[Foundation-l] please remove my moderating bits

[Walter van Kalken]

I have been thinking it over and decided to face reality. I have lost 
all my believe in the wikimediaprojects. So much even that I am now 
adding content to places outside of the wikimediaprojects instead of 
having to deal with all the 100000000000000's of procedures and rules 
being implemented by people who do not even know how to write an article.

The projects have been taken over by a group of people, mostly 
teenagers, whom apparently have lost all sight of realism and have taken 
other people's work hostage, without creating one bit of content 
themselves. Who feel that adding templates, writing rules and policing 
(the process) is more important than what we set out to do. Also there 
is a very very very strong western bias in the projects. Ideas and 
processes are launched which might work perfectly in a western world 
(like the rules for verification) but which fall flat on their face when 
applied to non-western items. When someone actually rises this point on 
the lists (me) it is ignored.

Also Jimbo's statement that en: wikipedia has covered most subjects 
disappoints me. This might be true for subjects on developed countries. 
But the projects are heavily lacking in the same sort of content with 
regards to the developing world. While every lake in the US probably has 
an article. Most Asian / African / South American countries have barely 
got articles describing these kind of features. And if someone does 
write an article about it, it gets deleted as non-encyclopedic. Also 
wikipedia's become very nationalistic like the nl: wikipedia where a 
fairly large group feels non-Dutch and non-Belgian topics should not be 
covered in the Dutch language edition! And they actually wrote rules to 
enforce this.

The amount of people who only care about their own backyard (the west) 
and wanna delete everything they do not understand has grown to big. 
Also other idiocism like on nl: wikipedia where procedure is 100x more 
important than the smooth running of the project, resulting in an 
everyone can insult everyone situation and no-one get's actually blocked 
is taking to much time and stress.

Jimbo invented the wheel with the wikimedia projects. Unfortunately the 
wheel never evolved, nor will it in the current climate. Every form of 
progress of the projects in something meaningfull and working gets 
blocked or grinded in bureaucracy by a group of people who want to be 
the boss.

Meanwhile on the boardlevel politicians rule who only give a shit about 
themselves and about political games. I have seen many of these games 
played out over the years. Also the projects diversify to much and to 
much new niches where new small groups start that take their particular 
niche hostage (commons being a prime example) are started. Instead of 
looking at how things can co-operate people start their own new kingdoms 
and fiefdoms (like wikitionaryz, which is GerardM's fiefdom) into things 
that are not our core imho. We are about creating content, not spreading 
it, let other people do that job.

On some projects I still have moderating bits, I hereby ask the stewards 
to take these bits away as I do not wish to spend to much time anymore 
on the projects, I might shout a bit from the sideline. The wikimedia 
projects will always exist, and the original idea was great. 
Unfortunately Winston Churchill was right .... democracy works in theory 
only. When the masses take over like on our project, the sum gets 
lowered to the level of the masses. Which means herd thinking.

Waerth