User:Targeman

[edit] Enough

Well, this will not have been a very long journey - less than four months and 800 mainspace/1800 total edits. And yet, I'm glad I've seen the light before investing too much of my time and effort in this project.

I have not been banned and I haven't had any serious conflict with anyone. I just finally realized I'd been had.

It was immense fun at first. However, as my watchlist grew to almost a thousand pages, it became impossible to ignore the staggering amount of relentless and mindless vandalism going on here.

Instead of creating, researching, sourcing and illustrating articles as I did in the first weeks, I found myself inexorably dragged into attending to that most mind-numbing of chores: fighting vandals.

Enthusiastic as I was in the beginning about sharing my knowledge and experience with the whole world for free, I soon realized I was spending almost my entire time walking behind morons, picking up their garbage and pleading them to stop or I'd have to report them to the headmaster.

As the article Criticism of Wikipedia eloquently summarizes, many users are against allowing anonymous edits. That article was written long ago, and sadly, Jimmy doesn't appear to have taken this very justified criticism to heart.

Jimmy, you've invited the entire world to build a library. Many have followed, and I too believed this encyclopedia was a new wonder of the world in the making. But why, why did you also invite everyone to sabotage the work at will? How can you stand back, watching the library constantly rebuilt by dedicated workers who maybe, just maybe, will have to strength to add a couple extra bricks when they're finished cleaning up?

Democracy only can get you this far. Your confidence in the innate honesty of people is touching, but I'll have none of it. After four months of editing, the tedium and frustration of fighting an incurable but entirely preventable disease clearly outweighed the satisfying aspects of the project.

The amount of utter bullshit, propaganda, spam, hate, incivility, idiocy, irresponsibility and long-undetected hoaxes I've seen here is a clear testament to what Wikipedia really is: a huge, inept and anarchic organization committed to political correctness more than to anything else, employing an unpaid, ill-equipped, badly trained and pitifully powerless work force.

Time to move on for me. I hope Wikipedia will not go the way of the dodo, but that will depend on your will to introduce real checks and balances and to convince serious people (yes, those elitist nerds with actual credentials) to invest their time in the project. If you don't take action against the brain drain and the other issues for which your brainchild is derided, I'm afraid the world will have lost yet another treasure to human stupidity.

Please make Wikipedia not suck.

Targeman 02:28, 17 August 2007 (UTC)