After comments and emails from a number of 'true' Wikipedians I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the more extreme of us are right: Wikipedia cannot be redeemed. It's not Arbcom, it's not 'Jimbo' it's not the system. It's that the majority of the 'community' are barking mad and are simply not normal people. They need to be hospitalised and cared for, and the place should be blown up and destroyed.

I have some ideas of my own about how this could be achieved in a humane and decent way, but interested in the views of others.

Destroying hundreds of people's lives simply because you disagree with them doesn't sound like the most wonderful of ideas.

I don't think Peter intended to kill anyone, just cause the demise of a dysfunctional website. Even at that his language is conditional and he will probably be back to work "building the encyclopedia" in no time flat.

For all your destructive designs, your userpage says you're "in retirement [–] until October 3 2009." (dash my own for obvious effect). Seriously PD, what the hell? I find your labelling of the community as "not normal" a bit ironic; I don't think a person who has retired and then returned and then bitterly left again saying "wah wah, I want to destroy Wikipedia!" and who is so obviously in a love-hate affair with Wikipedia can be called "normal" either. You can't even retire properly (..."until October 3 2009").

Get out of limbo land. Make up your mind to either stay or leave. The pitifulness of the situation is reaching sickening heights, and no-one's fooled by this latest proclamation of anti-Wikipedianism.

And before anyone points out to me that I'm making a nuisance of myself, this is part of my 35%.

Are you joking? This would be returning their lives. Like discovering a risk-free antidote to heroin addiction.

The solution here is embedded in the question: the problem is not the (flawed, rife with error) database of Wikipedia, but the community itself. How do you destroy a (volunteer) community? Make it deeply unpopular, or provide a compelling alternative. One of the reasons WP won't implement flagged revisions is that it would create a strong disincentive to drive-by editing, the source of much of the "community". I'd start there.

That sounds like destroying lives to me. Perhaps not to you though.

Considering the "place" in question is an online community of sorts, I don't see that as desire to physically harm anyone. Do you think that Peter is suggesting some real building be blown up?

Sounds like it to me. I got the impression he wanted to blow up the hospital all the Wikipedians were in. Clearly it was some sick sort of metaphor for something else.

It's true that, given its location in the sentence, "the place" could be taken to refer to the hospital. Contextually, I have a hard time seeing how one could not realize that he meant Wikipedia.

How Do You Stop The Pusher, Man?

Stop Buying, Dope!

Ja Ja

Always remember, "Nerd" is "Nerd" spelled forwards.

Ja Ja

They don't need to be moved.

With all the barking mad people safely locked inside the luny hospital named Wikipedia, we can simply start anew elsewhere.

Eh? He said heal their lives- that they be given the mental health care they need. Unless you mean wikipedia is some people's lives (which could be right lol)

"Wikipedia: Threat or Menace? Film at 11!"

Good, because you're already past the bounds of what is known or even reasonable. How do we know the requirements of simple user account registration (have a paid email account which you probably have anyway, and put in the gigantic mental effort to select a username and password) are such a horrible disincentive to drive-by editing? Particularly when they get you out of having to do the stupid CAPTCHA anytime you add a weblink, which you're often doing anyway if you're doing any editing of any value (which will include some weblinks surely in your cites). The time you lose creating a username is paid back almost immediately in CAPTCHAs not seen.

Same for the extra stuff you get like ability to send email to others and upload images. And if you want to edit protected Wikis (a larger and larger fraction) you have to register and wait out the confirmation time. Okay, so you have to wait 4 days-- again big deal. In 4 days, you're going to be the same place you are now, except 4 days older and without the ability to edit sprotected stuff if you didn't make the necessary application 4 days ago. This is not NOT a good argument. It's been made by the WMF for years and there's NOTHING logical behind it. If you ask them, their evidence consists of some francophone fr.wikis where the IP vandalism doesn't remotely resemble en.wiki's, which find that most of the good editing (for a very small group of editors with very few edits) is done by IPs. In France and Belgium. So what? Most of the IP-vandalism done here, isn't done by ANYBODY over there, because they aren't big vandals even when they ARE IP-users. What does that tell you?

Nothing! It tells you that, for over here, you don't know. Which, as Socrates reminds us, is sometimes a good place to start.

I feel the same way about Scotland.

AMEN... Wikipedia is a canker sore on the internet. All Wikipedia does is... takes, steals peoples IP property, rights, and reputations.

Wikipedia should be closed down, the Domain sold, the data base purged and the servers sold and monies realized, be given to a worth charity.

It probably depends on whether they're to be treated as addicts, criminals, cult-brainwashing victims, abuse victims, or ordinary lunatics. Being a charitable sort myself, I'd prefer to think of them as victims of some sort or other, but of course that's hard cheese on the people they've victimized. From a psychological perspective I'd say "cult-brainwashing victims" is the closest to what the really hardcore ones are, but that's a small minority. Another possibility is to create a whole new category for them, but then someone would have to come up with a name for the category, and "Wikipediots" is too silly-sounding to bring in any serious public-health money.

Anyhoo, this is all theoretical, right?

Just like canker sores!

If your life is so lame that the loss of Wikipedia would "destroy" it, then you already have problems.

I'm guessing he actually meant to write "cancerous tumor." I was under the impression that canker sores eventually heal on their own.

I'm thinking this is more a reference to the way non-emergency hospitalization tends to do the patient more harm than good. Plus being formally diagnosed with a mental disorder will limit one's employment opportunities regardless whether it is accurate or whether the symptoms are anything to worry about.

But once you're checked into the Fourth Floor (because the symptoms are something to worry about, or because they can't make up their fucking minds) you'd better just hope there isn't a fire.

Q:How to utterly destroy Wikipedia
A:Leave/Put Jimbo in charge

I think some of you mistake the nature of my engagement with Wikipedia. An addiction looks like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...ns/YellowMonkey

My contributions never look like that. I have never reverted obvious vandalism, for example. My concern is with vandalism like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=275708267

which is made by a bona fide member of the 'community', and which has the result of seriously distorting popular perception of an important subject of human knowledge (medieval philosophy and theology). 185,000 people a year read that page, and it is the first result of a Google search on 'Scholasticism'. I have similar concerns about the way that Wikipedia distorts the prominence of cult figures like Ayn Rand over mainstream and orthodox philosophers.

I had always thought the way to correct this problem is to work from inside and try to change people's perceptions from inside Wikipedia. I have always had a belief that this is the best way to change things.

I now think that this is like going into a crack house and persuading the inhabitants to leave. This is a mistake. They should be gently but firmly led out, put into a hospital and allowed to withdraw from their addiction, and the crack house utterly destroyed without trace. (I hope that makes my metaphor clear).

But again, how would one do this?

Some ideas:

1. Demoralise the vandal fighters. Constantly vote against every RfA. Reduce the number of administrators to such a pitiful level that they will all give up.
2. Demoralise the content contributors so they leave. To an extent this is already happening. The problem here however is that most of the 'community' would welcome them leaving. Then they could concentrate on their job of fighting vandalism and keeping the encyclopedia eternally in the state it was in 2005.
3. Attack the source of funds. This would be very effective but difficult. Requirement: a few articles in respectable journals that showed properly how Wikipedia was distorting human knowledge. (To make up for that ridiculous and skewed 'Nature' article). Properly write up the stuff about pedophiles, zoophiles, pornographers, Objectivists. Publicise this widely. Talk with journalists.
4. Subtle vandalism. This makes me uncomfortable, however.
5. Form an alliance with the natural enemies of Wikipedia such as Britannica.
6. Get sponsorship from wealthy person or corporation who would pay editors to contribute.

At least Blnguyen is consistent. You are unable to admit your addiction and your inability to either leave or stay at Wikipedia. What do you think you're playing at coming on here and saying, "Yeah, let's just destroy Wikipedia and everyone on it", when you're returning on October 3?

So what should I be doing?

[edit] I am in the unenviable position of being a hated figure on Wikipedia for my role in the unseating of one adminstrator and one arbitrator. And being hated here for my belief that it is still possible to work for change within Wikipedia.

I am being quite consistent. I am utterly opposed to the current governance system in Wikipedia, and the way that it guarantees the survival of a certain rentier class. It is that I want to destroy, and always have. And if you look at my editing pattern, it shows no evidence of any addiction, I think. For example, look at all my edits today

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...et=Peter+Damian

I am consistently opposing the election of every new adminstrator. If every one here did the same thing consistently, Wikipedia would collapse within a month or two.

Surely you don't actually believe this?

