DAVID G. SIMPSON

Nanopedia

 
Home
Blog
Personal
Professional
Software
Photos
Reference
Nanopedia
Wiki
Contact Me

NASA Site
PGCC Site
SCHS Site
Esperanto
Moon Rocks
S-M Comics
Mouse Site
Art Gallery
   

DAVID SIMPSON'S NANOPEDIA

These are articles I would normally have contributed to Wikipedia, but lately conditions at Wikipedia have become intolerable. I now publish new Wikipedia-like articles here instead.

* indicates an article I originally wrote for Wikipedia that has since been deleted. I've reproduced the article here, where it can't be deleted.


The Case Against Wikipedia

I spent a number of years editing Wikipedia, contributing material on physics, mathematics, and other subjects I knew something about. Here's my advice to anyone interested in getting involved in editing Wikipedia: DON'T. Just don't do it. If you decide to contribute something to Wikipedia, here's what will happen:
  1. Your contribution will be deleted within minutes. Typically it will be by some administrator who will indicate that you've violated some Wikipedia policy like WP:IAR, WP:WAX, etc. (whatever those mean). Or maybe they just don't like what you wrote, for whatever reason.
  2. If you ask why your work was deleted, you will be called names, cussed out, bullied, threatened, and harassed. Your integrity and motives will be questioned. Out of spite, administrators may vandalize your user page or delete any previous contributions you've made.
  3. If you decide to report the abusive behavior, especially if it's against an administrator, you will be put on a kind of “trial”. You will be accused of being the problem for reporting the abuse. Again your integrity and motives will be questioned; administrators will search through all your past edits, looking for something they can threaten you with. Again, you'll be called names, bullied, threatened, harassed, and cussed out by administrators who will be circling the wagons to protect the bullying administrator whose abusive behavior you were reporting.
Technically, Wikipedia has a “civility” policy (WP:CIVILITY), but I'm told that this policy is long dead, particularly when it comes to behavior by administrators. From what I've seen, there's nothing resembling civil behavior going on with Wikipedia administrators.

I found that two Wikipedia administrators who are particularly bad about this kind of bullying are:

  • “Arthur Rubin”
  • “Future Perfect at Sunrise”

Bottom line: Wikipedia is a very corrupt, very hostile environment, being run largely by childish, bullying control freaks. Stay far away. Life is too short, and it's just not worth the aggravation.

What Others Have Said

This is an excerpt from James McKay's blog, from his article “Are Deletionists Harming Wikipedia?” (Feb. 2, 2010).
The problem is that there is a massive disconnect between Wikipedia's users—casual visitors who often don't even bother to create an account—and its overlords—the regular, active Wikipedians with edit counts in the thousands or even tens of thousands and an encyclopaedic knowledge and understanding of its policies. It is at its most striking in the whole inclusionist versus deletionist debate. And the deletionists are alienating a lot of would-be Wikipedians.

It turns out that this is one of the biggest criticisms levelled at Wikipedia by occasional editors. People come onto the site knowing nothing of Wikpedia's policies, but plenty about some—possibly very niche—subject. They make half a dozen or so edits, then return a week later to find that their article has been deleted with no apparent explanation. Or perhaps it will be flagged with a deletion debate, crammed full of arcane and cabalistic abbreviations such as WP:NFT, WP:NOTE, WP:V, WP:WAX, WP:SOAP, WP:IAR, and so on, all pointing to Wikipedia's byzantine and convoluted policies, guidelines and procedures. What kind of impression does this leave the casual editor? That Wikipedia is a hideout for a bunch of antisocial, bureaucratic teenage control freaks—a kind of online equivalent to the kids on the beach who kick the sandcastle you've just spent three hours building into your face. And since first impressions count the most, they will go off, never contribute anything else, and rant on blogs and forums about how insular and out of touch with Real Life these Wikipedians are.

Why is this harming Wikipedia? Because these are the people who contribute the overwhelming majority of substantive, meaningful content to the site.

And from Nicole Hamilton, quoted in the Wall Street Journal:

The problem of the so-called “deletionists” is totally out of control on Wikipedia. These are, so far as I can tell, completely self-appointed topic police who go from one article to another deleting pretty much anything they don't like. Now, certainly, if they were making these decisions in topics where they actually had some particular domain expertise or knowledge, I'd say, fine. But that doesn't appear to be what's going on. To me, it just looks like a plain ol' power trip for idiots who know basically nothing about anything except Wikipedia's rules, which, also as pointed out in the article, are getting to be about as labyrinthine as the IRS code. Bottom line, Wikipedia is falling over of its own weight.

Contact Information

I may be contacted at:
 

Copyright © 2006 David G. Simpson

http://www.DavidGSimpson.com

Webmaster: David G. Simpson
Page last updated: January 15, 2016.