User:Travelbird
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Unfortunately Travelbird has retired as a Wikipedia editor and will not be returning |
The original concept of Wikipedia was great. The idea to provide a free, hugely encompassing encyclopaedia that was to be the work of a worldwide net of collaborating editors was a truly remarkable project. However, like many good ideas, it has proven to be unworkable :
1) There is too much vandalism going on. Even though most of the obvious vandalism get fixed fairly quickly, A back check of pages edited, which I did when working on New Page Patrol, revealed that once a page got through the “new pages stage”, the vandalism was very likely not to be corrected for a long time, even if fairly obvious. Also – administrators are not sufficiently supporting New Page / Recent Changes Patrol. It can get very frustrating if you have to revert the 20th vandalous change and administrators still haven’t acted.
2) There is too much POV going on.
a. Articles like Cyprus are the classic example of why Wikipedia isn’t working. Almost all edits to pages like this one are purely for on-sided POV pushing. After the 50th revert by a partisan POV pusher even the most dedicated neutral Wikipedian eventually gives up.
b. Many articles have been “adopted” by certain users, which revert any substantial change made to it. This is undermining the fundamental principle of Wikipedia.
c. There is no real scholarly discussion going on. Most editors aren’t interested in discussing facts, but rather in “being right”.
3) The quality and reliability of Wikipedia is too low. Every fact you find here has to be double-checked somewhere else. There reasons for this are : a. Wikipedia is being edited by POV-editors/vandals (see above) b. Wikipedia is being edit by good faith editors, that don’t have a clue of what they’re doing. Unfortunately the second one is the fatal flaw. Facts and especially specific data (sizes, numbers, population figures etc.) are very often incorrect. In contrast to normal, published encyclopaedias, Wikipedia is edited by editors that more often than not are not experts in the respective field. That means that – while being of good faith - they simple often do not have the specific subject knowledge needed to write an encyclopaedia article – many mistakes, errors and omissions result. c. In its current state Wikipedia cannot be called an encyclopaedia. It’s a more or less indiscriminate collection of information which is often flawed and is not reviewed by.
I don’t see a point in continuing here, since unfortunately I don’t really know how to fix the problems stated above. Possibly a new encyclopaedia with restricted editing privileges only for proven experts would be the way to go. Even though that would great reduce the amount of content it would make Wikipedia a truly reliable source of information.
Therefore I am retiring from Wikipedia after about 18000 edits. I already emptied most of my watch list. I may check up on exonym related pages from time to time, but I will no longer substantially edit other pages or work on New Page, Recent Changes, Vandalism or Disambiguation. Travelbird 23:52, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
To see my current list of Barnstars and other awards, see : /Barnstars.
For those of you interested in genealogy, check out : /Ancestry.