OK that was tongue in cheek. But let's be more scientific. We assume that the election of every new administrator has been opposed, and so the admin population is falling by the natural attrition rate (I believe we have some stats around this). Then work out how much each admin has to do in terms of fighting vandalism and estimate how much the work load would be increased by the falling admin population. At some point there would be a 'tipping effect' - a small number of admins realise that the fight is hopeless, and give up. This in turn increases the workload on the remaining admins, who give up in orderly fashion, and the dyke collapses.

No, but they'd certainly notice the "WR-block" of opposes, and change the rules to stop "off-site" canvassing. We'd all be labeled "meatpuppets" (at least those of us who agreed with each other enough to make this block) and kicked out, in some way. They'd have to. A block of 50 oppose votes, even 25 opposed votes, would swing most of the recent RfAs. The real problem with WR is its own integrety and (allow me this bit of horntooting) our good taste. Also, the unwillingness here by many people to vote against what looks like a decent admin candidate, just to monkeywrench the works of WP in general.

Though it might be fun to try it ONCE, just to see the fireworks.

It was pretty good even when we saw Ottava Rima start to try it abortively: "All those mean-mean WR people came here to vote against meeeeee." And all those stick-in-the-mud WP people who wouldn't be caught dead on WR also, turns out.... Wups.

Of course, it's not as though little Kabbals don't occur on WP from little backchannel cliques. How often have you seen SlimVirgin, Crum375, Nevard, and the ever power-amassing Jayjg (back when he was with us) vote against each other in an RfC where they did vote? Not too damn often. But if you blinded them all from each other's votes? Methinks that would be about as interesting an experiment as making the French wine judges taste wines with the labels hidden. Hey--- they can't tell Napa Valley from Bordeaux.

I happen to agree with Peter. Just not with the methodology.

There is no need to "destroy" it. The deranged ADHD sufferers who
run the thing are slowly destroying it for you. Will take years, though.

Why do people pay so much attention to that madhouse?
Because Google gives their articles high page rank.
No other major reason that I can see.

So: Talk to Google, convince them that Wikipedia is not a trustworthy
source for information. That'll kill the Magic Wiki a lot more quickly.

(Good luck dealing with the bastards who run Google. If you think Jimbo and the WMF
are paranoid freaks, the Google top management make them look like pikers.
I suppose you could try kidnapping Eric Schmidt and cutting his fingers off, one at a
time, until he agrees to remove WP pages from the ranking algorithm....)

Watching Wikipedia from this close is rather like watching Orwell's Ministry of Truth - from the inside the actions of the bureaucrats are banal and petty, but from the outside the results are a complete loss of freedom by reason of cultural and historical memory loss.

Edit:

Wikipedia will never be destroyed. If Wikimedia was shut down tomorrow, there'd be a hundred avatars of the same content desperate to be the next Wikipedia.

The only way to beat Wikipedia is to supercede Wikipedia, to produce a web-hosted encyclopedia of real scholarly, historical value.

I don't see that happening yet. I have my own ideas but no money to carry it out.

I have some contacts at the CofE education division

http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/education

which I haven't used so far, but could try. These people are in charge of all church of england schools which educate probably about 15% of the UK child population. More importantly, they would be in charge of the filter policy that selects the sites are available to computers used in church schools. If they were to block Wikipedia it would have no direct effect but the indirect effect (if well publicised) would be enormous.



I suggested above a strategic alliance with natural competitors such as Britannica. Or perhaps just make a good business case to a group of investors via the usual channels. Get a group of contributors together, mock up a set of articles, a charter, a policy and so on. Allow advertising in a carefully controlled way, allow content contributors an income, make suitable revenue projections and you are off.

At the moment, investors are still buying the Wikipedia Kool-aid, although frankly I cannot see how throwing money at Wikipedia can be called an investment when there's no possibility of any return.

No I meant a competitor to Wikipedia. Make strong business plan, get together a bunch of future 'employees', present to venture capital company, get finance, invest in infrastructure, build alliances with potential advertisers ... That sort of thing.

I would be most surprised if Google were remotely interested in the perceived accuracy of Wikipedia, so long as it drives traffic throught their site.

So long as readers visit Wikipedia, it will exist. And so long as "consensus" is used to determine policy, no substantive change can or will take place. What is needed is some leadership for the masses, and seeing as we don't have sharp sticks to make people follow as is done in RL, the aspiring leader will need to use charisma and persuasion, both in short supply.

Nonsense. They'll just restructure the election process so that the objections don't count.

Wikipedia isn't Iran. It's not possible for there to be a general strike with hundreds of thousands of editors clogging the streets, refusing to edit, and there's no international community breathing down Wikipedia's neck watching every move with bated breath. Nobody cares if Wikipedia's elections are a farce.

