I am troubled by what I'll call "persistent cruft injection" and I think it is a real problem. Two that have impinged on me: One is the use of names for large numbers--names that don't appear in dictionaries, aren't in real use, and are neologisms or hypothetical curiosities or useless extensions of systematic naming patterns. Back in second grade all us nerdy types enjoyed knowing the names of bigger numbers than our peers knew, but we ought to have outgrown that. Nevertheless there is a persistent tendency to add "googolquadruplex" and "brontobyte" and "zebibyte" and so forth. They are added typically by anons, and, I think, different anons. They don't care to read through previous discussions or reasons why certain words should or should not be added or how they should be described. They know (or think they know) the name of a bigger number than any other contributor has yet added to the article, so in it goes. Another is academic boosterism. Virtually every article about any major university seems to have a continuing tendency to accumulate more and more braggadocio. I see that Harvard, for example, now contains as its second sentence "It is widely considered one of the finest academic institutions in the world." U. S. News and World Report rankings keep filtering in to university articles, and if an institution does not rank high in that listing, then other listings in which it does rank highly ("Washington Monthly," anyone?) will be used instead. Conversely, any information that is perceived as being negative gets removed. Sometimes you can get temporary agreement that a particular paragraph has gotten a little over-the-top, but it doesn't do much good because a few months later someone else decides that if Yale is going to mention how many Nobel laureates it has graduated, then they had better, too. The contrast between university articles in Wikipedia and their counterparts in traditional encyclopedias is dramatic. Ours read like admissions-office brochures. Jason Scott's comments were very unpleasant, but his reference to how one moves from creating content to _defending_ content has a ring of truth to it. It is difficult to form a stable consensus when there isn't a stable community within which to form one. -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/