[Wikipedia-l] please remove my moderating bits

[Mark Williamson]

I have to agree with a lot of what you have said.

Every Wikipedia seems to have been best when it was just around 100K
articles. When Wikis go beyond that, they get overregulated, and/or go
crazy in some other way.

I still use en.wp as a reference (sometimes), but I rarely edit it. My
reason now isn't the same as the one I used to have (busy with other
language wikis), but rather, simply that I find the climate to be too
hostile and too toxic for me to make any real editing progress.

The good admins are getting discouraged and leaving one by one, and
the bad admins are continuing in their horribleness.

en.wp has even gotten to the point where to be a member of certain
sites critical of Wikipedia is somehow bad, and to be a *sysop* at
them is even a sort of bannable offense (notably Hivemind, Wikitruth,
ED).

Mark

On 25/10/06, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> 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
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>


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