If it was that easy I would have done it by now. You might as well have said

1. Make business plan
2. ????
3. Profit!

..for all the use that is. Venture capital companies are rather leery about investing generally at the moment, particularly in seed rounds where there is a well-known competitor which is free (as in beer). In order to get VC interest I've got to create some winning formula to bring in revenue that will give investors an excellent return and a clear exit strategy (like an IPO). I think I have that idea, but I have no money to even begin to lay it out.

Maybe someone should ask Don Murphy if he'd like to help fund the seed round of an encyclopedia project that will kick Wikipedia's ass by actually behaving *shock* *horror* like a bona fide publishing company. Alternatively (and this is my better idea) a new technology which will allow Encyclopedia Britannica and mainstream media outlets to publish on the Net profitably and would probably be picked up by Google or Microsoft in a heartbeat because of the new potential revenue streams it would generate.

Somebody ask him or any lurking VCs (I wish) that are reading this.

To make a serious proposal:

Get onto Net nanny and similar people. Point out how much pornography there is on wikipeida and commons and demand that there both blocked. That would mean these sites couldnt be accessed from schools libraries and many offices. That would cut 90% or more of edits and views.

Dubious percentage.

Good - very good.

Do you or does anyone else know of the sums of money needed to develop a working project on these lines? The best projects actually start on a very small scale without ambitious investment. In addition, if a sizeable number of the leading contributors to Wikipedia could be persuaded to leave in return for equity in the new project, that would significantly damage Wikipedia's competitiveness.

The reality is that Wikipedia survives because the masses are simply not very interested in the idea of encyclopedias. They want to find out stuff, and think that whatever Google spews out is good enough. After all, take away Wikipedia and what would people accept from Google is whatever happens to be on the first page that looks vaguely plausible.

We now know that the WMF are not really very interested in making an encyclopedia, they are getting a nice living leeching off the project, such as it is.

The only way to kill it is to make being involved with it a stigma. In fact, it seems that it more or less is at the moment, people simply do not like admitting in public that they have anything to do with it. The "good altruistic idea" phase of Wikipedia seems to have passed, and it is viewed as something that many people use but apologetically.

I seriously doubt it can be killed. It cannot be replaced by something done properly, as the gerneal public do not perceive Wikipedia as being done wrongly. The fact that something like flagged revisions, the simplest attempt to add some authority to the publication of the aggregated tat that is a Wikipedia article, has failed should tell you something not just about the governance, but the audience as well - there is no sense of demand from the readership.

Wikipedia is seriously broken with regards to being a scholarly work, but the fundamental problem to solve is "Who cares?"

I think the only way to get Wikipedia fixed (and I think the time for breaking it has passed) or at least less broken, is to get political and do damage that way.

You could start by paying off the editors listed for that idiot cabal you tried and failed to get going. Most of them may have rejected the invitation to join your circle of self-indulgence, but that doesn't mean something greener won't draw their interest!

Confused. You mean RL party political? Or get involved in internal Wiki politics?



This in my experience is the only way to draw the interest of experts.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

I thought it only took a phony idea.

Stigma and ridicule will be increasingly piled onto Wikipedia.

But what I reckon may hit WP the hardest is its lack of adaptability. WP had hardly changed since the early days, and pretty soon, the formatting will seem tired, irritating to use, and obsolete.

Is there any reason for this unremitting hostility? Are you one of those who regard me as a traitor to Wikipedia Review, or a traitor to Wikipedia?

Please say what you really think.

Are you FT2 by any chance?

Interesting take. You really think the formatting is a detriment to the usability? The main crux of it, the article space, is pretty plain: text, image on the right, image on the left, section headers, references (if you're lucky!), and that's it. It's pretty pedestrian, but it's functional and streamlined. It presents information without much fluff. What's your guff with it?

I agree.

To my mind, the best practice at this phase of the game is to construct and publish an accurate and insightful analysis and diagnosis of the project and the participants, and to do so in as professional and credible manner as possible.

The dysfunctionality of the site's governance model is increasingly apparent, as more and more scholars and professionals publish their analyses and studies of WP's anachronistic mobocracy.

The site is dominated by a substantial number of power brokers who manifest some variety of personality disorder, (primarily Cluster B). This would be the stigmatizing portion of the diagnostic analysis, were it to come from credible and reliable sources.