User:BigCow/WikiCynicism

The following page is full of evil thoughts from people who do not feel the WikiLove.

Complaints against Wikipedia

• Wikipedia will never beat the trolls.

I have people who have been working for two years from the inside of Wikipedia to slowly ruin it. They have been able to change rules, they have been able to make administrators get deleted, they have been able to modify how rules are run in some places. Why? It's fun!

People will play World of Warcraft for 80 hours a week. There's no difference between that and playing Wikipedia for 80 hours a week. It's even more fun because of none of the characters in World of Warcraft think they're what they are. People on Wikipedia, some of them think "hey, I'm contributing to the sum of human knowledge." You can fuck with those people, that's extra bonus time. So, 80 hours a week on Wikipedia, who cares, that's pretty cool, that's pretty neat.

• Wikipedia is a cabal, an elitist group of editors influencing content for their own ends

So basically what you end up with is, you end up with a situation where now people are in the dark, they're angry, they don't understand what's going on. Wikipedia has got battles on the inside. Enough that I do know that some of the higher point of administrators have been talking about deposing Jimbo. Jimbo doesn't know that. Now he does.

Did you nominate them to have these powers? Did you sit in on the discussions? Did you debate the pros and cons of this feature being added to Wikipedia? No, no you didn't. You're a meat puppet, sad to say. You might find tomorrow, the day after, anytime really, that stuff you worked on is gone. Really gone. Super gone, like someone who spoke a little too loudly in China or bought a little too much ammonium nitrate.

• Wikipedia will drown in its own bureaucracy

To combat this, a lot of "what ifs" and "don't be so hard-set" lines start appearing in the rules. These are supposed to make things better, but they end up making things worse. The reason is that there are so many different opinions as to what a rule ends up being, there's enough "wiggle room" to make them mean anything. Just browse over the Wikipedia entry for the "3RR" (three reversions rule) and you see a pile of exceptions, interpretations, and clarifications, the result of so many different hands touching the rule until it is rendered into meaninglessness. The rule ends up being whatever we want it to be. And "Gaming the System" results.

• Wikipedia will never succeed at being anything other than a big sack of trivia.

Any system of knowledge that is capable of listing films in order of use of the word fuck is incapable of writing a good summary and analysis of the Philippine-American War. And vice-versa. This is an inviolable rule. The problem with Wikipedia is that it was designed to maximize the world's ability to contribute to this movie-fuck list. As new movies come out, random readers can count up the fucks and add the new tally. Other readers can double-check or proofread or add links. It doesn't require any particular expertise.

• Because Wikipedia is so influential, if it gets something wrong, or if people insert enough lies or rumors, people will start believing it's true.

Wikipedia's dirty little secret is that it has a lot of problems with living people who have Wikipedia entries about them, since the people, knowing themselves, go naturally bat-shit when they read all the inaccuracy, misstatements, and wild-assed guesses that populate a standard Wikipedia biographical article. This dirty little secret lays bare to the inherent problem with a project like this: it works best when the subjects being written about can't correct you.

• Wikipedia will always be dominated by WP:POV and people wanting to game the system.

Whoever you voted for, whatever you believe, don't put it into your User page. All it's going to do is encourage someone from the other side to stand overlord over your pages. Seriously, what will it buy you? It's better to hide the real you, whatever it is. This place is not about being honest about who you are.

It's not at all hard to be come an admin, and Wikipedia is currently creating a new admin a day. If I wanted to, I could create a sockpuppet account, use it for 20 minutes a day, and within 6 months have it to admin status. I already know of one banned edtior who was very close to succeeding at this (he was caught via other means), and I know of another problem editor who is currently preparing a sockpuppet (actually his third) for an adminship he will certainly receive (unless he is exposed first). The formula is quite simple, and the only reason I don't post it here is because if I do, other people will start using it.

My Responses

• Criticizing Wikipedia is like criticizing the internet. If you want to Google some information on a topic like Game Theory or Spain or something, you're going to get a lot of information, some of which may be biased, inaccurate, or whatever else. The difference between Wikipedia over a Google search is that the information is MUCH more comprehensive, MUCH better organized, and MUCH more likely to be complete and accurate, even to the point of letting you know what the state of its content is. It may not be perfect, but complaining about it to the point where you say it shouldn't exist is ridiculous. All Wikipedia does is organize information better than previous online sources. If you don't like non peer-reviewed content, don't use the internet as a reference. Wikipedia isn't perfect. It's useful.
• Wikipedia is essentially a new way to access information. TV can be sensational and exaggerate, newspapers can over-simplify and get things wrong, and every form of media has its weaknesses. Wikipedia is a more useful portal for information than most, and it's useful for getting an overview of a topic.

Cynical Sources

A speech on Wikipedia A cynical Wired description of Wikipedia WikiTruth:A wiki critical of this Wiki