[WikiEN-l] Why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore

[Ian Woollard]

On 04/02/2011, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> "It's a common story in the human species. First, we want to achieve a
> goal. Second, we discover that we are all different[2] and that we
> need some rules to organize our work. Third, we make the rules really
> complicated to fit every corner case. Fourth, we completely forget the
> goal of those rules and we apply them blindly for the sake of it.
> Fifth, we punish or kill those who don't follow the rules as strictly
> as we do."

To be perfectly honest, I've not really seen that happen; although
people will often get their work reverted for not following rules. I
cannot think of a single example of people getting banned for not
following rules (other than copyvios and behavioral rules).

I've much more often seen people, or even worse, groups of people,
tearing up rules and just doing something fairly random, often because
they think it "reads better" or because they just don't like something
or other(?)

One of the weaknesses of Wikipedia is actually that of accuracy. It's
not that it doesn't happen, in fact it very frequently is accurate,
but accuracy only occurs because individuals put it into articles,
whereas there are often groups of people quite happy to systematically
remove accurate information.

As the Wikipedia moves towards some arbitrary definition of notional
'completion', can anyone point to a board or mechanism in the
Wikipedia which is specifically for maintaining and ensuring technical
accuracy of articles?

-- 
-Ian Woollard