User:MrCheshire
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I was once a shameless wikipologist, but I've cooled to the whole project with time. I think that too often it replaces one kind of elitism with another - you could say professionalism with free time. It's fine if you don't want to defer to the judgments of people just because they're professors or have some other title, but it seems ridiculous that the people who have the most say here are the people who have logged the most edits. As an inexperienced and overanxious editor, I have made mistakes and was met with rudeness and insults that shattered my naive resolve. This process has repeated itself three times, to the best of my recollection, and I don't expect that I'll ever be as excited about wikipedia as I was in those days. Perhaps I need to be thicker-skinned. Perhaps I got unlucky. But I tried to believe.
Wikipedia is the only place in the world in which all 300+ pokemon are instantly considered noteworthy and have their own individual pages with multiple uploaded pictures, while the author of a prominent column on Slate has to plead his case for his page to stay. Is Relicanth really more notable than the author of Chatterbox? On wikipedia it is, and by a significant margin.
There are two kinds of people who are most important to the wikipedia's development, in my view. Edit contributors, who add content or create new pages, and edit police, who ensure that wikipedia's policies are being upheld. Each subject area has a different ratio of these types of people - pokemon has a very high volume of contributors, with relatively few police. You'll find police much more often on controversial subjects, particularly those that involve real people. Fantasy worlds like Tolkein's and the pages for individual high schools draw relatively few police, so their corner of the wikipedia expands with very few people wandering by to tell them to keep themselves in check. Journalism, on the other hand (and oddly enough, webcomics) have a great number of people determining what is worthy inclusion. What the perfect ratio of contributors to police might be depends on what your vision of what the wikipedia should be.
Wikipedia editing is also a prime example of the Internet Fuckwad Theory, in which "anonymity+audience=total fuckwad." Wikipedia policy intentionally protects editor's anonymity. As a result, a fair number of people who find an edit or an editor that they disagree with will find no reason to maintain any sense of civility, since arguing on the internet is so far removed from anything resembling normal human contact. In my experience, the kinds of people who are inclined to become a wikipedia editor can be a jerk. They can be borderline (at least) OCD. They can have an agenda to push. And they must have a lot of free time on their hands. They are not, by and large, the type of person that I feel comfortable entrusting with the sum total of human knowledge.
But that's what appears to be happening. When you need an answer, how often do you go to wikipedia first? I still do a fair amount of the time, because there's still nothing else like it. But I worry, now. Was the page that I'm looking at the subject of an edit war recently? What perspective won out? Who was shouted down, or banned for their conduct? I suppose it's a good thing that this experience has made me a little more skeptical.
