ChrisU

You're too late, I've already given up on WP, there's nobody home to take your call.

It's sad really; when I first heard of Wikipedia, I thought "yeah, right. Give people canvas, a twink pen and a biro, and expect art to develop? you must be joking", but for a while there, I really thought I might have to eat my words. I expected that the good intentions of the few wouldn't stand a snowballs chance in hell against the juvenile nonsense of S|_|pr l337 h4X0R$ and other like-minded twits who make up the many.

In that, at least, I admit I was wrong, Wikipedia has demonstrated remarkable resilience to defacement and the kiddies have shown little inclination to cause mischef.

As time went on, I spent more and more time lurking here and watching it develop into a really useful resource so I finally bit the bullet and started contributing to some of the underdeveloped pages that I stumbled across as I read about things that I had an interest in and, for a while, it was quite a rewarding experience.

That was when I discovered a third group: the well informed/intentioned few write the articles, they are group one. The many don't cause them any problems, they're all too busy downloading "pr0n" and banging their faces on their keyboards and calling it "l33t-speak" in IRC channels to take notice, they are group two. The third group is far more troublesome than group two, and it's those guys who guarantee that Wiki can never be a satisfying experience for those that want to contribute.

This third group is also well intentioned but, unlike group one, these ones don't know anything; they have not a single useful thing to add to whatever page they are editing. They are the ones who will take a perfectly well written paragraph and add another sentence that clumsily reiterates what has already been said for no good reason, or replace a single word with another one that has exactly the same meaning, but which (somehow) makes the entire sentence worse.

Here's a good example:

  "(blah blah blah) in which the hoplites would line up in files, no less than four deep"

gets replaced with

  "(blah blah blah) in which the hoplites would line up in lines, no less than four deep"

"line up in lines", eh? nice one. That was the sole contribution that this guy made to the article.

Another good example of the kind of thing this third group will do is take the entry for the Roman testudo formation, and move it to a new entry called tortoise formation - y'know, 'cos testudo is latin for tortoise, and most people don't speak latin. The fact that the formation is widely referred to as testudo, not tortoise, doesn't occur to them, nor does the idea of creating a "tortoise formation" entry that redirects to testudo.

I have nicknamed this third group the middle manager group, and it is because I have found myself spending more of my time fighting their doltish interference than I have actually contributing and feeling good about it that I have decided that - as useful a resource as WP most certainly is - I want no further part in actually helping it to grow.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think my efforts will be missed: compared to many, I have barely contributed anything at all, that's not why I'm writing this rant, but I do feel saddened in that I think I'm far from alone in feeling the way that I do. Wikipedia could have been a great thing, instead, it's only a useful thing. I hope that, in five years time, we will come to look at WP as a first (failed) attempt at something that came along later and was everything we had hoped Wikipedia would be.

Larry Sanger's own article Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism sums it up better than I ever could.

So that's my rant. Now all I've got to do is learn to stop caring about what happens to the contributions I've already made.