User talk:Dennette
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[edit] I give up
I know that Wikipedia is not a blog, but there's no place else for me to say this.
I started contributing to Wikipedia in April, when I made some additions to IGES. Mostly I made random edits and fixes to pages I stumbled across a page for John R. Fox, which led me to working on World War II related pages.
When I found the page for American Muslim Council, that led me to my first major contribution ... combining the pages for Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, which had been created because of two different spellings. This in turn led me to working on Islam/Muslim related pages.
A few weeks ago, I did my first AfD ... List of famous members of Mensa ... then I created Category:Members of Mensa, and spent 5 or 6 hours searching for and adding tags to 44 articles of people whose page claimed that they were members. That was my first real marathon session.
- See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 March 8#Category:Members of Mensa ... attitudes about categories have changed ... someone even went through and edited all of the articles to remove the category references. Dennette 03:42, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
Very quickly I had gone from a "casual" editor to spending over 8 hours a day on Wikipedia, a lot of it reviewing AfDs. My watchlist had grown to over 350 entries. Wikipedia had become like a drug for me.
But now it has become a real PITA. I have grown weary of the constant edit wars on Shahada, Portal:Islam/Did you know, Basmala, and the other Wikipedia:WikiProject Islam pages ... the Shi'a vs Sunni and "God" vs "Allah" POV reverts, and people adding/deleting "(PBUH)" after every mention of Muhammad. (I'd forgotten the Nikola Tesla revert war over whether he was a Serb or a Croat ... probably the first one I dropped from my watchlist.)
And I've gotten sick of all the fancruft from having spent so much time fixing Family Guy and The Simpsons related pages. Doing the AfDs opened my eyes to the world of Pokemon and Friends cruft, and the recent cancellation of Stargate SG-1 brought out the fanboys using the talk page for their speculations on how the series would be concluded, and numerous reverts of "Save the Gate" petition links.
I finally realized the Awful Truth ... in spite of its best intentions, Wikipedia is not a very reliable encyclopedia, and I was really wasting my time by trying to make any meaningful contributions. The trolls and sockpuppets have taken control, and Wikipedia has become the new MySpace.
The problem with "freedom" in this paradigm is that it has reached the point where more time is spent cleaning up after the vandals than can be spent improving the quality and accuracy of the articles. The appeal for me was that I was "doing something worthwhile," but the reality is that I was just finding an excuse not to do other things in Real Life.
So, I'm going to try to wean myself to just a few, brief visits a day, and then I can walk away from it. I've said all this as a reminder to myself, and as a warning to others. Don't let Wikipedia fool you ... it's a siren temptress who will only disappoint you in the end. I've read about the "Editors Revolt," and how the expert editors and administrators are leaving in droves (WP:MIA). I took it as a sign that it was time for me to leave, too.
Wikipedia will never become a Reliable Source of information, and teachers will soon forbid any research on Wikipedia for homework and essays. The data changes too quickly, and most of it is false ... some vandal will change a bio to say that the person died of AIDS, and it will remained uncorrected for days, because there aren't enough editors to watch all of the pages, and the bots can't keep up, either.
Well, that's my 2¢ worth. --Dennette 09:55, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Continuing to detox
Well, I got my watchlist below 150, but that's not good enough. I finally decided to reudce my frustration level by deleting all Islam/Muslim related artcles from my list ... hopefully this will reduce the amount of time I waste looking a edit-war reverts by half (some of them have gotten Really Ridiculous, particularly the ones between User:CltFn and User:BhaiSaab).
- Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi
- Abjad numerals
- Ablution
- Abu Hurairah
- Allah
- American Muslim Council
- Basmala
- Hadith
- Islam
- Islam by country
- Islamic calendar
- Islamic concept of God
- Islamic view of Muhammad
- Islamic views of Muhammad
- Isopsephy
- Madhhab
- Mawlid
- Moses
- Muhammad
- Muslim
- Qur'an alone
- Sahaba
- Shahadah
I also stopped looking at Lists of cruft ...
- List of aliens hidden in South Park
- List of anthropomorphic animal superheroes
- List of characters from Family Guy
- List of neologisms on Family Guy
- List of songs from Family Guy
I gave up trying to deal with the Islamophobe vandalism weeks ago (leave that for the bots and the "crusaders" looking for barnstars), and the total ignorance of the fanboys polluting the lists just grinds my gears. <Sigh!> --Dennette 03:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Final post
Well, with the opening of school, the anonymous vandals have returned in force. I tried cutting back and letting others handle the reverts, but I've finally come to accept that as noble as its intentions were, the baser side of human nature is an inherent flaw in the paradigm. It was fun being a part of Wikipedia, and I will still include links to many articles on my personal pages, but ... the anal orifice factor is just more than I can deal with. There are many Good People working here, but they are far outnumbered by the foul-mouthed children and others seeking attention. I no longer wish to be a part of this enterprise. --Dennette 14:28, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
- P.S. - Discovered that Google still brought up my User page, so I restored it and added some userboxes ... aside from these cosmetics, I've been Pretty Good about staying away from here. --Dennette 02:37, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Sandbox - D&D alignments
The nine alignments can be represented in a grid, as follows:
