(Disclaimer : every sentence below should be considered to be preceded with the phrase "I think that", "I'm guessing that" or "I recently hallucinated that ...")

Wikipedia is dead. Not because the content is worthless; the quality is shit but the scope is amazingly comprehensive. Some day, perhaps soon, someone will take that massive heap and cull out the copyright violations, fix the prose, and balance the editorial balance. Someone else.

Wikipedia is sometimes worth reading, but it's not worth contributing to. Nobody who values their time or money will contribute either, nor should they. Anyone who tries to make an improvement is rebuffed by a culture which is hostile, juvenile and incompetent.

So what happened?

Jimbo didn't found wikipedia, any more than whoever-the-fuck started the Yahoo boards 'founded' them, or whoever-the-fuck started up Usenet founded that. It was a cultural phenomenom that arose organically.

The first group of 50 or so editors comprised the vigorous sprout. They were prolific, dedicated and evangelizing and got wikipedia to its first thousand articles. These were the founders and WP was a Good Thing.

Then a miracle happened. The idea of user-authored content caught fire and 50 editors grew to 1000. A small village of 50 people can handle anarchy. Everyone knows everybody and being a dick is a really bad idea. No need for a sheriff.

But a town of a thousand really needs a few good cops and some sensible rules. This is where a 'Founder' was sorely needed and WP didn't have one.

The qualities a person needs to possess in order to found a new society are rarely found in people. You need to have foresight and to be selfless; to put the well-being of the society above your own. All the founders of the USA signed a document which, in effect, presented themselves to be hanged by the king of England should the colonies lose the war.

It was these people, and their dedication not to self but to society that got the USA off to a thriving start. The actual rules and laws laid down were secondary. The USSR's contsitution was actually
pretty good. But the USSR began with Lenin, not Washington. Lenin was power-hungry, paranoid and murderous. He drew more corrupt people into government, and more followed in his path. A sick society was born.

WP actually has a pretty good set of rules. But they're irrelevant. WP is controlled by a self-perpetuating group of admins who don't have the requisite qualities for society building. They are the unemployed, the unaccomplished and the seflish. They protect their role as admin first and the society second, if at all. They perpetuate themselves outside of democratic process, through a back-room economy of quid pro quo.

In the end, WP is a sick society because bad human choices were made in the very beginning. Jimbo, who- by historical happenstance - held the power to make these choices, lacked the foresight and selflessness to make them wisely.

Wikipedia could be fixed tomorrow the same way any sick society gets fixed : revolution. Lock every article, Jimbo steps down, all the admins are stripped of power and ... you start over. This time with a group who takes the hard work of society-building seriously.

It would be simple. It wouldn't take long. It would never happen, of course.

So the sick society stays sick, aware of its impending demise but unwilling to avert it.

Oh Look, yet another recitation of the Nobody's In Charge (WP:NIC) myth …

See Also

• TINC
• TINCC
• Nemocracy
• Unseen Hand
• Rex Absconditus
• Jimbo Krack Korn

Jon

Ya didn't read the second half where i compare Jimbo to Lenin Ah hell, the post is too long and on a sunday morning i wouldn't read all of it myself ...

It's not that I didn't read it all, it's just that the Nemo theme resonates with some recent reps of ritual rubrics by a motley crue of Wikipediot Altar Boys — Doc Glasgow, Newyorkbrad, and others. So that is what jumped out at me from the Mass, er, mass.

If I ask myself Why They Need To Be Able To Say That To Themselves, I guess the first answer that suggests itself is a tune from Tommy —

I'M FREEEEEEEE !!!!

But methinks they doth protest too much.

Jon

The settlers in the Garden of Jimbo made the same mistake that bedeviled Adam and Eve. They juiced down the Kool-Aid of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

In this case, they concocted quite a hodgepodge of WP:Rules and then used them as scattershot weapons to play Wiki-Paintball War Games with each other.

Your narrative is overly informed by wp-mangled concepts like "dick".

cf JZG's wannabe-traffic-cop fantasy.


Arse.

The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat

A really good set of rules (such as in Chess, Checkers, or Go) defines a really good game, full of drama and suspense.

I must confess I've lost interest in my original point, whatever it might have been. But this ...



Is some damn fine keyboard jamming and



i'll be blasting The Who until further notice ...