User:Gummer85
Gummer85 quit for the 2nd (and last) time on 1 October 09 in the face of trolls and self-important twits. Very little goodwill left. Look at my record, you will see I've been fairly collegial and diligent except for my last edit which was "petulant", and indeed, was intended to be. The petulance was calculated and was called-for in light of a larger picture and history with the fellow. The response was as expected. I stand by the petulance. It was targeted and well-deserved.
Wikipedia is set up with fundamental weaknesses. It's bad enough to need to invest so much time protecting against the continuous reintroduction of chaos by the well-intentioned-but-not-fully-informed. But, then we need to tolerate the defacto power and points of view of the merely omnipresent. It's not a collegial peer-review meritocracy here. Nope. Persistence prevails in Wikipedia, persistence in the guise of "peer-review".
The system is too inefficient. It is too much work for very little improvement. An article gets good and stays good for a while, and then someone comes along with an UNreliable reference and makes an incorrect change. It becomes incorrect - but with a reference(!). Not good. The error is in keeping with the rampant misinterpretation* of reference policy, but not the actual policy. We have to work harder then to explain why we deleted the (over-vaunted) reference and/or why the addition is incorrect. This is a never ending process. If we care about the quality of an article, we must become a troll and constantly monitor it and correct it when it gets smelly. And boy do they get smelly! All pain, no gain.
How many "Featured Articles" fell from grace by this continuous influx of entropy? LOTS! How is Wikipedia perceived for reliability? It's infamous! People don't ridicule WP because it's not well referenced, they ridicule it because it's often so unreliable! Expertise of editors is how reliability (of text and references) is estimated. I've seen too many cases where the mere existence of a (dubious) reference trumped pleas by much better experts as to it's reliability.
The call for references is so strong that the expertise needed to filter out the unreliable ones is almost derided. That's no fun for the experts that Wikipedia needs. Instead, Wikipedia is loaded down with people who can control little in their lives but the articles they troll. The whole WP system is so pathological.
I've been clean for 7 months and I feel fine!
Do it!
Get clean!
Just say "No"!
Gummer85 (talk) 01:20, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
(Signing off)
.*The infamous, over-vaunted, "Verifiability, not Truth" maxim. This mentality is antithetical to just about everything good in the world. It should be antithetical to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, it is not.
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