong beliefs that contradict what we consider the balance of reliable sourcing, or they want to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, or so on. Many people will always feel that Wikipedia is unreliable because it doesn't reflect the tenets of their faith, or because it doesn't describe their nation the way they believe it should be described, or because we say humans evolved from apes or the earth is round or any number of other things.

Some lower-quality sources, especially breaking news sources (with limited time to verify the facts) will engage in equivocation and what we would call WP:FALSEBALANCE in order to create the appearance of neutrality. Other sources will strive to reflect what their readers expect, even if it means discounting or downplaying the opinions of the best available experts.

This is an approach that Wikipedia has rejected. Our goal is to inform readers, not just to tell them what they want to hear; to neutrally and accurately summarize the best available sources for them, not just to serve as a mirror of their pre-existing beliefs. Sometimes this means writing articles that will be shocking to many readers, potentially even the majority of readers. But the fact is that this approach, which has informed Wikipedia since its foundation, has made it one of the most trusted websites in the world.

This doesn't mean that our reputation is meaningless, of course; it is still valuable. But it has to be secondary to, and derived from, our core principles.