User:Colin McLaughlin
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This user has left wikipedia.
Reason:
I am no longer involved in contributing to Wikipedia.
1. The frustration of adding material, just to come back later, time and time again, and find it has been removed or messed about with by people who think they know better, or who have their own agenda, or who simply like meddling and have nothing better to do with their time, has eventually convinced me that the editing processes here are absurd. Anyone can amend any page? There isn't going to be sufficient quality control, then, is there?
2. The fate of any particular contribution after you post it seems to depend on who happens to get to it first. If they don't like what you said, they have the power to delete it. If they like a bit of what you said, they can delete half of it and leave the rest. They. Not anyone else. But who are 'they'? Whoever happens to rush in. What a stupid process!
Wikipedia works on the principle that "He who arrives early does the hard work, but he who comes along later gets to dictate the form of a page." What a stupid system. Arbitrary, wasteful, silly. There is no guarantee that those who come later have any common sense, or don't have a particular agenda, or know about the subject - yet they are all empowered to meddle. Tragically, computers are so cheap nowadays that even fools have no difficulty getting hold of them.
3. There is also a layer of administrators here who are seemingly given power to dictate to call the shots and dictate all the rest. But many of those people often seem incompetent. They delete on a whim. If you put back in what they delete, you get banned.
One guy, seemingly some sort of administrator, deleted my contribution of fifty minutes worth of edits. I went to his user page. The guy is blind. Blind, I ask you! How ridiculous that my carefully set out text, with bolds and italics, gets deleted by a blind person. But Wikipedia gives people that power. And he left a mess in his wake.
Another administrator repeatedly deleted a link I added to a page. I have already added that link to three other pages without difficulty or anyone trying to delete it. When I asked him to justify the removal, my request was ignored and deleted from his user page. When I reinstated the link, I got banned by him. Arbitrary. Inconsistent. I am in the hands of fools in this place. This place is like wandering round a dark room, bumping into people you don't know, whose qualities, calibre and competence you also have no way of knowing.
4. Any bit of nonsense can be slipped into any page by any mischievous person, particularly given that the facility exists here to post anonymously, and if it is information of the sort where other people won't readily know if it is true or not, it stays, at least for a time. So the truth of the information within Wikipedia is easily undermined by anyone who wishes to vandalise the material. The pages can't be taken at face value.
"There are too many fools in the world."
Colin McLaughlin 09:53, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
