The End edit
Over three years and 4,500 edits later I think my work is done except for local pages. I joined when Wikipedia was still fairly underground (yes, only three years ago), when copies of Wikipedia (eg. answers.com) ranked higher in Google. Over time vandalism has increased, respect for fellow Wikipedians has decreased and there have been Wikipedia-wide campaigns against units and images. In my opinion it has been hijacked by "social climbers". I first saw these on Internet Relay Chat where the objective is to become friendly the channel "op", and recieve a promotion to the priveleged status of op. In Wikipedia the objective is to recieve barnstars and/or promotion to administrator status. One way to get points is to "address the problem" of fair use images uploaded by people such as myself.
My "split" with Wikipedia is that I consider intellectual property a concept that limits freedom in the name of greediness. God knows what copyright pertaining to images on the web is all about. I understand the concept of writing a book and having ownership of that work in order to generate some income from it. But why do Wikipedia users want to delete, say, a screenshot of a television program? Does an "open-source" encyclopedia mean that people will be given pats on the back for deleting any image that even remotely looks like it doesn't comply with general "fair use" guidelines? Is copyright so important that an image on a wiki should be deleted within a week if it doesn't follow what a user considers to be a "valid fair use rationale" or "minimal use"? What does Jimbo Wales, at the very top of the pyramid, think?
An anti-freedom spirit has overtaken Wikipedia and I don't like it. It's all about limiting, constricting, deleting. And that's not what I believe Wikipedia should be about. --Diceman (talk) 18:25, 16 December 2007 (UTC)