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2007 At The Review - “The Unvarnished Truth, The Red Pill”

January 21st, 2008 by The Review

As part of our continued series highlighting some of last year’s most illustrative exchanges at The Review, we present this post from The Review’s resident Orwellologist, JohnA.

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Wikipedia Administrator : Believe it or not, some of us do stuff other than push POVs and hang out on AN/I. A lot of admin work is pretty dry and boring.

JohnA : I believe you. However you are being exploited to provide free labor in return for supporting an enormous enterprise because having sacrificed so much, it’s difficult to walk away from.

Once you realise that you want a life where someone isn’t turning your house and garden over every five seconds 24 hours a day 365 days a year, then you’ll start to dislike Wikipedia. Then you’ll feel like quitting. Then you’ll pick one final fight. Then you’ll sit in a darkened room and decide whether to go for “blaze of glory” or just walk away into the night.

It’s a labor of love, right until the moment you realise that the project and most everyone else, could not give a shit about you and what you’ve sacrificed for it. You’ve sacrificed so much but the returns will diminish and the “sysop”* bit will mean less and less emotionally and intellectually.

Oh and Jimbo Wales is making money hand over fist because of Wikipedia while you get nothing.

One day, you’ll wake up and realise that what seems like cynicism or vindictiveness on my part today, is nothing more that the unvarnished truth, the red pill that most of us here took some time ago.

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(* Wikipedia Administrator / System Operator)

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Posted at 12:32 pm, January 21st, 2008 by The Review in Administrators, 2007 At The Review | No Comments »

2007 At The Review - “Wikipedia is a blog”

December 27th, 2007 by The Review

To celebrate the end of another magnificent year at The Review, it is perhaps time for a recital of this much appreciated post written by Jonny Cache, The Review’s resident polymath, back in January 2007. In light of Wikipedia’s increasing resemblance to a cult, the final paragraph seems more apt than ever:

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Jonny Cache: Wikipedia is a Blog. The word vandalism, as used internal to this Blog, has no determinate meaning to outsiders. As far as external observers can tell, Wikipedia users are constantly vandalizing the subject matters to which many of them have dedicated their lives and sacred honors. By and large, Wikipedia website “administrators” are engaged in a form of anti-education that is warping the minds of naive people about the very nature of knowledge, and there is no reason that real educators should have to respect what goes on there.

The word encyclopedia, as used internal to the Wikipedia Blog, vandalizes the very meaning of the word. Wikipedia has not earned the right to appropriate this word because Wikipedia adamantly refuses to do the things that it would take to earn anybody else’s respect.

People of good will and intelligence granted the Wikipedia experiment the initial benefit of the doubt. In time they began to warn the Wikipedia populace about the collapse of credibility that it was headed for. But all that people of good will and intelligence got for their troubles was a constant stream of spit in their faces.

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Posted at 2:20 am, December 27th, 2007 by The Review in Critics, 2007 At The Review | No Comments »