User:Martin Wisse

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[edit] General info

Martin Wisse does not like talking about himself in the third person, so will not do so from here on.

I have been doing some Wikipedia editing since September 2004; to see what my interests are like, take a look at my contributions.

One article I'm quite proud of is oxygen minimum zone, as that was the first article I started from scratch, on a subject I was less than familiar with even. I think it's now correct, informative and easily understandable.

Outside of Wikipedia, you can find me at

[edit] Why Wikipedia has problems

  1. The cult of Jimbo: no man should be able to dictate what Wikipedia can and cannot be, arbitrarily overriding everybody else.
  2. The cult of notability: you too can become a respected editor by deleting other people's work, never writing anything yourself on the dubious notion that something is noticable enough for an online encyclopedia of infinite capacity.
  3. The cult of consensus: not everybody's opinions are equal. Cranks should not be adhered to, experts should be listened to, which brings me to
  4. The cult of the amateur: people with credential should be able to use those credentials in the areas they're an expert on, even when this includes their own life.
  5. The cult of citation: yes, Usenet and blogs can be good sources of information, no a cite from the New York Times should not automatically trump anything else and yes, you can write the truth even if you do not have the cites for it at the moment.

These are the problems that plague Wikipedia at the moment, each of which grew from well intented principles to fix other problems, mostly to keep people from abusing Wikipedia. Unfortunately, these rules combined have created a social climate in which rule lawyers, nitpickers and borderline autists are determining for the rest of us what is and isn't allowed in Wikipedia, driving away all of us who don't like to play their game.

One example of this process at work is on view at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James D. Nicoll (2nd nomination). A reasonable article about somebody who has been a big online presence for at least seventeen years or so, was first nitpicked into irrelevance then nominated for deletion. I assume the people behind this were acting in good faith, however they don't understand what Wikipedia is for.

Wikipedia should be the first stop for information on any subject, whether it is something you would traditionally find in a general knowledge encyclopedia or not, because Wikipedia is not just one encyclopedia, it is all encyclopedias. We don't need to prune for reasons of space and having articles on socalled frivilous subjects will not diminish its usefulness for looking up more serious subjects. In fact having a wide range of what some sourheads here call "fancruft" is good, because it's exactly that kind of epheremal subject that never gets included in a serious encyclopedia, until Wikipedia came along.

See also: Wikipedia:Non-notability/Essay

[edit] Articles I've started

Most of my time on Wikipedia is editing articles started by other editors, but there are some articles I've started:

[edit] Comics

[edit] Science fiction

[edit] War stuff

[edit] Other

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